Chapter 9
9
I don’t mean to snoop on her phone. Really.
It just happens. A natural reflex. I’m not proud to admit how much I use social media to cope. I struggle to exist without something flashing on the screen. Can’t sit still without a video blasting to deaden my dark thoughts. Social media is the biggest thief of time but it’s also an impossibly addictive form of escape.
As soon as that device leaves my ear, the phone app white and bright in my eyes, I swipe onto Chloe’s home screen. The notifications haven’t stopped. Every second, a banner pops up. Blah blah blah liked your Instagram post. Or New comments on your TikTok. Or Someone tagged you in a photo . How does Chloe handle this information overload? I’m already getting a headache from overstimulation. Then again, maybe it’s because I’m too used to silence. Whenever I wake up, the only notification that greets me is my alarm.
Instinctively, I open TikTok first. Just to cope, to distract from the images of Chloe. After everything I’ve been through, I think I deserve it.
TikTok is my go-to, since the videos are curated through (likely invasive) algorithms. My personal feed is self-effacing story times or people injuring themselves in slapstick ways, quick bites of content that are guaranteed to make me laugh. But if Chloe’s TikTok says anything about her, it’s that she’s boring. Her FYP consists of videos that replicate her lifestyle content. Occasionally, a TikTok pseudo-therapist pops up, lecturing me on ways to deal with guilt, depression, or some parent-child attachment complex. I groan. I’m looking for a cheap, distracting laugh, not to heal my inner child.
I swipe onto Instagram. The first thing I see is the little graphic that shows how many new followers, comments, and likes she’s gained. Even though her last post was two weeks ago, her numbers still cap at one hundred for each value. It’s chilling. All these people, all this attention, yet nobody knows she’s dead.
Perhaps this is callous of me, but I can’t help thinking: What happens to the sponsorship money now that she’s out of commission? Does Chloe just not get paid? That’s outrageous. Her last post got—I click on the analytics—more than three million impressions. Even if she’s dead, the brand should still fork out that money. It’s not like megacorporations don’t have enough.
Out of pure curiosity, I visit her DMs. My eyes widen at the sheer number of blue checkmarks. From fellow influencers to singers to models to magazines to literal A-list celebs.
I click into her requested messages, which take a second to load due to volume.
Thousands—and I mean thousands of DMs—are from her followers clamoring for attention, parroting how much they love her, how much Chloe inspires them. A few hundred messages are from men asking if she’d like to see a picture of their penis and sending it anyway (preblurred by the app, thankfully). Some surprisingly detailed (and oddly creative) death threats. A number of smaller influencers trying to slide into her DMs. Hundreds of brands asking her to connect.
I can’t resist going into her email. Her inbox has over two thousand unread, mostly spam. I navigate to the sidebar and find her second account for filtered correspondence. Only five unread. Everything else has been slotted into folders. She’s neat.
The newest email is from Kare Kosmetics, dated three days ago. Title: Re: INVOICE for January.
It calls to me.
I click through.
Hi Chloe!
We loved your latest post and reel. Thank you for confirming the analytics with us. As always, you impress us with your reach and versatility. As per the contract, we have paid out your invoice at the end of the month. Please see the attached file for reference.
We look forward to working with you next month. Can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Before I know it, I’m loading the pdf.
My eyes fly to the TOTAL. I clap my hand to my mouth.
I pinch the screen and zoom in. My eyes aren’t tricking me. The number is real.
For one Instagram Reel / TikTok cross-post and two static feed posts over four weeks, Chloe received $45,000.
Forty. Five. Thousand. Dollars.
What. The. Actual. Flying. Fuck?
I barely make that much in a year , but she makes that with a few posts of her in a shitty little face mask?
How can this be real?
My face scrunches with envy. I’m so disgusted by the unfairness of the world that I want to hurt something.
Fuck her privacy. She’s dead anyway. I scroll through her other emails and open every file attached.
In the span of a few minutes, I’ve viewed about twenty invoices and not a single payment is less than $10,000. Within a single month, Chloe had raked in over $100,000 worth of sponsorship money. This doesn’t even include her YouTube channel, which must earn thousands per video.
No wonder she had bought me that house at the edge of town like it was nothing. It was nothing. I looked up the property a while back. It was listed on the market for $272,000. She could have bought the house with a few months’ worth of income. And who knows how much she earned from the dozens of gratuitous ad rolls she implemented in that one hour-long #EMOTIONAL video?
Actually… now I can find out. I log into her YouTube analytics, scroll three years back, and click on Earnings to Date . Fifty-seven thousand. Okay, not as much as I thought she’d get for twenty million views—wait. What the hell am I saying? She earned more than my salary with one measly video that exploited my vulnerabilities. And she didn’t even give me a cut! How is that fair?
I remember there was a mid-video sponsorship for some app called Mansion-Scapes. ( Through Mansion-Scapes, you can build your own home like Julie, design your own furniture, and have guests over by solving addictive puzzles! Jump-start your immersive gameplay with thirty free Mansion Coins by using code Chloe30. Thank you Mansion-Scapes for sponsoring this portion of the video. ) I search her email for “Mansion-Scapes.” There’s an invoice dated three years back. The influencer coordinator gushed about the performance of the video. Of how over twenty thousand people downloaded Mansion-Scapes and redeemed her code.
The invoice totaled a staggering $125,000, with $75,000 in base pay and a casual $50,000 bonus for meeting an incentive number of downloads.
I’m so gobsmacked, I have to look away from the screen to process.
How can anyone make that much money with one video? It only gets worse as I read through the email thread from when Chloe had pitched the idea.
Evidenced in the attached analysis of YouTube’s trending tab, philanthropic videos are attracting a favorable general audience, including those aged 8 to 20, who are most likely to download a game app. As this is a deviation from my typical content, I am confident that Julie’s lower-middle-class life will be relatable to a wider viewership and would result in positive, empathetic engagement. I would love to see if it’s within your budget to increase my compensation, especially reflecting the personal investments that would go into producing a video of this magnitude. Cheers, Chloe V.
And there it is. The truth.
I was nothing more than fodder for a video. An accessory for an ad. I meant absolutely nothing. I was a pawn.
It breaks me.
I cry, not for Chloe’s death. I cry for my loss. Grief for that person I could have been.
I think back on my overwhelming gratitude when Chloe first found me, how misguided I was, when she only wanted to exploit me. How she used my childhood nickname, Ju-Ju, knowing how it must affect me. I wonder if she laughed internally as she said it, calling me a little pig and having me burst with appreciation. I grieve for how worried I was when she called. I wasted all that time and energy on her—time and energy I’ll never get back. And for what? To find out she never cared? Not even for one second? That I was just some sad, lower-class example to be fed to her viewers? What type of fucked-up turn of events is this?
Pure hatred, hot and venomous, coils in my flesh, my muscles. I want to go into her apartment and tear into every piece of furniture. Cut into every designer bag, flush all her skincare down her ludicrous Toto toilet with its warm seat and bidet. She doesn’t deserve any of it, not her material objects and wealth or my empathy and compassion. She is a vile, vile human being, selfish and narcissistic to the bone. I feel disgusted to be related to her—to have positive memories of her.
I sob and I shriek, loud and uncontrolled. Doors down the hall open. Neighbors’ eyes fill with shock and concern. I don’t care. I cry out from the depths of my chest, deep and guttural.
A hand grabs my shoulder. I jump.
It’s Ramos. Behind him are a police officer and two paramedics with a stretcher.
A stretcher that will soon hold Chloe.