Part 2: THE PRANKS THAT WERE NEVER FUNNY

I stood frozen on the landing, water still dripping from my hair.

Melissa had told Ethan I knew?

That I had agreed to have a bucket of freezing water dumped over my head in front of my family?

I wanted to turn around and demand an explanation.

But something stopped me.

For months, I had been reacting exactly the way Melissa expected.

I became upset.

She called me dramatic.

Everybody eventually agreed that I needed to learn how to laugh at myself.

This time, I wanted to understand what was happening before giving her another reaction to record.

I went into my bedroom and closed the door.

My birthday dress was ruined.

It was pale blue, with delicate embroidered flowers along the sleeves.

Robert had bought it for me on our last anniversary together.

I had worn it because I wanted to feel close to him.

Now it lay in a wet heap on the bathroom floor.

I wrapped myself in a towel and looked in the mirror.

My hair was plastered against my forehead.

Mascara had run beneath my eyes.

My face looked pale and exhausted.

I looked exactly like the kind of woman people might laugh at in a humiliating internet video.

That thought disturbed me.

Why had Melissa been so determined to keep recording?

I changed into dry clothes and sat on the edge of my bed.

Then I remembered something from three weeks earlier.

Ethan had hidden my purse.

At least, that was what Melissa told me.

I had searched the kitchen, living room, and hallway for nearly twenty minutes.

My medication and house keys were inside, and when I began to panic, Melissa laughed.

“Mom, calm down.

It’s just a purse.”

Ethan eventually produced it from behind a couch cushion.

But he hadn’t looked amused.

He had looked relieved.

At the time, I assumed he was embarrassed because I’d become upset.

Now I wondered whether he had been waiting for the ordeal to end.

Then there was the spider.

I had opened my medicine cabinet one afternoon and discovered a large rubber spider sitting on top of my prescription bottles.

I screamed.

Melissa appeared almost immediately, phone raised.

She had been recording then, too.

And afterward, she kept asking me to repeat what I’d said.

“Mom, say that again.

That was hilarious!”

I refused.

She seemed annoyed.

A soft knock interrupted my thoughts.

“Grandma?”

Ethan.

“Come in.”

He entered slowly and closed the door behind him.

His eyes were red.

“I’m really sorry.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“Did your mother tell you I knew about the bucket?”

He nodded.

“She said it was a birthday surprise you’d agreed to.”

“Did that sound believable to you?”

“No.”

His honesty surprised me.

“Then why did you do it?”

He rubbed his palms against his jeans.

“She said you were getting upset about everything lately.

She said if I did something really funny, you’d laugh afterward, and everybody would see you were okay.”

“Okay?”

He swallowed.

“She said you needed to stop taking everything so seriously.”

A heavy feeling settled in my chest.

“Ethan, look at me.”

He did.

“Did you want to do those things to me?”

He shook his head.

“Not all of them.”

“Which ones were your idea?”

He hesitated.

“The spider.

I thought you’d laugh.

But when you screamed, Mom kept telling me we should do more.”

“And my purse?”

“She told me to hide it.

She said you were always losing things anyway.”

I closed my eyes.

My own daughter had been encouraging her son to frighten and humiliate me.

But I still didn’t understand why.

“Why was she filming?”

Ethan glanced toward the door.

Then he lowered his voice.

“Grandma, I think she’s putting the videos online.”

I stared at him.

“What videos?”

He took out his phone.

“I found something last night.”

He held the screen toward me.

And there I was.

Screaming in my own bathroom.

A caption stretched across the bottom.

When Grandma can’t handle a little prank.

Underneath were thousands of views.

And the account belonged to my daughter.

Part 3: THE WOMAN EVERYBODY WAS LAUGHING AT

I stared at Ethan’s phone.

There was my bathroom.

My medicine cabinet.

My frightened face.

And there was my daughter’s laughter in the background.

I watched myself stumble backward from the rubber spider, one hand pressed against my chest.

The video ended just before I began crying.

I remembered that afternoon clearly.

I had been getting ready for a doctor’s appointment.

My heart raced so badly afterward that I had to sit on the edge of the bathtub for ten minutes.

