Page 50 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

I do it myself. Unscrew it from the tripod with hands still shaking, carry the fat white ring across the lot at arm's length like it might bite, and drop it into the bin with the drywall scraps and the torn-out camera and the busted joint compound buckets. It lands with a hollow plastic crack.

It does not land like loss. It lands like kicking off a pair of shoes I have jammed my feet into two sizes too small for a decade, and the relief of it nearly buckles my knees.

I go back inside and I take the set apart. The pastel backdrop, rolled and shoved behind the studs. The little props, the staged coffee mug, the fake succulents that photograph better than real ones, all of it swept off the plywood into a contractor bag. The eight AM concealer I use to bury the dark circles, I leave in the truck. Whatever version of me is about to show up, she comes as she is.

Then I set my phone on a stack of two-by-fours, prop it against a level, and sit down on an upturned five-gallon bucket in the middle of my gutted barndominium. No filter. No lamp. No angle. Just my bare, blotchy, exhausted face floating in the little preview square, older and rawer than the brand has ever once permitted me to look in front of a hundred and forty thousand people.

I go live.

The counter starts to climb the instant it connects. Six hundred. Two thousand. Hearts float up the side of the screen in their pretty pink stream, and I let them come, and I hold my sponsor smile in retirement where it belongs, because that girl went in the dumpster today along with everything else that was fake about me.

"Hi." My throat is sandpaper and gravel. "I'm not going to caption this cute. I'm not going to shape it into a story arc with a satisfying beat at the end. I'm just going to tell you the truth, one time, straight through, and then I'll probably lose most of you, and I have made my peace with that."

The number keeps climbing. Ten thousand. Twenty. Word travels fast when the girl who never breaks character breaks it live.

"That video going around. Of me and the contractor. It was filmed on a hidden camera planted in a private home, without his consent, without mine. I didn't shoot it. I didn't post it. I found out it existed the same minute the rest of you did." I hold my eyes dead on the lens and I do not let them drop. "My own manager planted that camera weeks ago and leaked the footage for engagement. I fired her this afternoon. I filed a police report at two-fifteen. And I am formally, publicly, on the record ending my contract with her agency, live, right now, so that there is a timestamp, so that nobody can ever spin this into a cute little scandal down the road."

The comments blur past too fast to catch a single one. I push on before my nerve gives out.

"His name is Oggan. He builds things to outlast everyone who'll ever touch them. He hates cameras. He told me the very first week, standing in this barn with sawdust on his boots, that the parts of a person that stay private stay private, and I looked him right in the eye and I promised him they would. And then a machine I invited into my world broke that promise for a home-goods sponsorship." My breath shakes going out. "For engagement numbers. For the exact thing I have chased my entire adult life."

Fifty thousand people now, live. My hands are steady on my knees. I have no idea where the steady comes from. Him, probably. He left a whole toolbox of it behind in my driveway.

A comment surfaces near the top and sticks there, hearted a thousand times over. this is the most real you've ever been. I read it out loud without meaning to, and a broken laugh jumps out of me, because there it is, the whole tragedy in one line. The realest I have ever been, and it took losing him to get here.

"So here's the part I have never once said on camera. I have measured my entire worth in numbers since I was twenty-two years old. Views. Completion rate. How many of you stuck around past the eight-second mark before the algorithm ruled whether I get to eat this month. I got so good at being looked at that somewhere along the way I forgot how to just be." The tears come and I let them fall, no dab, no tilt of the chin toward flattering light. "And then I met a man who never cared what my numbers were. Never once. Who sat down on this cold concrete floor next to me and asked who I am when the cameras shut off. And I didn't have an answer for him. I sat there with nothing. And he waited for one anyway. He just waited. Like the answer was worth the wait. Like I was."

Somewhere in the roaring flood of comments, a phrase starts repeating. Three words, over and over, hundreds and then thousands of them stacking up the side of the screen, and I catch it on a fast scroll and it cracks something wide open behind my ribs.

go get him.

"I lost him today," I say, and my throat closes and I shove it open with the last of what I have. "Because I let a machine into a moment that was only ever supposed to belong to two people in the whole world. He believes I sold him out. And the very worst part, the part I have to lie awake and live with, is that the girl I used to be, the one with the ring light, she absolutely would have. She'd have run the numbers on his heartbreak and cried over the wrong column."

I drag the back of my wrist across my face. Drywall dust smears cold across my cheek and jaw. I leave it exactly where it lands.

"So I'm done. I'm done curating my whole life for strangers. This house is going to get finished by my own two hands, with a hundred crooked mistakes in it, on camera or off, and I honestly could not care less which anymore. If you followed me for the girl who was always, always smiling, then please, go ahead and unfollow. Let her go. She was so tired." A wet, cracked laugh jumps out of me. "And if a few of you want to stick around for whoever this actually is, the one crying on an upside-down bucket with a face full of drywall dust and no idea what she's doing, then hi. This is me. It is nice to finally, finally meet you."

I reach for the phone.

Then I stop, hand hovering over the glass.

"And Oggan." Half a million now. Half a million strangers along for the wreck of me, and only one person on the planet matters, and he will never in a hundred years lay eyes on this, because he does not own a single working notification in his whole beautiful stubborn life. I say it anyway. I owe him the words even if they land nowhere. "If this ever finds you, somehow. I'm sorry. You handed me the one dark thing you had left, the one part of yourself you'd never given anybody, and I let it get taken. And I would tear this entire brand down to the bare studs to hand it back to you. I already am. Come look for yourself."

I end the stream.

The barn drops into total silence. Just me, and a bucket, and a half-built house with the ribs showing, and a phone that will not stop lighting up with a hundred thousand strangers, and not one of them is the only one I want to reach.

I set the phone face-down on the plywood.

I stand up off the bucket. My legs hold.

I pick up the framing hammer.

There is a ridge beam lying across two sawhorses in the great room, and it needs setting up on the posts today, and it is easily four hundred pounds of green lumber, and he is not here to spot the far end, and I am going to set it myself or break something trying.