Page 46 of Famous for a Living

I sit at my desk and stare at the post on my laptop.

Uncle Terry has been steady in his office all day. He keeps a surprising amount of meetings going, and the second he’s off, his face droops and he spends the next fifteen minutes staring at spreadsheets deep in thought.

Across the room Peggy alternates between typing madly whenever Uncle Terry enters the room and playing Candy Crush on her phone.

The door has opened approximately three times today to visitors—which is approximately three times more than yesterday. Whenever someone does show up, the general protocol seems to be that everyone within earshot races to greet that person like we’re welcoming the president. Regardless of what you are doing. Whether on a phone call or hauling trash.

I have spent the past two weeks since I arrived here at my desk building up the social media pages for Kannery National Park that were hitherto essentially nonexistent. (Although I have learned not to mention this around Kevin. I did once and received a lecture about how he can’t control the world’s ridiculous reaction of valuing a video of someone pulling down someone else’s pants for a prank over the heroic efforts of the dung beetle.)

My work the past two weeks hasn’t done anything magnificent, however. I’ve grown the account from about two hundred to twenty-three hundred, the engagement rate hovering at a decent, but not noteworthy, range of 3 percent. I’ve definitely not been successful in doing anything remotely able to, as Uncle Terry says, “put Kannery Park on the map.” In fact, it’s been a bit discouraging.

People have complained to me about this over the years, saying, “It’s just so hard to get noticed.”

I didn’t get it before. I guess it’s been so long, I forgot what it was like in the very beginning.

But I remember now. The memories come back.

Me at fifteen getting that used beater of a phone off an old boyfriend three years older and three thousand miles away from the kind of guy I should’ve been hanging around. Eventually he left, but his gift did not. I worked nights at a shabby restaurant to escape my life in a shabby home and scraped enough from work to pay for my phone bill and little else.

Social media for me at fifteen was an outlet. So little of my real world was worth sticking around for. So much of my life was gray.

I longed to escape it.

So I escaped.

Started posting little things.

Lip-synching in the corner of my dimly lit bedroom.

Dancing.

Just a young teen living her own personal talentless show.

Then a curious thing happened.

People started to comment. People started to follow.

At the beginning they may as well have been robots, because none of them felt real. Just a bunch of numbers. Just a bunch of names. But there was something about that boost, something about seeing the numbers rise that spurred me on, gave me an almost indescribable energy hit.

Seeing the little numbers rise to twenty thousand followers. Then fifty thousand. Then a hundred.

It was electrifying.

So I shared more.

Became more.

I started experimenting with myself. Noticed how people were attracted to the energy of the bright-eyed, excitable influencers. So I followed in their footsteps.

Began talking the way I wished I talked in real life. Began walking, laughing, dancing with the confidence I wished I had in real life. Had the bubbly personality I longed for. Tried out what it was like to be playful and attractive on-screen like I wished I could be in real life. I pretended I was an it girl.

And then one day, I wasn’t just pretending anymore. I was an it girl.

You look like u r feeling down. Pls take care of yourself. We love you!!!

I look at the comment on my post, just one of hundreds filling the screen. It doesn’t sting like that of the keyboard warriors striving to bring destruction to every happy person online. Those trolls I’m used to. They’re mere sweat bees.

But this one, the one about me looking under the weather. One by @ginnylee1334, a devoted user who comments so frequently I recognize the tiny King Charles spaniel in the profile bubble. One who is faithfully kind to a fault.