Chapter 13: The Video
Zaire woke on Saturday to a sound he did not recognise at first, and then he did: his mother's phone, buzzing against the kitchen table like a trapped insect. It buzzed, stopped, and buzzed again. Angela picked it up, frowned at the screen, and put it down face first, as if that might make it stop. It did not stop.
"Leave it," she said, but her voice was tight. "Eat your toast first."
He ate, slowly, because he could feel something had changed in the flat overnight, the way the air changes before a storm. The toast was cold. The milk was cold. His mother kept glancing at the window, at the door, at the phone, as if she were counting exits.
"What is it?" he asked at last.
Angela turned the phone over. The screen showed a video, paused on a frame he knew too well: the red Ferrari in front of Meridian Tower, the crowd in a loose ring, and himself, small in his secondhand jacket, kneeling by the open door with his father's multimeter in his hand. Underneath it, a number that made no sense to him. Hundreds of thousands of views. Then, as he watched, the number climbed.
"Someone posted it last night," Angela said. "Then everyone did."
Zaire had known there were phones. He had seen them raised, had heard the little clicks and gasps when the engine caught. He had not understood what that meant until now. A moment that had lasted thirty seconds in a car park was now loose in the world, travelling faster than any car, and it did not belong to him anymore.
By the time he had finished his toast, the video had been cut into shorter pieces. One piece showed only Ashworth's face going pale. Another looped the moment the engine roared, over and over, with loud music laid on top. A third froze on Zaire's small shoes, a half-size too small, and strangers wrote jokes underneath about them. Some of the jokes were kind. Some were not. Angela read two comments aloud without meaning to, then stopped herself and put the phone away in a drawer.
"They do not know you," she said firmly. "Remember that."
But the world outside the flat seemed to know him now. When Angela opened the front door to take out the rubbish, a young man with a camera was standing by the stairwell. He was polite, but he was also persistent, and he asked if Zaire would say a few words for his channel. Angela said no, closed the door, and locked it, and then stood with her back against it for a moment, breathing hard.
"Are they allowed to do that?" Zaire asked.
"They are allowed to stand there," she said. "We are allowed to say no."
At school on Monday, the gate was worse. There were three reporters, not one, and a van with a satellite dish on its roof. Ms. Elena Ortiz met Zaire at the gate herself, which she had never done before, and walked him in through the side door, her hand light on his shoulder. Inside, the corridors were normal, which felt strange. Jamal Hayes found him at his locker and grinned, too loudly, and then saw Zaire's face and lowered his voice.
"Everyone's seen it," Jamal whispered. "Even my gran. She says you're famous now."
"I don't want to be famous," Zaire said. "I just want it to be over."
Jamal nodded, serious in a way that made him seem older. "Then we'll just be normal," he said. "I'll still beat you at lunch football. That part hasn't changed."
That evening, back in the flat, Angela sat Zaire down and spoke to him plainly, the way she always did when something mattered.
"You did a good thing," she said. "You kept your head, you listened, and you told the truth about what you heard. That is yours. The video is not you. The jokes are not you. The people shouting your name at a gate do not get to decide who you are."
"Will it stop?" he asked.
"I don't know," Angela said honestly. "But we will not chase it, and we will not perform for it. If someone wants to talk to you properly, with respect, we will listen. Otherwise, the door stays closed."
Later, when the flat was quiet and the phone had finally stopped buzzing in its drawer, Zaire opened his notebook and wrote one line in his own careful hand: The car made a sound. I listened. That was all.
He closed the book. Outside, Houston hummed on, unaware and indifferent, and somewhere out there the video kept travelling, carrying his thirty seconds to people he would never meet. He could not stop it. But he could decide, quietly, what he would not give it: his mornings, his school, his dignity, or his name said in a way that was not his own.