Clearwater is a town that has forgotten that every great teacher is first a great liar. All of that changes one day in December when a mysterious hacker uploads 119 private files stolen from Clearwater’s teachers. Suddenly the private medical records, email exchanges, tax returns, Tinder profiles, Netflix preferences, Craigslist ads, direct messages, and GPS movements of 41 educators are a curious click away, and the rest of the faculty dwells in fear of another leak.
The Doxxing of Clearwater High tells the stories of the teachers and students exposed by this suburban Wikileaks. The science teacher with the shocking search history. The math teacher who made a sex tape. The French teacher outed as a transgender woman. The English teacher concealing a hidden punk rock past. The principal racing to save his school from collapse. In an era where every phone hides a camera and every keystroke leaves a trail, a community must acknowledge that those charged with teaching the humanities are often the most fallibly human themselves.
Clearwater is a town that has forgotten that every great teacher is first a great liar. All of that changes one day in December when a mysterious hacker uploads 119 private files stolen from Clearwater’s teachers. Suddenly the private medical records, email exchanges, tax returns, Tinder profiles, Netflix preferences, Craigslist ads, direct messages, and GPS movements of 41 educators are a curious click away, and the rest of the faculty dwells in fear of another leak.
The Doxxing of Clearwater High tells the stories of the teachers and students exposed by this suburban Wikileaks. The science teacher with the shocking search history. The math teacher who made a sex tape. The French teacher outed as a transgender woman. The English teacher concealing a hidden punk rock past. The principal racing to save his school from collapse. In an era where every phone hides a camera and every keystroke leaves a trail, a community must acknowledge that those charged with teaching the humanities are often the most fallibly human themselves.
Jennifer Watson could think of few things more humiliating than writing a math problem on the board. When she had been twelve, her math teacher summoned her to the front of the class, handed her a piece of chalk, and asked her to show her peers how she had calculated the volume of a traffic cone. She was painfully aware of their eyes watching her diagram integers, and the fact that she couldn’t see their faces as she worked intensified her discomfort.
But now she was a math teacher herself, and she understood the power of public demonstrations. Every kid in her class took a turn at the board; it gave her a chance to check their thinking and impress upon them the methodology of algebra.
It also helped her relate to her students. Sometimes they required coaxing or encouragement. And sometimes they simply refused to comply. Like now: 16-year-old Simran had her head down and was ignoring Jenn’s summons. The teacher knelt beside her student and brought her voice down to a whisper.
“Hey,” said Jenn. “Do you need to take a walk?” Simran was silent. Jenn persisted. “Need to talk to someone?”
“Please go,” said Simran. Her voice was like wet tissue.
Jenn shifted her legs. “I know it’s scary,” she said. “But you’ve got this, Simran. I wouldn’t ask you do something you couldn’t handle.”
“Ms. Watson?” said another student. “Ms. Watson, I can write the problem. I don’t mind.”
Sometimes all a kid needed was a little breathing room. “That sounds good, Katie,” said Jenn. “Maybe you show us #14.” She stood, but she leaned down to whisper to Simran. “I’ll come back to you in a few minutes,” she said.
She heard a chirp from someone’s backpack, then another and a third. “Hey, you all know the rules,” said Jenn. “Phones on silent.” But she could tell that several more students had received messages; they were surreptitiously checking their smart watches and little black screens. It was a like a breeze blowing through the classroom, ruffling everyone. “Come on,” said Jenn. “Phones away.”
There was a loud crack outside her classroom that made Jenn flinch. Even Simran jolted upright. A strange silence settled over the classroom, then an uncomfortable laughter. Jenn’s forehead furrowed. “You three,” she said, pointing to three kids in the first row of desks. “Put problems 14-16 on the board. I’ll be right back.”
Carlton Wemish was in the hallway, gathering pieces of a shattered laptop. His classroom was across the hall from her own. She was used to Carlton greeting her each morning with some inanity about Star Wars or his trivia team. Now, though, he was on his hands and knees, looking like a frightened animal.
“Carlton, what happened?”
“Oh,” he said. “I tripped.”
She knew him well enough to recognize that he was lying. “On what?” she asked.
“It’s…” he began. “Look, Jenn—”
He froze; they heard shouting down the hall. The voices were muffled, but Jenn recognized a familiar registry. “Can you keep an eye on my class?” she asked Carlton. “I’ll be right back.” He seemed relieved by the distraction.
Around two corners and down the freshman hallway, Jenn spotted a throng of students. Their phones were out, and they were recording a confrontation. She was close enough now to identify the voice. “GIVE ME THE PHONE!” shouted Stanley DuPont, her department chair.
Stanley had backed a student up against a bank of lockers and was reaching aggressively for the student’s hand. Her department chair gripped the kid—probably a junior—by the coat lapel. “Let go, man,” the kid said. “I wasn’t doing anything.”
“GIVE ME THE PHONE!” Stanley repeated.
Jenn pushed through the students and inserted herself between her boss and the kid. “Stanley,” she said with a quiet firmness. “Stanley, what’s going on here?”
Like a broken spell, the older man suddenly returned to himself. He released the student and backed away. The color drained from his cheeks. “Jenn, I…” he began.
“He fucking hit me!” said the kid. “You all saw it!” He gestured to the array of phones. Jenn suddenly realized that she was being filmed. She forced herself to composure and raised both hands in a supplicating gesture. “Okay,” she said. “All right. Let’s all take a breath here. Why don’t we go down to the dean’s—”
“Fuck this,” said the kid, red-faced and on the verge of tears. He pushed past the gawkers and disappeared around the corner.
Jenn turned to face Stanley. “What just happened?” she pleaded.
