Page 2 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

Slow. Unhurried. A ridge of muscle down each arm catches the work light. Drywall dust clings to skin the deep green of a forest at dusk. Two curved tusks, a jaw like a cinderblock, and an expression of profound, total indifference to being perceived by anyone, ever.

The comments scroll faster than my eyes can track.

ma'am your PIPES are not the emergency

I would let him rip my kitchen apart with his bare hands and I have a very nice kitchen

the way he does NOT care about the camera is doing something to me

hire this man forever

I close the app. My heart is doing something aerobic.

Okay. Okay okay okay. I cup both hands over my cheeks and breathe through the panic the way the meditation app taught me before I stopped paying for the meditation app. Six weeks ago I emptied my savings into this building. Four sponsors put me on warning this month alone. The pastel-cupcake era is dead, my numbers have slid since spring, and I gambled everything on becoming the girl who transforms a barn into a dream home in front of a hundred thousand people.

And now the plan has arrived, uninvited, wearing the shape of a contractor whose name I lack.

I scroll back through my own inbox, hunting for the booking. There. A single line item from a referral service. Warhip Contracting. Plumbing, framing, general. A phone number. No email. No website. No cheerful headshot with crossed arms and a hard hat, which every other contractor on earth apparently owns.

I hit call before I can talk myself out of it.

It rings four times. Five. I compose my pitch. Hi, so, funny story, you're extremely famous now and also I want to build a personal brand on top of your body, would you be interested in a percentage.

Six rings.

A click. Then a low rumble that arrives in my ribs before my ears, a rasp like gravel poured down a well. "Warhip."

Every word I rehearsed evaporates. "Hi! Hi. This is Jilly. Jilly Dulane. The house? The barn house, with the pipe, from today, you were here today."

Silence.

"You fixed my water heater," I add, uselessly.

"I fixed your water heater." Flat. Patient in the manner of a man who suspects he is about to be asked for something and has already landed on no.

"So there's been a development." I pace across the subfloor, dodging the hole. "A really unexpected, kind of enormous development, and this is going to sound completely unhinged, but you sort of went viral. On the internet. Today. You. Your, um, your shoulders, specifically."

The silence on the other end acquires a texture. A dense, offended texture.

"There's a video," I plow on, because stopping now would be worse, "and it has five million views, and my manager is convinced, and honestly so am I, that if you would consider coming back and letting me feature you in the renovation series, we could turn this into something huge for both of us, and I would obviously compensate you, generously, more than generously, I would compensate you almost aggressively..."

"No."

Just that. One syllable, dropped like a cinderblock into a pond.

"Right, no, of course, that's a completely reasonable first reaction..."

"I fix pipes," he says. "I fix framing. I do not do..." A pause, as though the word itself tastes of drywall. "Internet."

"You wouldn't have to do internet! You'd just have to exist near me while I do internet!"

The line goes dead.

I stare at the phone. Behind me, through the giant sliding door I have not yet learned to close properly, gravel crunches. Headlights sweep the exposed studs. A car door slams with the particular violence of a woman who has never once signaled.

Patsy is here.

And somewhere out there in the dark rolls a green mountain of a man who just hung up on the best idea of my life.