“Did you hear about his magical dick too?” Holden called after. “How am I the last to know?”
I gave him the finger behind my back as Evelyn led me to a bench under a huge oak tree. For all her confident calm, she was practically bouncing in her skin as she took a Mac Air out of her stylish leather backpack.
“Getting some attention this morning, are you?” she said, powering it up.
“Do you know why?”
“I do.” She turned her Mac screen to face me. “This is my fashion vlog. You’ll note the subscriber count is well over fifty thousand.”
“Congrats?”
“Don’t be an ass. As of last week, I had half that. But thanks to you…”
She hit play on one of her highly produced videos. After she gave a brief intro about me, the screen flashed to a compilation of my performances: Chance’s party, Violet’s YouTube video, and the Winter Talent Show.
“That’s why everyone’s staring at you.”
I frowned. “That was Violet’s YouTube video. Which she deleted.”
Out of morbid curiosity, I had gone on YouTube to see if the video of me performing “All I’ll Ever Want” had gained traction or was only a breeding ground for snarky comments, but it was gone.
“I deleted it,” Evelyn said.
“Uh…why? How?”
“When River stood her up on Homecoming night, Violet dropped her phone and ran out.”
I clenched my jaw. It wasn’t news to me what that bastard had done, but it still pissed me off that he’d humiliated her like that in front of the entire school.
“Anyway, her phone was in my possession for more than twenty-four hours, and I’m a very curious person by nature. I found the video—”
“You snooped in her phone?”
“Relax. Girls share everything. Anyway, I found the video of you playing, and it was…wow. Just fucking wow.”
For a second, Evelyn’s carefully crafted and stylized artifice came down, and she looked truly moved. Then she shook her head.
“On a hunch,” she continued, “I googled your name to see if that video, or any others from Chance’s party, were up. That’s when I found Violet’s sad little YouTube channel. She was already logged in from her phone, so it was easy enough to go in and delete it.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t just throw your commodities onto the internet for free.”
“But you can put it on your vlog? You fucking stole it—”
“I repurposed it. It’s worth too much. I put it where it would bring me some ad revenue and help you get exposure.”
“Jesus, how long have you been planning this?”
“Since Homecoming. Chance’s party performance was great, but I needed one more ace. Proof that you could rock a crowd. The Winter Talent Show fit that bill quite nicely. But then we went to Barbados for Christmas and the whole thing to
ok some time to produce…” She rolled her hand in lazy circles. “Long story short, this weekend, you were the subject of my vlog’s first ever musical spotlight. My subscribers got a taste of your talent, and as of this morning, the video of you singing ‘All I’ll Ever Want’ has been reblogged and shared on Twitter and TikTok thousands of times and counting.” She smiled triumphantly. “Oh, I forgot to mention, I have huge TikTok and Twitter followings too.”
I tried to absorb the fact my performances had reached a shit-ton of people. “Do they…like it?”
Again, Evelyn’s face softened. “Oh honey, of course they do. They love it. They love you. You should read the comments. Here, let me give you a sample.”
I waved my hands. “No, no. I…” I couldn’t feel this way. This hopeful. It wouldn’t stick.