Page 1 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

CHAPTER 1

JILLY

My phone convulses on the plywood like a dying fish.

Three hundred notifications. Then four hundred. The number spins so fast the little red bubble gives up and just reads "99+" with a plus sign that somehow manages to be smug. I hold the thing at arm's length. The vibration travels up my wrist into my elbow and lodges there like a splinter.

The livestream ended nine minutes ago. I ended it. I slapped that red button hard enough to nearly crack the screen, right after a green mountain of a man strolled through my tearful sponsorship apology carrying a water heater on one shoulder like it owed him money.

He never once glanced at the camera. That part keeps replaying behind my eyes. Two hundred pounds of stainless steel and copper balanced on a shoulder the size of a Thanksgiving ham, and he moved through frame with the bored ease of a man walking to the mailbox.

The chat had done things I have no words for.

I lower myself onto an overturned bucket. The barndominium stretches around me in all its unfinished glory. Exposed studs jut up like the ribcage of some enormous beast. Wiring dangles from the ceiling in loops. A ragged hole gapes in the subfloor where a toilet should live and does not. Drywall dust coats every surface, including, I am fairly sure, my molars.

This house is supposed to be my rebrand. My pivot. My "authentic renovation journey" that convinces sponsors I am more than pastel cupcake tutorials and ring-light smiles.

Instead it is a money pit with excellent acoustics for crying.

Six weeks ago the loan officer slid a pen across her desk and asked, in that gentle way people use right before they ruin you, whether I had a contingency plan. I laughed. I told her the channel was my contingency plan. Four hundred thousand followers, a spring campaign lined up, a brand built on the promise that any disaster can be transformed if you just believe hard enough and film it in good light.

Then the pipes burst, the subfloor rotted, the plumber ghosted me, and my four biggest sponsors sent identical emails with the phrase "reevaluating our partnership" buried in paragraph three.

The phone rings. An actual call, not a notification, and the name on the screen drops my stomach through the hole in the subfloor.

Patsy.

I answer before the second ring, because you do not let Patsy Johnson go to voicemail unless you enjoy being screamed at through a closed door later. "Patsy, hi, so about the stream, listen, I can explain the whole..."

"Do you understand what you did?"

Her tone gives me nothing to grab. I brace. "I panicked and word-vomited about plumbing for eleven minutes?"

"Five million views." Each word lands like a dropped brick. "Five. Million. Views. In three hours, Jilly. Three hours. The clip is still climbing. It crashed the app twice. Twice!"

I pull the phone away and stare at it.

"Are you sitting down?" Patsy demands. "Because I am walking to my car right now, I am getting in it, and I am driving to that disaster you call a property, and when I arrive I want you standing up and ready to work, because we have a window and windows close."

"Wait, what clip? The apology?"

"Nobody cares about your apology." A car door slams on her end. "Nobody heard a syllable of your apology. Do you want the truth? They heard nothing. The audio does not matter. There is a six-second cut going around where you are sniffling into a tissue and behind you, out of focus, a shirtless orc the size of a refrigerator lifts a water heater like a gym towel and walks off. That is the content. That is the whole content."

My mouth goes dry. "The contractor."

"The contractor," Patsy confirms, and I can picture her merging onto the highway without signaling, because Patsy has never signaled a day in her life. "The shoulders, Jilly. The internet has declared the shoulders a public utility. Somebody cut a slow-motion edit set to a cello. There is fan art. There is fan art, Jilly, and it has been ninety minutes."

I stand up. The bucket tips over behind me. "I don't even have his name."

"Then get it."

She hangs up.

I stand there in the dust and the ruin and the dangling wires, and I break the promise I made to my therapist. I open the app to look.

Big mistake.

The clip sits right at the top of my feed. My own face, blotchy and puffy in the foreground, gestures at a burst pipe nobody cares about. And behind me, in that soft focus that makes everything resemble a perfume commercial, he crosses the frame.