Dolos (children’s/YA short story)
DOLOS
Part 1
It had seemed funny at the time. Jenny’s face, Jenny’s butterfly necklace, Jenny’s stupid haircut, it all looked just right. Perfect, really. And there it was, Jenny’s stupid mouth saying those awful, filthy words. We cackled like evil monkeys and uploaded the clip. It didn’t take long for the whole year to see it, then the whole school and, finally, the teachers. It was a foggy Tuesday morning when Jenny was called in to see the headteacher. She was suspended while the teachers investigated. I felt terrible, but none of us said a thing. That’s the point when everything began to slip. Anyway, I’m rushing ahead. Let me start at the beginning.
The app was called ‘Dolos’. Alice looked up the name while Laura and I created an account. It was a slow Monday breaktime and the three of us were sprawled over the common room’s wonky plastic chairs, swapping each other’s phones, and taking goofy videos to try out the latest filters and apps.
“Dolos was a Greek spirit of illusion,” she told us. We looked again at the app’s icon: a stylised, grinning face with a pointed beard.
“Whatever,” Laura said. “As long as it works.”
She tapped open the app and her screen was filled with a larger graphic of the face, which winked at us conspiratorially.
“Yeah,” I said, “loads of these deepfake apps are rubbish.”
“You should try learning a thing or two,” Alice sighed. “It’s not like your looks will get you anywhere.”
I put my tongue into my lower jaw and waved my fingers at Alice, goblin-like. She did the same back.
“Woah, look at this,” Laura said, and we gathered to peer at the screen. It was a video of me, taken just a moment before, but now I was reciting all the worst words Laura had been able to think of in the short time she’d been poking at the app. It looked seamless, just like reality. Even my voice sounded perfect.
“No way,” I said. “My mum would kill me if she ever saw that.”
Alice had a big grin on her face.
“I’ll save this one for a special occasion,” Laura said, smirking.
“All hail Dolos,” Alice intoned, hands in mock prayer. “Who shall we get?”
There was only ever one candidate. All of us had reasons to dislike Jenny Fawcett. She was prettier than Laura, just as smart as Alice, and her mum’s sports car would rev past me each day to drop Jenny off at the school gates as I trudged off the number 27 bus. Someone had to bring her down a peg or two. So, we hunched over Laura’s phone, snatching time between lessons and during lunch, until we had the perfect fake video. We took a clip of Jenny from online, changed the background a bit and began adding all the nasty things we could think of. The app let us twist her face and bend her voice to do our bidding. We were satisfied when we were done. It was convincing. Just like the real thing, we all agreed.
“Eugh,” Laura said, “even fake Jenny is gorgeous.”
“Don’t worry,” Alice said, “soon Jenny will be in real trouble.”
That’s when we giggled and uploaded it, there and then, like it was nothing. I got the bus home in a good mood, but my phone quickly started pinging with messages in loads of different group chats:
- OMG have you seen this Jenny video?
- Wow, she’s screwed tomorrow!
- She said WHAT about me?
- Prob just a fake
- Looks pretty real to me
The messages kept coming and coming, and as they did my throat got tighter and tighter. I hadn’t really thought that the video would blow up this much. I barely slept that night and felt unsettled going into school the next day.
Jenny had tears in her eyes at breaktime when I saw her at her locker, stuffing things into a backpack and sobbing with a friend.
“But it wasn’t me,” she said.
“Jenny, it’s okay,” her friend replied. “I don’t mind the things you said.”
“But it wasn’t me!” Jenny insisted. Her eyes were red and her normally perfect makeup streaked down her face. The back of my chest felt hollow. Everyone else in the corridor was looking at Jenny, muttering. They whispered about the cruel, disgusting things Jenny had said, how her perfect mask had slipped to reveal the horrid truth underneath, how it was just like they’d thought. For some, she’d always been fake, and now they’d finally seen the real her. For others, it didn’t even matter if they thought the video was a hoax. They’d been set free to say what they wanted. Jenny was fair game. I couldn’t bear it.
