Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  I poured myself another glass of vodka, and told Julia that I would not be going out that night. I’m gonna be a grandma tonight and stay in, though in reality I was in such ecstasy that I could have run a marathon. I wanted to stay in to prolong that happiness and guard it selfishly, as if to expose it to real life might taint it. I got back into bed with my drink and opened up Instagram again, and responded to certain Comments and deleted and blocked certain other ones. I changed my bio to read Color me a revolutionary. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t want to think about Gemma. Instead, I stayed up late staring at smaller, distorted images of my own face.

  * * *

  —

  It was remarkably easy to slip into her place. At the time it felt like destiny, although now I know it was just the algorithm doing what it was supposed to do, which was to figure out what we wanted to see before we even knew about it, using a set of intractable and unknowable equations that evolved over time based on engagement. The idea was that the algorithm was only showing you what you would have liked anyway—it wasn’t corrupting your taste or free will in any way; it was only facilitating greater options. Only sometimes it was difficult to tell if you’d really had any choice in the matter, just like in junior high when you thought you liked punk music because the boy you were dating was into punk music but then when he dumped you, you realized you hated it. The machine knew that if you Liked Gemma, there was a good chance you would Like me, too, and since its promise is to serve us more of what we like, forever, always, it promoted me to the Popular pages of Gemma’s Followers, and when they Followed me, as the machine knew they would, that was integrated into the equation, too, so that I was then promoted to users who were similar to those other users, and so on and so on, echoing out endlessly.

  Within the week of that repost, my Follower count was up 170 percent, to almost 70K. I was determined to surpass 100K within the month. I kept obsessive track of how each post performed: Images that showed my face and body received roughly 50 percent more Likes than those that did not. Images that showed my face and body and included a message of empowerment performed best; they received roughly the same amount of Likes, but engagement was far better.

  I started reading The Second Sex, for something to post about, but it was difficult to get through. I made a list of all the quotes that might make good captions, and brainstormed ideas for their visual counterparts. Books made good content. Yoga, meditating, brunch, smoothies, colorful cocktails, walks in the park: these were all good content, and good content was all I thought about those days. It was my God.

  I was so preoccupied that the dread and disappointment I felt every time I checked Gemma’s profile and found that she hadn’t posted anything in days was slightly neutered. I knew she was just taking a break, it wasn’t that strange, really it wasn’t, I kept insisting to myself. She’d be back. Still, sometimes I would visit her profile and a panic would seize me as I gazed upon her familiar grid, so stagnant and immovable I felt as though she were buried under concrete, suffocating to death, and all I wanted to do was chip away at the barrier between us. Something must have happened to her, something awful. What if she was hurt, what if she was in pain, what if she needed me? There could be no other explanation for her silence but catastrophe. Unless—my mind turned on itself once again—she was deliberately shutting me out. Or someone out, more likely, I told myself, thinking of Benoit. I knew there was no possible way she could have known we’d slept together, but still, it was possible she’d figured out, once and for all, what kind of a person he was. But none of my rationalizing or wild conjectures helped when I went to search for her name among my new Followers, as I did every day, multiple times a day, my heart plummeting when, every time, she was still absent. Thankfully, though, the magnetic appeal of those other Followers, the numbers always going up, up, up, was strong enough to eventually buoy me back to the surface.

  Mostly, I was just busy, busy, busy, making posts, doing interviews. At first, I was nervous doing the interviews, but it wound up being easy. All you had to do was say what the interviewer wanted you to say in the same way that everyone else being interviewed said it.

  “It just came about really organically,” I heard myself say over the phone to a journalist from Teen Vogue.

  “I love that,” she said. “I feel like when things happen organically, it’s always better.”

  “Absolutely, it just feels more real and natural.”

  The girl’s name was Molly, and I googled her while we talked. She was twenty-five, with short black hair cut into weird baby bangs that she probably thought made her look like Amélie. Her face was pretty, but I found a few full bodies of her and she was short and chubby, which was fine if you knew how to pull it off, but she clearly didn’t.

  “Totally,” I said, in response to something she said.

  “It’s like, we should be out there in the open with it, you know? Girls need to see this so that they know they are allowed to feel pleasure, that their bodies exist for them to have pleasure, too. Don’t you agree?”

  I said totally again and later, when the interview is written up, her words will be attributed to me. The interview will contain a link to my Instagram, and I will almost immediately get 4,000 new Followers.

  Molly asked me what I thought my Instagram Following liked best about me, and I told her “Confidence,” while I took pictures of my face with my phone.

  “I just don’t really care what people think, and I think people sense that, and they think it’s refreshing and maybe even inspiring,” I said, holding down the Capture button indiscriminately and watching a miniature version of my face flicker in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. “I think a lot of times, girls feel like they can’t just be themselves, and I just want to be one of the people that stands up, in my small way, and shows them: you can be yourself, you can be however you want to be, you don’t need to apologize.”

