My muscles give out and I let my head fall back against the forest floor. There’s a gap in the canopy where this fir used to be, and I can see the cheery blue sky and the sun right through it, like a window to a world I can’t reach.
“Fuck,” I mutter, laughing again, wondering if I’m going to die alone out here.
And then I realize that, by moving out to the cabin and cutting off everyone — even my sister — that must have been what I wasalways planning for. To die alone. To never connect with anyone again.
Closing my eyes, I allow the regret I’ve held at bay to come flooding through.
Maybe I should have asked Lola about those videos.
And maybe, if I live through this, I’ll have to do something about the intense ache in my heart, the missing her that’s driven me to this moment, trapped and alone, wondering if I’ll get the chance to make things right.
CHAPTER 21
LOLA
“Oh myGod!” Maisie screams from the other room, her voice muffled through her cracked door.
I’m sitting on the couch, my laptop open in my lap, an email pulled up that’s going fuzzy in front of my eyes.
Over the past few days, I’ve gotten so many sponsorship offers and collaboration requests that I nearly missed this one.
My heart leaps when Maisie comes running into the living room, her eyes wild, a toothbrush hanging from her mouth. Around the toothbrush, she says, “You’re almost at a million views, Lols!”
Last night, when I was falling asleep, the view count was hovering around seven hundred thousand.
For a video that’s nearly forty minutes long, that many views is breathtaking.
“Well?” Maisie prods, then, thinking better of it, she holds up a finger and spins around, running back into her bathroom before returning,sanstoothbrush. “What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Should we get some champagne?”
I summon a meager smile for her, clearing my throat and sitting up from my place on the couch, which is, coincidentally, where I slept last night. Something about sleeping in the living room, on the couch, felt cozier than being alone in my room.
Maybe the obvious fact of someone missing in your bed, my mind supplies. I shush it and focus on Maisie, who’s started to look at me like I’m missing brain cells.
“Yay!” I try, but it doesn’t come out right, my eyes flitting to the laptop screen, which is still open, but has dimmed now.
“Come on, Lols,” she says, dropping onto the couch next to me, hiking one leg up next to her. “I’ll skip class today. We should do something to celebrate. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”
I haven’t showered since yesterday. The video has been up for six days and has already garnered serious attention.
Since I started doing influencer stuff, I’ve mostly focused on short-form videos, little mini-blog posts in my Insta captions. For a while, I tried making long-form weekly vlogs, but they never really caught on like my other stuff.
But this video isn’t a vlog. It’s… well, it’s something else. Not a glamping tutorial. Not even anI survived in the woods alone for daysvideo, though that probably would have done pretty well.
No, this is more like an essay. A verbal recounting — through the voice-over — of what it was like that first night. The torrential rain. The drone footage flickering out.
I even included that first awkward shot and all the mistakes; each time I tried to stick to the bubblegum, sweet script and fell off, my voice going back to its normal tone. A focus on the difference between who I am on the camera and who I am off it.
They’re both me, but the performance of being an influencer makes me feel like an actress who never leaves the role.
And then, the video shifts to a recollection of what it was like to disconnect. To not think about which parts of my life I could monetize. To no longer agonize over getting an invite to a new restaurant.
Rather than ending with some profound, meaningful statement about life, I instead left the viewer with a question: is it possible to completely disconnect? Is it possible to balance some of the ‘real’ world with what we’re biologically wired for? Can we have both the life out in the mountains and an acai bowl recommendation from our online besties?
It combined all my footage — none of which showed anything that could identify Rowan, or where he is.
The video pulled straight from my heart, and from all my deepest insecurities. And, after the first time she watched it, Maisie had turned to me with tears in her eyes.
“You’re good at this, Lols,” she’d said, voice quiet. “And this means something. It’s like… seeingyou.”