I went to find Laura and Alice.
“We should tell Jenny what we’ve done,” I said.
“Why?” Alice asked. “We got away with it. There’s no way she can know it was us.”
“Yeah,” Laura agreed, flicking through her phone. “What can she do, even if she thinks it’s fake? Relax.”
I nodded and tried to suppress the horrid, strange feeling that had started to creep up my entire body.
Leaving school, my thoughts distracted, I made my way to the bus stop and waited for the number 27. The fog from the morning had barely lifted, and the whole day had this miserable, grey feeling to it. My clothes and hair felt slightly damp. There was an older man at the bus stop clutching a Tesco bag full of energy drinks and white bread. He looked me up and down as I approached.
Something didn’t feel right. I don’t know whether it was my guilt over Jenny, the old man’s stares, or a premonition of what was to come, but I had the sinking feeling that the world had been yanked out from under me. I noticed that someone had stenciled the Dolos app’s icon in graffiti on the bus shelter. The grinning, bearded face made me shiver.
Impatiently, I looked at the bus stop’s display to see when the 27 would arrive. There was no 27 listed. I went to my phone and double-checked the timetable on the live map. No 27. I swore and the man tutted.
“Girls these days, filthy,” he said.
There was no way I was asking him what had happened to the 27, and I wasn’t going to wait around near the creep either, so I started walking to the next stop.
It was the same story there. No 27. At this point, I was cold through and miserable beyond words. I trudged on and on, past darkening alleys and the strange glow of cornershops, mopeds and vans scooting past me. At every bus stop on my usual route, it was like the 27 had never existed. I even asked a group of boys at one stop, but they just squinted at me like I was some escaped lunatic.
“27? What you on about, butters?” one of them said. The rest of the group laughed: stupid, greasy laughs. I shivered and trudged on. Once, I thought I saw a girl staring at me from an alley, so I gawped back stupidly. Didn’t I know her? Jenny?! Then she was gone and I wondered if she’d ever been there at all. I was so tired.
My mum fussed terribly when I got home. It was dark and my clothes had taken on all the damp and grime of the streets.
“Oh my baby girl! Now where you been? Got your mother worried sick! Oh my baby!”
“Sorry, mum. But what’s up with the 27? They changed the route or something?”
“What you saying girl? 27? What is this?”
“The bus, mum,” I said, sighing.
She looked at me quizzically.
“The one I get home.” I was really fed up at this point, and the last thing I needed was mum being slow.
“Baby girl what you saying about 27? You get that 43 home from Castle Road. Now stop your nonsense and take off those wet rags.”
Now I was nervous, and felt my voice get thin as I argued .
“No, mum, I get the 27. How can you not know this?”
She rolled her eyes and went back to the kitchen, exasperated. I took out my phone and checked the transport website as I slumped onto the sofa. The damp from my clothes left a dark print on the fabric below. The 27 went nowhere near here. It went down the south end of town. What was going on? I’m tired, I told myself. I’ll go to sleep and it’ll all be fine when I wake up. I went to my room and tried to forget about the day.
That’s when I received the video. I didn’t recognise the number, but opened it all the same. It was Jenny. Her face was drawn and tired - black circles under her eyes - but she had a grin on her face like the sides of her mouth were being stretched upward by unseen clamps.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was slippery and shifting. What on earth was this? Was this even really Jenny?
“I know it was you,” she continued. “So, I thought I’d have a bit of fun in return. Have a good day at school tomorrow.”
Then she started laughing. It was a horrible laugh, that ripped through the phone’s speakers and clawed at my ears. She laughed and laughed until I stopped the message and threw my phone across the room. I sat there, shivering, regretting everything. If I could have gone back then and talked Alice and Laura out of it, I would have done it in an instant. But things weren’t over yet, and before they were I’d leave behind nearly everything I’d thought was true.