  Molly agreed, as I knew she would. The interview was shared around, people loved it and acted like I was saying something new and profound instead of the same meaningless garbage everyone else was saying. That was what content was; it encapsulated all art, journalism, social media, any form of expression, and it didn’t matter what it was saying, or if there was any message; the message was the content; the content was the content. As if all of it were just the contents of something, the guts of some juggernauting beast.

  * * *

  —

  Earlier that month, Gemma had posted a photo of herself perched gracefully on the edge of the fountain in Washington Square Park, one leg extended, the other bent at an obtuse angle, her body turned three quarters of the way towards the camera, one arm bent with the elbow gently resting on her thigh. Her hand tilted a vanilla-chocolate swirl soft-serve ice cream near her face, perfectly telegraphing summer nonchalance while maximizing the length of her legs.

  It was eighty degrees out, and I bought the vanilla-chocolate swirl at an ice cream truck parked, seemingly permanently, on Bleecker Street. I waited patiently for a woman to remove two screaming brats from the vicinity, then sat almost exactly where Gemma had sat—with the arch just to my right in the background. My phone was already clamped in the selfie stick. I felt a cold mist against my back and against the spaghetti straps on my Rouje Daria Dress in Night Blue Flowers, and thought about how Gemma’s skin had probably been wet by the time she’d finished taking the photos. Expertly, I guided the phone to the correct spot, angled so that you could not see the hand that held it aloft. I bent one knee and extended the other leg straight in front of me. I gently rested my elbow on my thigh, tilted the ice cream towards my face—and smiled.

  While I was uploading the picture in a pocket of leafy shade—the ice cream was melting away on the top of an overstuffed trash can—Jason, who had grown, conveniently, into my biggest supporter and number one fan, called to tell me that JOY wanted me for a shoot.

  JOY, I
probably don’t need to remind you, was at that time the pinnacle of chic (this was a year before one of its early investors got caught shilling kiddie porn). Founded by the legendary Cate Ancien in the ’90s, JOY had more recently succumbed to capitalist pressure and sold to Condé Nast, where it had greatly enriched its coffers without losing its street cred.

  “Benoit’s shooting, he asked for you specifically,” Jason said. Then he went all quiet and said in an excited, hushed voice: “And guess who’s styling it? Cate.”

  “Holy fuck.” I jumped up and began pacing around the park, zigging and zagging between people.

  “We’ve got a pretty good shot at a cover.”

  “Holy fuck,” I said again—a little too loudly. A trio of NYU students sitting cross-legged in the grass jerked their heads to look at me. I laughed, gave them the finger, then walked quickly out of the park and up Fifth Avenue.

  “What about the CK campaign?” I asked. Cate and Benoit did the Calvin Klein ads each season, and it was well known they tried out girls at JOY before bringing them on as faces of the brand. I knew the JOY shoot would pay nothing—but if I got the cover, I’d be officially sanctioned as the new face of fashion. Ergo, I’d be a shoo-in for the face of Calvin; ergo, I’d soon start raking in hundreds of thousands, then millions…

  I could feel Jason smiling through the phone.

  “We’ve got a good shot at that, too.”

  I noticed this we Jason was all of a sudden bandying about, but I was too excited to correct him on it. “They haven’t cast it yet,” I said flatly.

  “Nope. And it’s about that time, too.”

  Gemma’s first cover of JOY was almost exactly two years ago, and right afterwards she was named the face of CK. So I was right on schedule. Yes. Things were going exactly as they should.

  “You just do everything in your power to make them love you, okay?” He wasn’t using the we this time. “Anything they want.”

  “Of course.”

  “Charm their fucking pants off.”

  “I will.” I caught my reflection in a store window and smiled widely.

  “This is big for us,” Jason went on. “So I just want you to be on your A-game. I want you to be absolutely perfect.” No carbs, no sugar, no dairy. Actually, try not to eat at all if you can. Water, though. Drink lots of water—except for on the day of the fitting. Twenty-four hours before the fitting and of course the shoot: no water because even innocent old water can bloat you. For the past several seasons, CK had been pursuing an explicitly sexual image. The glossies called it “porno-chic.” One ad showed a woman on all fours, wearing a horse saddle and stilettos long and slender like needles. That was a lipstick ad. Gemma’s was relatively tame. She’s wearing a black mesh skintight dress through which you can see a lacy bra, and reclining on a ripped-up couch that seems to have been abandoned outdoors somewhere.

  “Think sex,” Jason said. “I want you to fucking ooze it, sugarplum.”

  We hung up. I walked home in a bit of a daze. For some reason I started thinking of my dad—something I’d been trying to avoid since I’d canceled my visit with him. I still felt a little badly about that—mostly because my mother was upset—but not too badly, and anyway work was my priority right now, and my dad had stopped trying to call me altogether so he couldn’t have really cared that much. As soon as the big money started rolling in, though, I promised myself, I’d go see him; I’d finally be able to look him in the eyes and tell him I needed nothing from him, that my mother needed nothing from him either. As I neared my front door, I fantasized about buying my mom a house, or at least being able to rent her a nice apartment somewhere, maybe even in the city, on the Upper West Side. Once I held the purse strings, it would be me she’d have to listen to, not my father. The appeals would stop. Case closed. My dad could rot in jail for the rest of his life, and I’d actually be happy to visit him, my work schedule permitting.

