The Truth About Gemma Grey: A feel-good, romantic comedy you won't be able to put down

by Sophie Ranald

  When I got back to my desk, I was greeted by an email from an unfamiliar address.

  Hi Gemma, I read.

  I’m reaching out to introduce myself, and hopefully to arrange to meet up for a coffee and a chat. I’m with Ripple Effect, a talent agency specialising in new media, and I’m a huge fan of your blog. I’d be really excited to speak with you about possible ways we could work together. Do call me and let me introduce myself in person.

  It was from someone called Sloane Cassidy.

  That afternoon, I found it harder than ever to focus on the online antics of cats. I kept reading and rereading Sloane Cassidy’s email and gazing at my bank balance. I waited for Sarah to go into a meeting, leaving her office empty so I could sneak in and make my call in private.

  I’d imagined finding out a bit more about who Sloane was and more importantly what on earth had possessed her to get in touch with me, but I’d reckoned without her forceful personality, and by the time I ended the call five minutes later I’d agreed to meet in my lunch break the next day at Ripple Effect HQ, which was just down the road from the Clickfrenzy office in Soho. As soon as I ended the call, I began to wonder if I was making a massive mistake.

  Back in my bedroom that evening, I tried on just about every garment I owned in an effort to find the perfect, elegant yet edgy, effortless yet immaculate ‘I go to meetings like this every day’ outfit. Needless to say, my wardrobe failed to produce such a thing, and nor did the pile of clothes I found under my bed.

  I tried on my favourite white skater dress with slightly battered pink Converse, but decided that it was too short to be even vaguely meeting-appropriate, and the shoes made my legs look like golf clubs. I put on the pencil midi skirt I’d worn to my interview at Clickfrenzy, but I couldn’t find the top I’d worn with it – and then I remembered that I’d put it in the tumble drier and shrunk it beyond salvaging, so my lucky outfit was no more. I couldn’t wear leggings or jeans – I just couldn’t, not without abandoning my self-respect altogether and losing what little fashion-cred I had.

  When in doubt, crowd-source, Gemma, I told myself. So I put together four vaguely appropriate looks, Instagrammed myself wearing them, asked my viewers to vote on the best one and went to sleep.

  I made my way to my meeting with Sloane Cassidy the next day wearing white trousers that were meant to be ankle-skimming but I was sure looked as if they were just too short, together with a stripy T-shirt and a scarf with poppies on it, which I hadn’t managed to tie in a way that didn’t look stupid, however many video tutorials I watched.

  The first words Sloane Cassidy said to me were: “Oh my God, you got your viewers to dress you! Gemma, that’s just too adorable.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that she might check my channel and see if I’d uploaded anything overnight. I felt my face turn bright red, which at least matched not only the stripes on my top, but also the scarlet feature wall of the meeting room into which she ushered me.

  “I’m just so psyched to meet you,” she gushed. “Have a seat, make yourself at home. We want all our talent to feel right at home here. Help yourself to candy.”

  There was a huge bowl of jelly beans on the table. Apart from them and the wall, everything else in the room was white. I felt utterly foolish, as if I’d dressed to match the decor, and wished I’d thought to do a Google image search and see what the place I was going to actually looked like.

  Sloane, in stark contrast to me, looked immaculate. she was wearing a plain little black dress that made her waist look tiny and her bottom look smaller than I suspected it actually was. Her shoes were black too, with sky-high heels that had that geometric thing going on, so they looked like they’d been attached to the shoes upside down, and I knew that however simple they looked, they had cost a fortune. Her glossy dark hair was twisted up on top of her head and held with a silver chopstick thing in a style that looked effortlessly simple, but I knew would have required straighteners, curling tongs, back-combing and half a can of hairspray to achieve. Likewise, she was working a ‘no make-up make-up’ look that takes at least a dozen different products and about six brushes to get right.

  “What can I get you to drink?” Her accent was American – or maybe Canadian, I couldn’t tell. “Tea? Coffee? Juice? Soda?”

  “Just a glass of water, please,” I said, and she picked up the white telephone on the table and said, “Could we have two waters in meeting room one, sweetie? Oh – one of each, I think. Why not?

  “Now, Gemma. SparklyGems – I love that name, it’s so cute – tell me all about yourself.”

