The Worst Thing I've Ever Done Extract

Allen & Unwin
Sep 9
5 min read

Updated: Oct 1

Read an extract from The Worst Thing I've Ever Done by Clare Stephens.

It's an ordinary Tuesday morning when Ruby Williams' name starts trending online.

She's uploaded an interview that has outraged journalist Felicity Cartwright, a social media personality who has built her profile by policing exactly what women are allowed to say and how they're allowed to say it. Ruby is at the centre of a brutal public shaming, watching on in horror as her reputation is torn apart.

At first Ruby thinks she can get on top of it if she can just explain herself better. But she soon realises she'll never be able to placate the tsunami of strangers baying for her blood.

The vitriol pouring in through her phone cracks open a visceral, personal shame from her past that she's refused to face. Because the worst thing Ruby's ever done is not defined by this interview, but by a single, chilling scream.

Read on below to dive straight in!

Prologue

For two weeks during a humid, suffocating summer, one where a teenage boy went viral for frying an egg on the pavement and tenants in century-old Art Deco apartments slept with damp towels draped across their foreheads, I was the most hated woman in the country.

My name, once so Caucasian and boring that it afforded me an anonymity I had previously taken for granted, became a trending search term. It appeared in print and online and in comments and captions, and in the mouths of people I’d never met.

My face, with my slightly overlapping front teeth and the faded, silver scar on my chin from when a girl in primary school had stabbed me with a pencil, was plastered across news sites. Photos from overseas holidays and drunken lunches were taken from my social media to accompany stories about me, sitting on homepages between articles about foreign wars and interest rates and celebrity divorces. The journalists always chose the happy photos. The ones where my eyes creased at the corners and my lips thinned around my gums, because then it looked like I was laughing at the people who were angry, and that made them angrier.

When the internet is feasting on you, tearing the flesh from your bones like vultures descending on a corpse, you’re not meant to scream. You can, people assure you, simply turn off your phone. You can block it and ignore it and touch some grass or sniff a baby or leave the country. You can throw yourself into the warm, turquoise ocean that hugs the edges of your city, humbled by waves that toss you like a rag doll. Further out, you can dive beneath the surface into the light-pierced, glassy emptiness, cradled by the endless weight of something far bigger and far older than you can possibly comprehend. You can tell yourself, with wet sand between your toes and the taste of salt on your tongue, that the stories filling the phone screens of strangers aren’t real, that their outrage is thin and artificial and fleeting. That it’s all an illusion, magnified by your own inflated ego.

But then you walk down the bustling main street on your way home, past the people sprawled outside overpriced cafes, and you’re certain a woman looks at you for longer than she should. There is a moment of recognition, a flicker of contempt that quickly turns to pity, and it is as real as the sting of the sun on your freckled arms. Because she knows just as well as you do that the internet and the pulsating reality inside it is not an illusion. It is the heartbeat of modern life.

And yet still you are not meant to scream.

Even a whimper will send the feasting vultures into a frenzy. Their violence, you must understand, is so warranted, so justified, that for you to consider yourself a victim of it is a crime in itself. How dare you cry out in pain when you are simply

being confronted with the consequences of your own actions? After all, how else can we hold people accountable for their behaviour if we do not destroy them on the internet?

To me, those two weeks felt like a lifetime. In some ways, perhaps it was. A person with my name and my face but who, I assured myself, was not me had been born; the product of a zeitgeist that needed a woman to loathe.

Looking back now, I can pinpoint exactly how things went so wrong. How decisions that seemed inconsequential were in fact propelling me towards my own destruction— towards the very specific set of circumstances that made the nightmare inevitable. And so, against the advice of everyone around me, I want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you my story, so that when you search my name and read about me, you know I’m not the monster they say I am.

For a long time, I was obsessed with the idea that, with the help of some perfectly crafted sentences, I could change everyone’s minds. My words would be read by people scrolling on their morning commute or procrastinating in soulless offices or distracting themselves on the toilet, and in unison they’d gasp, my humanity thumping them hard in the chest. They would see that Ruby Williams was never a demon, she was not a one-dimensional ideologue deserving of a kind of social death, but a person, with all the complexity and vulnerability that entails. They’d realise that the individuals advocating for justice had used it as an excuse for casual cruelty, and the rest of them, the ones who liked and commented and shared and messaged and laughed and mocked and spread the hate further and further so it burned through cyberspace like wildfire, had been casualties of mass hysteria. They’d feel ashamed of how they’d let a handful of dubious transgressions turn an ordinary woman into the bad guy, when the real bad guy was up there, lording over us all, pulling our strings as if we were puppets. I was certain, so certain, that eventually the rubble I’d been buried under would be lifted and that finally I would be understood.

But, of course, that never happened. There’s no use continuing to defend yourself in front of a jury that has already found you guilty.

No. After everything, I know I can’t be redeemed in their eyes. But I want to tell you this story in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I can be redeemed in yours.

Extracted from The Worst Thing I've Ever Done by Clare Stephens available September 30 from wherever books are sold.