Elephant City

Danielle Simon created Fenton Kind Words and it was popular right away. She had the idea during the Junior Leadership Conference in September where there was a guest speaker named Morris who had dark skin and a bald head. He was very funny and loud and everyone liked him. At the beginning he made a lot of jokes about himself and about how he had no hair, and about how all the other people at the conference did have hair. Then he talked about how when he was in high school he was a bad person and a mean person and how at the schools he went to no one taught him about kindness. He only learned about it when he was older and out of school. And it was almost too late then he said. He said that he was alone and sad, and all of his friends from high school that used to do all the bad stuff with him turned out to be not such good friends, and some of them even went to jail. But that wasn’t the main thing he wanted to talk about.

He said this: Now fellas, I want to ask you somethin. Now I’m talking to the fellas in the room. Ladies, you’ll get your turn too. So fellas, when—now think about this now—when was the last time that y’all said some kind words to a lady? Now think about this now! Now I know some of y’all are thinkin, it wasn’t too long ago Morris. But now think, did you say it and mean it, that’s what I’m askin you. Now if you’re thinkin yes, I meant it Morris, then I believe you. I believe you. But for some of y’all, it ain’t easy to say some kind words to a lady! It ain’t! Now I know y’all appreciate the ladies! But fellas, do y’all say it, is what I’m askin. Because there are some real good ladies out there who deserve those kind words. In this very auditorium, even. Right? Yeah I know, you have to say yes now when they all right here in the room, but I know y’all are tellin the truth! I seen these ladies, I met some of them just now! And fellas I know y’all notice! But do y’all say so? Not always… I know, not always. And now think about this too: When’s the last time y’all said kind words to another fella? Now that’s even harder, ain’t it. Hard to give it up for a fella. I know… I know. It’s hard. But y’all are thinkin nice things about each other, right? But now do you say the nice things.

He stopped talking for a few seconds and then started again: And now ladies, I’m gonna pick on you now. Cause I’m a gender equalist, I pick on everybody. So now ladies, y’all give compliments to those manly men out there? Y’all givin it up for those good fellas out there? Now before—now I know what y’all are gonna say. Y’all are gonna say Morris, but fellas don’t need no kind words. They big strong men, they don’t need no kind compliments from us ladies. But guess what. If y’all think that, y’all are dead wrong. Y’all are dead wrong. Y’all are so wrong—now when I talk about this, I’m telling y’all a secret now. Cause we men, we don’t like to talk about this. We don’t. But I’ll let y’all in on the secret. You ready? The secret is we men, the fellas in the room—including me! Yeah, Morris too!—we’re insecure. We worry. We worry bout things too. Just like y’all. Betchy’all didn’t know that. It’s the truth. Right fellas? It’s the truth. Now y’all don’t have to nod your head, Morris knows.

Morris went to the front of the auditorium stage and sat down on it with his legs dangling and he turned his microphone off and started talking again: Now what I’m sayin—can y’all hear me back there? Back there. Okay, that’s good then—now what I’m tryin to say is that we all need those kind words. We all need the kind words. Now go on, say it with me, go ahead! Say it: We all—need—kind words. I don’t care who you are. Black man, white woman, Asian, gay, straight, I don’t care who you are. We need em. Cause we’re all uneasy inside, a little bit. A lot maybe. Until that person, that kind person, comes up and tells us that we good. Tells us, we good. And y’all are those kind people! Y’all have the potential to be, is what I’m sayin. That’s what leaders do. And y’all are the leaders, so go lead!

Everyone liked Morris but Danielle Simon liked him the most probably. She was almost crying during the part about him being alone and then when he was done talking she was feeling very inspired to do something. Like she was getting the chills from what he said. On the bus back to Fenton High School she thought of the idea which was that she would use Page to let people say kind words and make people less uneasy.

The next day the Fenton Kind Words Page was up on the Fenton High School network which meant that if you were in that network you could see it when you were logged in to your own Page account. The description box for the Page showed this:

Hi Fentonites! So I’m starting this page, and I want everyone to help me make FHS a better place! Haha ok so that sounds corny (just a bit), but really I mean it! I want everyone to send messages to this page with compliments about your friends or teammates or just anyone you know here at Fenton who you think deserves a compliment. I’ll post them here anonymously, and I won’t tell anyone who sent them! If youd rather me not know that you are submitting the compliment, send me an anonymous email instead of using Page message. My address is dsimon@fhs.us. I really hope this works! Love you all! –Danielle

The thing that she was hoping for came true: Fenton Kind Words did work. A lot of messages, like dozens of messages, came in before the weekend was over and they were all nice and some of them made Danielle a little teary eyed because they were so nice. Some people used email so that Danielle would not know who sent the compliments. The anonymous emails sometimes had of sort of sad messages from shy boys who wanted to tell a girl she was pretty or nice or something but did not want to do it in person. Danielle secretly liked these the most because they were cute and because she liked boys who were shy and nice.

