“I want to be onAmateur Hourwhen I’m bigger,” her sister adds, mispronouncing “amateur” something awful, but it only makes her cuter.
I crouch down to their level and offer a wobbly smile. “Y’all are too sweet.”
They lean in while their parents take our picture, and while my smile is a bit more genuine with the cuties beside me than it has been with others today, it’s still hiding my true feelings. Because what I really want to say is that I hope all their dreams come true, but maybe not any that put them in this exact position I’m in. I want to cover these sweet, tiny humans in some magical Bubble Wrap that protects them from strangers who would make them question their worth. I want to make sure their parents teach them the line between being polite and letting others disrespect their boundaries so that when the time comes that someone tries to cross a line, they’re braver than I am and speak up.
Instead, I thank them and smile and wave as they move down the line.
I peek over at Benny occasionally, and his fan encounters seem to have some consistency. People of all genders and from ages sixteen to sixty have been throwing themselves at my boyfriend. I feel for him at first, knowing how not-fun it is when that happens. But Benny handles it like a champ. His smile doesn’t look any less genuine, picture after picture. I wonder what he thinksabout all the attention—if he ever has the kind of thoughts that I have about personal safety and boundaries, or if it just seems like harmless fun. The ease and confidence in his expression and movements make me think it’s the latter.
All in all, meeting so many fans is overwhelming, an emotional and sensory overload. As the massive line of people is coming to an end, a lady in akatherine for presidentT-shirt approaches.
“Ah, Reese!” she says with a giddy smile. “Could I hug you?”
Not many folks have asked that today. So when they do, it feels like an amazingly kind gesture instead of, say, basic human decency.
“Absolutely,” I say warmly. Her embrace feels eerily like my mama’s—soft and supportive. I’m shocked to feel tears pricking at my eyes as I pull back. I blink rapidly and focus on signing the picture frame she brought. Nice as this woman seems, I don’t want to look like an affection-starved maniac. I’ve had enough human contact today to last me a few decades, probably. But it’s different feeling a hug so familiar, one that’s so much like home.
“You are just so bright and strong,” she tells me as I hand the frame back to her. My brows raise at such a nice compliment, one I don’t especially feel like I’ve earned. But she continues, “It’s great to see such a confident woman who doesn’t let all the haters get her down.”
She’s not the first one who’s said something along those lines today. Others have commented on the Reddit situationthose guys talked about, or how they think it’s stupid how mad some commenters get when I tease Benny. I guess it’s easy to seem confident when I don’t have much clue what goes on in the comments on my own videos. It sounds like there’s a lot that I’m missing—for good reason, of course—but catching whiffs of it makes me all the more tempted to have a look for myself.
After what feels like both three days and three minutes, we make it through the end of the line. The quiet in the room, which is now occupied only by my coworkers and a few UltiCon personnel, is almost disorienting.
We’re thanked for our time and we thank the UltiCon staff in return for the invitation, then we’re set free for the night. Some of us talked on the walk over about sticking around after our session and exploring the convention a bit. But we didn’t plan for how exhausting this was going to be.
When Rajesh suggests we ditch and get dinner instead, most everyone agrees, but I make excuses to head back to the hotel. Iam so drained. There’s an uneasiness in my stomach after everything, and I don’t think I can pretend to be fine in front ofeveryone for one more minute, let alone an hour or two.
Benny tries to join me to make sure I’m okay—I claimed it was stomach cramps, thinking that would deter him—but I insist he go eat and catch up with me later.
Back in my hotel room, I change into the ratty old T-shirt and shorts I sleep in. I spend a few minutes at the sinkscrubbing at the phone number on my wrist with soap and water, but when my skin is red and raw and the ink still faintly visible, I give up and settle into bed. I try to work on an illustration of the Christmas-in-July cookies Nia made—Margie wants to use my drawing as a promo for thePiece of Cakeepisode going up next week—but my hands are unsteady. Every line I draw comes out like an angry slash. Not wanting my cutesy cookie picture to turn into a horror movie poster, I decide to pack it in for now. Then, knowing it’s probably the worst thing I could do but feeling helpless to stop myself, I open up my phone and pull up a random episode ofAmateur Hour.It’s the one where we made gnocchi, before we’d formally shifted into competition mode.
I scroll down to the comments.
why are they letting this bitch ruin so many videos these days
Benny: 1. Funny 2. Talented 3. Good-looking. Girl intern: 1. Boring. 2. Ugly. 3. Can’t even cook. Wtf fof???
she srsly can’t go 5 mins w/o making some stupid comment about the patriarchy
I watch this channel for the food not for an idiot pushing her views on everyone
Why doesn’t she go back to her hick town and leave fof to real chefs
My heart is already racing. Where the devil is all this coming from? Nasty, senseless comments about how I’m single-handedly ruining the whole channel, when I’d been in all of two videos at that point. Nearly of their own accord, my fingers scroll back up the screen and hit Play so I can rewatch the video and try to see what I could have done or said that was so awful.
But it’s just as I remember, a pretty light, funny compilation of the two of us bantering and cooking. The closest I notice to anything controversial is when I make a casual joke about my insistence on moving the heavy cans of tomatoes myself, saying that we don’t want our food to taste like wasted chivalry. Benny laughs.
But that’s all there is.
I click through to our other episodes, and they all have similar comments. There’s some positive stuff, too, and some creepy stuff. But to my admittedly biased eyes, it feels like a Reese hate-fest, with commenters going on and on about how stupid and useless I am, how I clearly make Benny miserable and he doesn’t deserve this treatment, how I’m sending Friends of Flavor down the drain.
I rewatch each video with the volume high enough to overcome the sound of my blood rushing in my ears. There’s more of the same tame content and disproportionate rage in the comment sections. There are also plenty of comments about how slutty I seem, how Benny is a great guy, and how I’m not good enough for him. A few times, people claim to know me or know someone who knows me, referencing what a terrible person Iwas in high school, saying I don’t deserve to have the platform I do now. It seems believable enough that they could be from my school.
Clicking on a link in one of the comments takes me to the Friends of Flavor subreddit, where I’m shocked to find whole threads dedicated to hating on me. There’s the bathing suit picture, too. Good gravy, I’m, like, twelve in that picture! Is this even legal? There are other pictures that people have dug up from my past, probably from acquaintances who’ve long since stopped speaking to me.
This is worse than I imagined. Unable to stop myself now that I’m so deep in this rabbit hole, I open Benny’s Instagram page on my phone and look over the comments on a recent picture he put up of me, in which he is pushing falafel toward my face and my mouth is hanging open midlaugh. Wordplay fan that Benny is, he captioned it “Feed the Reese-t.” Somehow my stomach sinks even further as I see more of what I’ve seen everywhere else.
I know that Benny only uses social media out of obligation, to appease the bosses and keep up the “public persona,” so it isn’t necessarily a surprise that he hasn’t responded to any of this stuff. But it also wouldn’t hurt to see my boyfriend give some kind of eff-you to rufus1234 for calling me a “bucktooth bitch.” I think even my old orthodontist would jump to my defense on thatone.