  So, after taking a too-big gulp of fizzy water that almost came out of my nose and made my eyes stream, I did. I told her about starting the vlog, hoping, like so many people, that I’d become the next big thing, and how when I hadn’t, my enthusiasm had waned and the frequency of my posts declined. I told her about Jack and being dumped and the video going viral. It felt weird confiding stuff like this to a stranger – but it wasn’t as if anything I said was news to her. She’d even known what I was going to be wearing before I’d walked through the door.

  “And you have how many subscribers now?” she asked, even though of course she already knew that, too.

  “Thirty-eight thousand,” I said. “At least, that’s how many I had this morning. It keeps changing.”

  “It keeps growing, you mean! And other social channels – where else do you have a presence?”

  I told her about my Twitter and Instagram feeds. “I don’t post much, though. Just to tell people when I’ve uploaded something new.”

  I didn’t tell her about Clickfrenzy and the cats, even though my articles on there got far more hits than all my videos put together.

  While I talked, she nodded enthusiastically, occasionally tapping a note into her tablet.

  “Right,” she said. “Now, I’ll tell you a little more about Ripple Effect and what we do here. When Megan, our founder and MD, started the business, it was a modelling agency. Have you done any modelling at all? No? I thought, with your height… Anyways, Megs soon realised that there was this huge, exciting pool of talent out there in new media, people creating content in a way we’ve never seen before. She figured there was massive potential there – a way to harness the passion and the energy not only of the creators, but of their fans, too. But you’re not here for a history lesson, right? The point is, we’re here now, and we work with some of the biggest names in the business.”

  She gestured to the wall – not the red one – where a selection of naturally posed yet carefully retouched photos hung in white frames. A stunning blonde girl running through a field with a golden retriever. A black woman with an impossibly perfect, toned body, grinning at the camera as she did a bicep curl. Two cute boys who looked like they must be identical twins.

  “You must recognise most of our other clients,” she said.

  “Some of them. I… I’m new to all this. I watch other people’s videos, but mostly they’re the ones like me, who aren’t famous.”

  “You guys,” she breathed. “You’re just amazing, you know? I never stop being amazed by the level of creativity, the ability to just come up with awesome, original ideas all the time.”

  “I don’t think they’re necessarily original,” I said, blushing. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve done anything that other people haven’t done, really.”

  “But it’s the way you do it,” Sloane said. “There’s something about you that appeals to viewers, else you wouldn’t be getting the hits you’re getting after such a short time. But I didn’t bring you here to make you all big-headed! I brought you here to talk about how we can work together to tap into your talent and maximise your potential. And, I hope, start getting you a good income from this.”

  “I got my first payment yesterday,” I admitted. “It was tiny, but I’m really excited about it.”

  “Rightly so! But once you become even better known, we can open doors to even more lucrative opportunities.”

&
nbsp; She talked a bit about endorsements and product placements and merchandise and affiliate links until I began to feel as if my brain was about to seize up. I knew that people made money from YouTube, that vlogging could be a business – of course I did – but I had no idea of the complexity of it, the idea that someone might be willing to pay me for having a particular brand of oat milk in my fridge. Except I didn’t drink oat milk, and it wasn’t my fridge, it was Hannah and Richard’s. It felt as if Sloane was talking about somebody else, not me.

  She must have noticed me glazing over, because she said, “But that’s all far in the future! For now, I’d see my role as helping and supporting you, being a listening ear, and most importantly, plugging you in to a network of people like yourself, so you can collaborate and share ideas – and share viewers, too. We believe, here at Ripple Effect, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Am I right?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Anyhow,” she said. “I’ve talked enough, and I hope I’ve given you plenty to think about. We’d love to represent you, Gemma. But I don’t expect a decision today – or even next week. This is your career – take your time, talk to your friends, your mom… get back to me whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.” But I already knew that I was going to say yes.

  I realised I was being dismissed. My head was buzzing with about a zillion more questions I knew I needed to ask, but I couldn’t think what any of them were right now. My mouth was dry in spite of the water I’d been sipping, and my palms felt at once clammy and sticky.

  “Oh, wait,” Sloane said. “Take this.” She pulled a bright yellow envelope from her squashy leather document holder and handed it to me. “We’re throwing a party next week, for the launch of the Berry Boys’ new book. You should come along. Meet the gang. Our parties are legendary.”

  And with that she showed me out.