Soon most of the students at Fenton High School looked at the Kind Words Page every week. Some even looked at it like every day. Danielle spent a lot of time posting compliments from her bedroom, which had light blue walls with photographs of her friends on them and a flower-decorated bedspread that she did not like anymore and about twenty stuffed animals that she still did like. Every night before she went to bed she would check the Page and then check her email and then post the kind words people sent her. Everything she posted was Liked by a lot of people, at least fifty and sometimes over two hundred. An example of a typical compliment would be like this: Roger Hapley is a great friend. He is genuinely caring and supportive. He is completely unselfish and only wants the best for every person he knows. He is a genius and knows everything about everything, but never makes a show of it. You rock Roger! Keep being you! Danielle kind of wished that someone would send a compliment about her, but she guessed that she was kind of excluded because she was the one posting stuff and no one wanted to make her feel awkward.

After two weeks of all kind words, Danielle received her first unkind message which was an anonymous email that had one sentence about Amber Middlemore and it had a word in it that made Danielle go to bed upset.

Almost a year before Morris spoke at the Junior Leadership Conference, three friends from the California Institute of Technology spent a week getting very little sleep and drinking a lot of Diet Coke and getting cranky because of the not sleeping very much. When the week was over they presented their class final project for Computer Design CS321. It was a phone app called Three Second Pictures or 3SP for short. Basically it let you take pictures and send them to other people, except the person getting the picture could only see it for three seconds and then it disappeared forever. The three friends were very bad presenters and they were also laughing a lot during the presentation because one of them drank three beers right before it started and did a lot of silly things during his introduction segment. He smiled a lot for no reason and threw every note card into the air after he had finished reading it. He knew he was being silly but he kept doing it because of the beers. He said in a mysterious voice that 3SP could be very useful in long distance relationships which was the thing that really made the other two friends laugh. Their professor Doctor Azra did not speak English very well and did not seem to notice the funny things going on. They got an A-.

They also made a lot of money because during that spring Three Second Pictures was downloaded a lot. More than any other app actually. No one called it Three Second Pictures or even 3SP though. Everyone called it “Threespee,” so for example you could say, “Danielle sent me a Threespee.” Danielle Simon actually did send a lot of Threespees. She would take a Threespee of herself when she was bored and send it to a friend. She was usually making a funny face in the Threespee which she would not make in a normal picture because with a normal picture a lot of people might see it on Page and it would be embarrassing. Danielle also said the name Threespee a lot because it was fun to say, especially at first when Threespee was only popular with girls like Danielle, like the kinds of girls who wrote bubble letter exclamation points and things like that. It was also popular with some guys if they were a certain type of guy. Like the type of guy who liked dancing, that type. Threespee was good evidence that if something can be popular with bubble letter exclamation point girls and dancing-for-fun guys, it will be popular with everyone soon probably. By September almost every student at Fenton High School used Threespee, not in the long distance relationship weird way but in the normal person casual nice way.

Fenton Kind Words made people like Danielle even more than they already did, which was a lot. She was the sweetest person at Fenton High probably. And the teachers loved her just as much as the students, which was why she got to go to the leadership conference in September. She always said she missed everyone when she saw them, it did not even matter how much time it had been since she had seen the person last. She gave really good hugs where she rested her chin on someone’s shoulder and squeezed them and shifted her weight from side to side, like a dance sort of. Before she gave the hugs she would see the person, gasp with her mouth wide open, and reach out her arms with her fingers wiggling around which showed that she was excited. Then she would say, I missed you.

Danielle was not skinny, but she was like medium weight. She wore glasses and had blonde bangs. She talked fast and she had to end her sentences sometimes by saying Sorry because she talked too long. Girls were always telling her she looked cute today. Boys liked talking to her because she was nice and because she talked so much that it was relaxing for them.