He didn’t seem to hear her; he ran his hands through his shale-colored hair, his nostrils wide and flaring. Jenn wheeled on the crowd. “Phones away,” she barked. “I want you to head to the dean’s office. Every one of you!” No one moved for a moment; she added an emphatic “NOW!” to rustle them towards Bryan Yulders’ disciplinary office. When they had dispersed, she returned to Stanley, but the distance in his eyes had only grown.
“I need to call my wife,” he said absently. He pushed past her and descended a stairwell.
What was happening? Carlton was odd and awkward, but basically a nebbish. Stanley DuPont, on the other hand, was as steady and reliable as a sequoia. Stanley was who people called when their marriage was failing, when a parent moved to hospice. She had seen him defuse student fights on more than one occasion, once without even getting up from the table where he was tutoring a student in calc.
She decided to go after him, hoping that Carlton could keep a handle on her students. But as she emerged from the stairwell into the wider corridors of the first floor, she recognized that the chaos was not confined to two math teachers.
Leila Bells, a young Physics teacher, rushed past, her makeup streaked with tears. Jenn called out to her, but Leila pressed on, past a gaggle of students who filmed her with their phones. “Hey!” said Jenn. “What are you doing?” The students quickly fled. Jenn pursued the middle one, heading towards the cafeteria. As she rounded a corner, she collided with another student, who dropped his phone. Jenn apologized and picked it up. The screen displayed a penis.
The kid’s eyes goggled. “It’s not mine!” he said.
“The phone or the picture?” Jenn asked.
“Uh,” said the kid. “Both?”
Jenn rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to the dean’s office. You’ll have to take a number at this rate.”
As she moved through the hallway, Jenn felt strangers eyeing her derisively. Once, when she had been a dancer, she’d performed several routines with her tampon string hanging out of the side of her leotard before one of the few nice girls took pity and alerted her. She felt the same sense of restrained mockery all around her now. One smirking student made eye contact with her. “Oh, Bill!” he said.
Bill? Who was he talking to? Was the dick pic kid named Bill? But there was too much going on to pursue the thought; walking past the Language Arts office, she glimpsed two teachers consoling a third. She passed Andy Waters’ classroom, but the young English teacher was missing. “He just walked out,” one of his students shrugged. “Didn’t say nothing to no one.”
She led her prisoner through the cafeteria, eyes following them. One student spotted her and burst into laughter. Another looked at her and moaned. “Oh, Bill!” said a third.
“What is going on here?” Jenn asked. She turned to the dick pic kid, who seemed paralyzed by her attention.
“You don’t know?” he asked.
“Know what?” Jenn asked. “What don’t I know?”
The kid seemed to be weighing life in prison versus capital punishment. He made a decision. “May I see my phone?” he asked.
“What?” she said. “I’m not giving you your—”
“I won’t delete the pic,” he said. “Wouldn’t matter anyway. Just… just… you need to see something.”
Slowly, Jenn handed him his phone. The kid tapped the screen a couple times, then handed Jenn a video image of her having sex with the father of one of her students.
“Bill,” said video Jenn. “Oh, Bill…”
It had been a mistake to get drinks with Bill Pastard after parent/teacher conferences. It had been a mistake to let him drive her back to her apartment, to invite him up. It had been a mistake to record the episode on her iPad. A daisy-chain of errors that was detonating in the Clearwater cafeteria.
“Oh, Bill!” said video Jenn on another student’s phone. Across the crowded room, she heard her own voice answer, again and again and again.
"But they want us to be more, don't they? Teachers are mentors, caretakers, moralists, priests, first responders. Saints. And you know how they make saints? They martyr you."
The Doxxing of Clearwater High follows the lives of it's myriad staff and students as it attempts to navigate a series of "doxxings", or the online leaking of private documents, of it's teachers. Each chapter follows a different mini-cast of characters in the days following the doxxings, how their lives are different, falling apart, falling together, or simply just falling.
In his debut novel, Michael Rossi paints a vivid and sometimes too "hi-def" picture of the lives of teachers, those mysterious, amorphous creatures we come to think of as confined to the four walls of the class room, to their personas as interpreted by the frenzied minds of teenagers. This book, first and foremost, is a reminder to all of us that though we may forget, teachers are also human. And humans are painfully flawed, disappointing creatures.
The writing style shifts with the perspective of each character, but Rossi still maintains a cohesiveness with his at times dry, at times downright hilarious figures of speech. I found myself surprised and delighted by how rich the writing was, and how accurate the voices were in portraying the way teenagers communicate between themselves and online. The shameless hyperbole of making someone look like "a panda about to operate heavy machinery" or the way a teen merged "only occasionally, as a sperm whale might for air" all brought physical smiles to my face.
It's almost too obvious that Rossi himself is an English teacher, surrounded daily by the incredulous ways teens might speak to and about one another.
Still, this novel never shies away from the gritty, the ugly. The lurid depictions of an amateur sex tape made by one of the math teachers, the grim acceptance of the transgendered French teacher, the utter, unshakable conviction of anonymous memers in their self-righteous bullying, disguised and justified by a sense of misplaced belief in "internet democracy".
Though a slightly fractured experience by the frequent narrative and perspective jumps from one person to another, I can't help thinking this too reinforces the fractured nature of social media -- each Insta post or TikTok blurring into the next before it can quite finish, each story feeding the next, and the next. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys true-crime, the ones who fall into internet or Wikipedia holes, the one's who can't help rubbernecking at a traffic accident.
But in the end, The Doxxing of Clearwater High asks us (or perhaps it forces us) to reflect on our own high school experiences, on the teachers we had once worshipped and loathed, considered our friends and foes. And to remember that they, like us, are only so, so fallibly and inevitably human.