  I picked up the boxes and packages stacked outside my mailbox and carried them up to my apartment. Brands kept sending me free stuff, and though most of it was junk, things I would never wear or use, it still gave me a narcissistic thrill to know that I was important enough to warrant unsolicited gifts. I dropped the packages on my floor and arranged them as artfully as I could, then uploaded a picture to my Stories. Today’s goodies. Getting free stuff was a status symbol that proved my place among the real Influencers, and the more I documented it, the more I’d receive—a positive feedback loop, a hall of mirrors.

  I took a Xanax and found a sharp knife in the kitchen, then got on my knees and started cutting open and gutting the boxes. Inside the first was another box, and inside that one was a set of cotton pastel underwear with frilled edges and the names of feminist icons embroidered in big, loopy, color-contrasting stitching on the front. I put them back in the box and filmed myself unpacking them. Baby blue was Gloria Steinem. Pink was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

  Another box contained still another box, filled with cardboard chips, which I had to dig through to extract a bottle of nail polish, the color of which was described as Avocado Toast. Apparently, this company had just launched a series of polishes “inspired by your favorite brunch items!” It looked like bile, and I decided to give it to my mother just for the chance to tell her that a brand had sent it to me for free. I knew that would delight her. Next, I filmed myself unboxing a neon-pink spandex swimsuit, necklaces that looked like henna tattoos, beach towels with a hyper-saturated picture of a sunset on them, and plastic pool slides from a company that gave kayaking lessons to kids somewhere with every purchase, or something, I don’t know.

  Each time I added to my Stories, I got sucked into a vortex inside my phone. Taylor Swift Weighs in on Sexism, Systemic Racism. The Brazilian Flu had spread northward to Mexico City, which was now contemplating a lockdown after three teenagers with the illness had wandered onto a highway during the disease’s dissociative phase and were nearly killed. Emily Ratajkowski Has a Surprising Trick to Achieve the Perfect Summer Glow. The “trick” was that she put on bronzer plus blush. Ideas that come to you now, dear Aquarius, particularly about areas related to learning, mental interests, communication, neighbors, connections, and siblings, can be especially important. They may very well kickstart a long-term pursuit. One of my cousins, Auntie Joey’s daughter, had gotten a puppy and named him Chocolate. A gunman had opened fire at a garlic festival in California, killing three, including two children, and wounding seventeen, after spewing neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideas online. An NYPD judge had said the cop charged with choking Eric Garner should be fired, despite the court’s ruling. Kendall Jenner wished Bella Hadid a happy birthday. Chocolate played with a butterfly on a patch of grass somewhere.

  By the time I was done, there was a mountain of cardboard and packing peanuts and plastic, and I had mixed feelings about the fact that sea turtles were likely to be genocided so that companies like these could send me all this junk I didn’t want. I did, however, put aside the underwear that said Joan Didion on them, and looked up quotes from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Actually, it would be cute if I was reading the book while wearing the underwear, I thought, getting excited. And I could write something like Whoa, meta. That’d be funny.

  By then, I had already internalized the algorithm, and I intuitively understood its rhythms and quirks. I had begun to think of all human experience in terms of content, distilling everything I encountered—a beautiful sunset, a funny sign, whatever I ate for breakfast that morning—into neat squares and dispatching it to the void, where it would be gobbled up by Followers while they rode the subway or used what little free time they had on their lunch break to zone out in front of their phones.

  Though she hadn’t posted in weeks, not since that fateful day by the pier, I continued to pore over Gemma’s Instagram, looking for clues to brand-building, content strategy, and post ideas. I slid my thumb up the screen and watched miniature versions of her disappear
at the top and new ones appear at the bottom. I went all the way back to the beginning, the first few photos she had posted: a shitty, heavily filtered photo of a sunset; Gemma and a girl I didn’t recognize grinning up at the camera without a shred of guile; a picture of a bee, slightly out of focus, crawling on the leaves of a sunflower. These missives embarrassed me, then gave me strength. Clearly, she had posted them before she’d found her brand. I suppose she’d just kept them up for posterity. I was glad, though, that I didn’t have anything half so embarrassing in my feed. It made me feel as though I had a leg up on her. In my mind, we were still in competition. I imagined her eyes on me all the time, sometimes enviously, other times derisively. Every once in a while, I’d think of her and feel a pang of longing as clear and sharp as if I’d been stabbed. I missed her. I wondered where she was, what she was doing. But all too soon that ache would turn to anger, and I’d be pissed at her for her silence. I knew her so intimately—could picture her as she slept, as she bit into her favorite slice of pizza from Artichoke, could detail every freckle and mole on her face—that it felt completely unfair for her to just shut me out like that. Especially at such a pivotal moment for me. Though of course it was possible she’d have no way of knowing it was a pivotal moment for me. What if she’d missed my viral ascent entirely, what if she didn’t even know I was going to be as famous as her? The thought made me shudder.