After the first unkind message to Fenton Kind Words, the one about Amber Middlemore, Danielle did not get so upset about them anymore. They only came once in a while and there were so many kind words that it was okay if a few mean ones came sometimes. Danielle did not have to post them on the Page or anything anyway. She decided that the people who sent them were just venting and did not really mean what they were saying, because the messages were not long and thoughtful like the kind ones but really short and weird-sounding, for example the one that said, DO NOT trust grace belden with anything especially your private information because she cant keep a secret if her life depended on it SHE CANT BE TRUSTED. That was what it said without all the curse words.

After Fenton Kind Words was around for like two weeks someone named Jeffrey Ming created a new Page called Fenton Unkind Words. He did it to be funny. It was not run by an administrator like Danielle’s Page, it was a Public Page that anyone could post on. Danielle was worried at first that people would use it to post mean things like the things they sent her sometimes, but hardly anyone did that because the Page was not anonymous like hers. With a Public Page like Fenton Unkind Words you had to post from your Page account which everyone could see. Pretty much all the comments on Fenton Unkind Words were funny things about the school, like, Breaking News: White Rice Served at Fenton High Found by Scientists to be Over One Million Years Old. And when someone actually did post something mean about a person, like when Curtis Whembler posted, Mr. Miller weighs more than everything else in his classroom combined, other people posted replies like, To the original poster: Please take your hurtful comments elsewhere. Just because Mr. Miller will never read this does not give you permission to make cowardly jokes at his expense. I happen to know Mr. Miller and he is a kind and generous man. The reply posts that were defending the person always got more Likes than the original ones with the mean things in them. So people stopped with the mean comments.

It did not take the three rich CalTech friends very long to figure out how they could be even more rich. If people liked pictures to disappear in three seconds, then they would like their text messages to disappear in three seconds too probably. So the friends made a new app called Three Second Texts, or 3ST for short, or Threestee for even shorter. (This time they knew what people would call it.) They released it in October, like a month after Danielle Simon created Fenton Kind Words.

Threestee was popular. Not as popular as Threespee, but still kind of popular. The thing was, the CalTech guys realized, that people did not really care about having their text messages disappear, because text messages never go up on people’s Pages anyway. So for a lot of people there was no point to using Threestee. It was like making a secret thing even more secret. But people still downloaded it and most of the people that downloaded it used it sometimes. Danielle used Threestee to send her friends silly inside-joke stuff, like funny quotes from herself, like for example, I can’t smoke weed, I have bangs! (classic hahaha). She did not really need to use Threestee for that, but part of the reason Danielle did it was because she liked the name Threestee.

The way the CalTech guys made money from Threespee and Threestee was by selling them to Page, Incorporated. It was kind of the only thing that made sense, because Page was the way everyone communicated now. About two years before Threespee even came out, Page added a message service called Page Message which was basically the same as texting except it was free. So there was no need to have phone numbers for texting, you just Page Messaged someone instead. After that, Page added a phone call feature that let your Page call someone else’s Page instead of using phone numbers to do it. That actually cost money for people because it was a deal that Page made with a phone company or something. The phone company was probably pretty desperate after the Page Message thing. But now there was really no point to having phone numbers. Probably pretty much everyone in college or younger used only their Page account for texting and calling now. So when you Threespeed someone or Threesteed them, you were just sending the message from your Page to someone else’s Page. Your phone was always logged into Page, and you only talked to other Pages that you were Friends with.

Page bought Threespee for ten billion dollars after it became popular and then it bought Threestee for one billion dollars after it became kind of popular. After that, Threespee and Threestee were not apps anymore, they were just features on Page. Like when you Page Messaged someone, you could just choose to make it a Threestee instead. Sometimes companies that you Liked on your Page account would send you Threespees of interesting new stuff. At least the stuff looked interesting when it disappeared so fast. Things are always interesting when they disappear, it kind of seems like.

The CalTech guys did not have anything to do after they sold Threestee so they started giving speeches at colleges and stuff like that. They got pretty good at presenting actually.

Danielle was getting a little tired of updating Fenton Kind Words but she knew it was worth it. The Page did not get as many messages as it did in the first couple weeks but it still did get a lot, and everyone still looked at it a lot. Danielle only had to update it like twice a week now and she really did look forward to it still. She remembered Morris sometimes and what he said about being a leader. She wished she could talk to Morris now and tell her about how she was leading. He would have been happy.

