On the frigid Tuesday morning of January 21st, 2025, junior McKaighleigh Smith swiped through her phone in a last desperate attempt to access her TikTok “for you” page. Shaking from withdrawal in her adviser room, she was led by one final hope, that the horrible New Trier WiFi would somehow reverse the government ban. Twitching, her fingers swiftly opened the app. In an instant, the sound of “Like a Prayer: Choir Version” filled the room. McKaighleigh had done it.
The news spread like wildfire through both the school hallways and the nation. By some miracle, New Trier High School had managed to avoid the country-wide ban. Immediately students began spam-posting, catching up with the trends they had missed in the last three days, and reporting the Europeans’ odd sense of humor to the rest of the country after America’s untimely expulsion from the app. It only took another twenty-four hours for the CIA and FBI to be alerted.
“I simply don’t understand how this could be possible” FBI director John Jacob J. Schmidt responded when questioned about the shocking turn of events by CNN reporters. “We had been told the New Trier WiFi worked in mysterious ways, but it shouldn’t be able to circumvent the government-mandated server shutdown.”
“I honestly don’t really care if it’s a national security issue” student-savior McKaighleigh Smith commented a week after her breakthrough discovery. “And I’ll happily sit next to the FBI agents in class if it means I can keep posting my labrador puppy edits.”
It took the local police force, federal employees, and the President’s cabinet two weeks, sixty-four gallons of Red Bull, and multiple evidence boards crossed with red string, but eventually the case was cracked wide open. During the first passing period on the morning of February 4th, school principal Donne MacMuffin was removed from the premises and flown to Guantanamo Bay Prison from the helicopter pad on the roof of New Trier’s new gym building.
“I didn’t even know we had one of those,” McKaighleigh Smith commented on her TikTok account, which by then had amassed 13.5 million followers.
As every news channel in the country reported that night, Principal MacMuffin had felt so lost without TikTok that she felt she had no other option but to reach out to the Chinese government. In an historic trade deal, the principal promised fifty-two free Turnabout tickets for access to TikTok through the New Trier WiFi.
“The only remaining issue,” John Jacob J. Schmidt reported on CNN, “is that we have no clue how to get TikTok off the wifi. We just can’t figure it out.”
“No takesies backsies!” President Xi Jinping replied.