Melissa had told me I was overreacting.

Now strangers were laughing at me.

I scrolled down.

The comments made my stomach turn.

Grandma needs to relax.

Do the bucket challenge next!

Her reactions are priceless!

One person suggested that Melissa should prank me every day.

I handed the phone back.

“How long has she been doing this?”

Ethan sat beside me.

“I don’t know.

A few months, maybe.”

“Did you know?”

“Not at first.”

“And when you found out?”

He looked miserable.

“She said it was harmless.

She said people liked watching us together.”

“Us?”

He nodded.

“She said we could make family videos.

She told me lots of people do it.”

I remembered Melissa talking about social media several months earlier.

She had complained that her videos never got much attention.

She worked long hours, felt unappreciated, and often talked about people who earned money online by filming ordinary moments.

I hadn’t paid much attention.

Now I wished I had.

“Show me the account,” I said.

Ethan hesitated, then opened the profile.

It had a cheerful name about family fun.

The profile photograph showed Melissa, David, and Ethan smiling together.

I wasn’t in the picture.

But I was in nearly every recent video.

There was the purse incident.

The caption read:

Grandma loses her purse AGAIN!

I watched myself search the room while Melissa asked whether I remembered where I’d left it.

At one point, I said, “I know I put it on the table.”

Then the video cut to Ethan pulling it from behind the couch.

What viewers didn’t see was Melissa telling him to hide it.

What they didn’t hear was me explaining that I needed my medication.

To anyone watching, I looked confused and forgetful.

My stomach tightened.

“Play the next one.”

It was the coffee incident.

I took a sip, made a face, and pushed the cup away.

Melissa laughed.

The caption read:

Grandma’s taste buds aren’t what they used to be.

Then came the screaming sound beneath my chair.

The mask.

The hidden reading glasses.

I remembered that last one.

Melissa had moved my glasses from the kitchen counter into a drawer.

She laughed when I finally found them.

At the time, it had seemed so small that I’d forgotten about it.

Now it was part of a collection.

A collection of moments carefully designed to make me look foolish.

I scrolled through the comments.

Some people were laughing.

Others were not.

Why does the grandma look genuinely scared?

This is getting mean.

Does she know she’s being filmed?

One person wrote:

Stop messing with elderly people for views.

Melissa had replied with a laughing emoji.

I put the phone down.

For several minutes, neither Ethan nor I spoke.

Then I asked the question that had been forming in my mind.

“Did your mother tell you what she planned to do with today’s video?”

He looked away.

“Ethan.”

“She said it would be the biggest one yet.”

“Biggest?”

“She said the other videos were doing really well, and people wanted something more dramatic.”

I felt cold again, though my clothes were dry.

“So she arranged my birthday dinner around a video?”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.

I remembered how Melissa had insisted on hosting.

How she had invited relatives I hadn’t seen in months.

How she had positioned my chair with its back toward the kitchen doorway.

How she’d told me not to move because she wanted a nice birthday picture.

I had thought she was being thoughtful.

She had been arranging the shot.

“Grandma,” Ethan whispered, “I didn’t know she was going to make you look like that.”

I turned toward him.

“Like what?”

He struggled to find the words.

“Like you don’t know what’s happening.”

My heart sank.

I picked up the phone again.

Beneath one of the videos, Melissa had written:

Life with our increasingly forgetful grandma.

We love her, but some days are a challenge!

I read it twice.

Then I understood.

The missing purse.

The misplaced glasses.

The salt in my coffee.

They weren’t simply jokes.

They were building a story about me.

A story in which I was becoming confused, forgetful, and unreasonable.

A story I had never agreed to tell.

Downstairs, I heard the birthday guests beginning to leave.

Melissa called Ethan’s name.

He stood immediately.

“Don’t tell her I showed you.”

I looked at my grandson.

“Are you afraid of your mother?”

He hesitated.

“She gets really mad when I ruin things.”

I reached for his hand.

“You haven’t ruined anything.”

He squeezed my fingers.

Then he opened the bedroom door.

Melissa was standing outside.

Her phone was in her hand.

And from the expression on her face, I knew she had heard enough.