But then in November a new Page sent a Friend Request to everyone in the Fenton High School Page network. It was a Personal Page, like the kind that you had if you were a person. Only this new Page was not for a person, even though it had the Personal settings. Where it should have said someone’s name on the top of the Page, it said, ELEPHANT CITY.

In the Biography box which you could read if you accepted the Friend Request it just said this:

A Page that any Fenton High student can log into. Log in and send a Threestee to anyone. Tell them how you really feel, good or bad, while staying anonymous. User name = elephantcity. Password = fentonhigh (will change periodically).

Danielle did not really understand it. She did like the profile picture of Elephant City though, because it was a baby elephant that was smiling and playing in mud. Whoever made this Page must be a nice person if they like baby elephants, is what she was kind of thinking when she saw it.

It was a Friday when Elephant City started sending Friend Requests to everyone and on Monday the next week Danielle’s friend Kathy showed Danielle how to use Elephant City. Kathy was short and she wore headphones a lot and she had a lip ring. Danielle liked to send Kathy Threespees. Kathy showed Danielle that it was easy to use Elephant City, you just had to log in using the password and then send Threestees to people that you wanted to tell stuff to. Like for example Kathy did a demonstration by sending Danielle a Threestee from Elephant City that said, Danielle Simon you are my favorite person in the whole world! Love you girl! It was there for three seconds and then it was gone. Danielle thought it was funny.

The problem was Danielle was afraid that no one would send kind words to Fenton Kind Words if they were just using this new Elephant City Page instead. But when she got home she realized that it was okay as long as people were still sending kind words to each other somehow. She had pretty much started the whole thing anyway, so she should be happy that it worked so well. Plus Danielle thought that if she did not have to post everything herself then she might actually get nice things sent to her too, which she was kind of wishing for now.

So Danielle went to her bedroom and logged into Elephant City and selected Kathy Cho from Elephant City’s list of friends and typed, Kathy, you are such an amazing person. Whenever I see you my day is instantly better. You are beautiful in every way and never let anyone tell you otherwise. If people don’t appreciate you that’s only because they don’t know how wonderful you are!! She sent it as a Threestee and logged off Elephant City.

Danielle was happy about Elephant City now. She got a textbook and did some reading on her bed and thought about what nice things she could send to her other friends to make them less uneasy, like she did with Kathy. She was also thinking about the cute elephant picture that she really liked. She thought would be fun to be an elephant, like for a day or something.

After reading for a while Danielle took out her phone and logged back in to her normal Page. There were a lot of funny clips and pictures to look at. Danielle Liked all of them, even the videos that she did not even watch, because she just liked that people were making the effort to share funny things with their friends. It was like a way to help each other get rid of stress. As she was Liking things, a red blinking thing at the top of her Page appeared which meant that she someone had sent her a Threestee. It was from Elephant City.

Danielle got excited when she saw it but also she got nervous, because what if it said something bad about her. Her palms were getting sweaty a little bit. She took an excited type of breath and tapped the Threestee button and this appeared on her phone screen: Danielle, you know I love you honey but the bangs have got to go.
Danielle stared at it for three seconds and then it was gone.

Everything was really quiet. Danielle kept staring at her phone even though the message was gone.

All of the sudden she started getting a bad feeling, like a helpless kind of feeling. She wanted the message to come back. She wanted to show it to someone, like Kathy. That way they could talk about it and say that it was mean. And also Kathy could say that she liked Danielle’s bangs and that the mean person was wrong. The other bad thing was that Danielle wanted to know who sent the message. She would talk to them and say something like, It’s okay if you send mean things to me but don’t you dare send mean things like that to other people. But she did not know who sent it and plus she had already forgot what it said except for not liking her bangs.

It was probably a girl who sent it. Maybe it was a boy though. Maybe it was one of her friends. Now there was a stinging feeling in Danielle’s mouth, like in her throat area. It was also kind of in her eyes. Everyone hated her bangs probably. Danielle wanted the message to come back.

Like twenty minutes later Danielle’s mom went upstairs to ask Danielle if it would be okay if they had spaghetti for dinner tonight even though they did have it two nights ago. She knocked on the door and went in and then she saw Danielle lying on her bed reading her textbook which was covering her face. When Danielle’s mom asked about the spaghetti Danielle just said, Okay. She said it in a whispery voice that was not her normal voice. Also she would not move the textbook.