The Crowdfunding Page

Carina had shared the page within a minute of seeing it. She had seen a friend's post: a photo of a crumpled bumper and a plea for help with the repair bill. Sharing it had seemed like the easiest favor in the world. By lunchtime the link had been passed on forty times, and the total at the top had crept past two thousand dollars.

It was only that evening, rereading the page for a neighbor who wanted to donate, that she slowed down. The text said her friend Janina had been trapped inside the car for two hours. It said the other driver had sped away without stopping. It said Janina would lose her job without a vehicle. Carina thought she should have read all of it before sharing, instead of just looking at the photo.

She frowned. She had spoken to Janina twenty minutes after the crash, and the story she had heard was different. Janina had climbed out of her own door, shaken but unhurt. The other driver had waited at the roadside to hand over his insurance details. Her job was at a bakery, reachable by bus.

Carina could have posted a correction in the comments. It would have been quick. However, it would also have exposed Janina in front of hundreds of strangers, and Carina suspected the exaggeration hadn't been planned. Janina must have written it at three in the morning, frightened and tired.

So she called instead, and asked whether Janina would like a walk the next morning. They met beside the canal. Janina arrived holding a paper bag of warm rolls and the careful smile of someone who already knew what was coming.

"I've been reading the page," Carina said. "Some of it doesn't match what happened."

Janina stopped walking. "Which part?"

"The two hours. The driver who left. The job." Carina kept her voice level. "I'm not angry. I just don't want it to come back on you later."

For a while Janina studied the water. Then she admitted that the repair estimate had been nearly four thousand dollars, and that she had been lying awake for three nights. When she sat down to write, the true version had looked too small. "If I had told it exactly as it happened, nobody would have cared," she said. "That's what I told myself, anyway."

"Perhaps fewer people would have given," Carina said. "Although the ones who did would have given for the real reason."

Janina laughed, but it came out thin. She confessed that a stranger had commented that he hoped the other driver would be found, and that she had felt ill ever since. Nobody had told her that a story, once shared, would be repeated with other people's anger attached.

They sat on a bench and rewrote the page together on Carina's phone. The trapped car became a car hit at a junction. The runaway driver disappeared from the text. The job stayed, but only as a worry: without the car, the bus would swallow ninety minutes of every morning.

Janina pressed publish, then added a line at the very top saying that the first draft had been wrong. Her thumb hovered over the screen for a moment before she confirmed it.

Meanwhile, Carina deleted her original share and copied the new link. One message at a time, she sent it to everyone who had passed on the first.