It’s Only Week Three

Track 2. The train was leaving in 5 minutes, which meant she likely didn’t have time to grab a box of Mike & Ike’s from Hudson News. That was probably for the best. The night before she had eaten three shrimp and moments later passed them, still in full form. It’d be smart to stick to Slimfast chocolate shakes and canned corn.

Cloaked in a dark pashmina and holding a copy of The Fountainhead, unrecognizable without her brittle hair on full display, Kellyanne boarded the train to Trenton. Lately, the fake news stations requested she did not appear on their shows, which truthfully was a blessing. It gave her time to do the more secret biddings of the president. Today she was on a mission.

On the train, a small child a few seats in front of Kellyanne read signs out loud as they passed them.

“Aberdeen. Wilmington.” The kid was smart. Kellyanne sneakily took a photo of the kid and sent it to Spicer.

“Smart kid. Very beautiful and small. Announce that she is DeVos’s new assistant?” she sent along with the photo.

Spicer wasn’t going to respond. He had limited data and tended to only text on weekends after 8 p.m. And even then, Bannon would hide his phone on silent under pillows in the Roosevelt Room to get Spicer worked up before conferences. But at least he would get the message. The train passed the Trenton bridge that read, “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.” Whenever she saw it, Kellyanne resonated with the pettiness of it. She gathered her belongings and glanced once more at the photo of the other child on her phone. The one she was sent to find.

The walk to the middle school was uneventful. Twenty-seven black cats crossed her path but Kellyanne wasn’t one to lean into superstition. According to her intelligence briefing, the target was in his Social Studies class, which was on the first floor on the west side of the school.

The sky hung low and heavy like it would before a summer storm. Yet it was February. Kellyanne thought this was odd, but long ago had decided to never question what was happening in the sky, because that was God’s domain. She arrived. She spotted him. 5’3″. Pre-pubescent and still a bit chubby. Tanner Grossman, the 6th grader whose nasty tweets calling Trump “a fat-ass” were gutting the president’s confidence.

Kellyanne stood outside the window until Tanner noticed her. (This same tactic was how she met her husband.) She put her finger to her mouth, held up her phone with his twitter account open, and pressed the follow button.

“We’re watching you,” she mouthed and dashed away from the window, back to the train station. This was exhilarating. Putting children in their place gave her an incomparable feeling. This was government in action.

The news channels were onto her. Every time she mentioned she was looking for schools to send her children to in the area, she was actually browsing cryogenic freezing containers she could retire into. Reporters were surely going to realize that she didn’t even have children, but instead dragged sacks of sawdust with wigs around with her to church every Sunday. For what it was worth, Kellyanne was proud she noticed the similarity and used it to aid her own narrative before it could be used against her. Besides, she was starting to care deeply for those sacks of sawdust.

She had no choice but to throw the press off. That’s why she did it. That’s why she threw out the Bowling Green Massacre. A made-up tragedy was brilliant. A million people could die in a made-up massacre and she could go about her own quest to never truly die. Was it going to cause backlash? Of course. But the only reason Kellyanne was who she was, was because she learned to surf those waves of backlash straight to the bank. A dusty brunette had said that to her once as an insult, but like magic, Kellyanne spun it into her affirming life motto.

“Bowling Green Massacre? Srsly?” Bannon texted her.

“Yes, seriously, asshole,” she thought to herself. She wasn’t going to respond. He didn’t get it. He didn’t have to go in front of the cameras like she did. He got to sit in the Oval Office and braid Trump’s hair all day long. She resented that. She had to make up egregious distractions for him all the time, but this time she was doing it for herself. The press would be so caught up with this fake massacre, she could slip down to Langley and tour the cryogenic facility she’d spend her tenth decade in.

What would the 2070s even be like? Would people remember her? Would there be a medical cure for her inability to enjoy music? She had been told (by Priebus) she would like the band Relient K. Hopefully they’d be around in 50 years. But if not, she’d be okay. She was always okay, unlike those tragically slaughtered in the Bowling Green Massacre.

With her newfound public platform, Kellyanne had one thing on her docket today. She had to update her online screen names from HotBitchKellyanne to something less recognizable. She, of course, wasn’t going to go off the grid entirely. She relied on her social media pages to keep her sane, but no one needed to know every platform she was on (and she was on a lot of them.)

Her favorite site was LinkedIn, where she would regularly drunkenly endorse close friends of hers for their skills, then retract the endorsements as a power move. She’d also report any other blond conservative women who looked like they were rising in their career as the arsonists of unsolved fires in their areas. This was much more fun than hate-scrolling through wedding photos on Facebook.

What if she used the pet name her darling husband called her? “OldCrowMedicineShow” she typed in. Hm, that was taken, which was odd.

Okay, how about her college nickname, Kellyanne the Karate Kid? Hm, that was way too long. She entered, “KKKShorty.” Taken, too. Insane.

Kellyanne was getting frustrated. All this time it was taking to find a new screen name could be used to retweet scientific studies about Republican women being hotter than Democratic women. In fact, that’s what the E.P.A. should be doing more research on. She shot Pruitt a text about that. He had a thing for her because of all the Aquanet she sprayed into the air as protest against healthy animals. He’d listen to her. She was certainly uncommitted to the climate. Certainly uncommitted to the climate! That was it!

Cuckellyanne. Perfect. No one had taken it. She logged onto her Tumblr with the new name and felt a deep therapeutic release as she faved a post calling endangered animals “pussies.”