  Over the past few weeks, while juggling what had begun to feel like a whole bunch of separate lives, I’d found myself falling into a new routine. In the evenings after work, I’d stop off at Daily Grind and spend a couple of hours there with my laptop, drinking coffee, editing a video ready to post and responding to comments on the last one. There were more and more of them, more people were liking my content and I had more subscribers, too. As the numbers crept upwards and I began to dream of getting to six figures, this process was taking longer and longer. I spent more time editing my videos, because I knew that they were being seen by more people – and I never stopped hoping that, maybe, Jack was watching my channel. That, maybe, he’d see the details I posted about my life and realise what he was missing, realise that it was me he wanted to be with and not Olivia.

  I even allowed myself to indulge in fantasies in which he posted a picture on Instagram of himself in an airport somewhere, with his backpack on his back but no Olivia by his side, saying something like, You know when you wake up one morning and realise you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life? #Cominghome.

  But he never did, and eventually the fantasy became more of a habit than a hope – a habit I tried without success to break. And so, one Wednesday night at Daily Grind, I drank the cold dregs of my coffee, snapped a picture of the empty cup and posted it on my Instagram account. Editing fuel! Look out for a new video on my channel later on tonight. Then, knowing I shouldn’t, knowing I wouldn’t see the post I longed for, I clicked on Jack’s feed.

  It was full of images of him and Olivia. Them holding a surfboard and laughing like maniacs. Them outside the Sydney Opera House. Them sharing a giant ice-cream cone. Them constantly laughing or kissing or sometimes both at once. It was like when you pick a scab you thought was healing, but discover the wound underneath is still a raw, bleeding mess.

  I quickly clicked away, and went on Facebook instead. And then I noticed a weird thing. Facebook’s weird anyway, right? You see things like Nancy being on holiday in the Maldives, and realise you’d totally missed the run-up to it. You see that the dorky guy you were at school with whose friend request you only accepted for the lolz has somehow gone and got himself In a Relationship with some beautiful, successful woman, proving once and for all that life is full of strangeness. But one thing you don’t do is actually count your friends, because that would be tragic. But even so, I was quite sure that I had ten or twenty fewer than the last time I’d looked. I searched for Olivia’s name and, sure enough, she’d defriended me. So had Calliope, her best mate. So had Shivvy. Katie hadn’t, but I could tell when I looked at her feed that she’d changed her settings so I couldn’t now see things I’d been able to see before.

  I tried to make myself not cry, but I couldn’t. The screen went all blurry and massive tear splatted down on to my trackpad, making the cursor on my screen jump.

  “Hey, Gemma.” I hadn’t noticed Raffy appear next to me with a cloth and a spray bottle. He squirted cleaning fluid over the next-door table and wiped it. “Are you okay? I’m sorry. Daft question. You’re not okay.”

  I tried to laugh, but it didn’t sound right. “I am, really. It’s just… Looking at pictures of my ex and his new girlfriend. And loads of people I thought almost liked me have culled me on Facebook. I know, it’s like I’m fifteen. But it hurts. I’m such a dick.”

  I attempted the laughing thing again, but this time it came out even weirder and ended on a sort of hiccup.

  Raffy picked up my coffee cup. “Hold on one second,” he said. “I’m just about to close up.”

  I snapped my laptop shut. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I’ve been sitting here ages. I’ve totally lost track of the time. I’ll head off home.”

  “If you want,” he said. “Only, I was going to say… we keep a bottle of bourbon behind the counter, strictly for emergencies. This looks like it might be one.”

  I thought about going back to Richard and Hannah’s house, and the carton of carrot soup I’d been going to microwave for my dinner. I thought about going up to my room afterwards and the video I was going to post, and how I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from scrolling through Jack’s Instagram feed again and again, torturing myself with what I saw. I thought what a stupid idea it was to have a private lock-in in a coffee shop with a bottle of bourbon and man I hardly knew.

  “You know what? I think it is an emergency,” I said.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Raffy said. “I’m on it.”

  “So yeah, I got dumped. Your little niece will probably have seen me looking stupid talking about it on YouTube. I expect I swore and stuff and your sister’s going to hate me. But what’s so shit is that I thought I was making him jealous of my amazing life, when actually my life isn’t amazing at all. All I’ve got is a rented room in a house with a pair of right weirdos, and my job that I thought was going to be so awesome is all about finding pictures of cats. Not that there’s anything wrong with cats. They’re cute and everything, but – sorry, I’m rambling.”

  It was half an hour later, I’d had two – or it might have been three – shots of bourbon, and I was rambling like a good ’un. I’d told Raffy how Jack had ended our relationship with a curt email, how I’d seen the picture of them together and realised that Jack’s relationship with Olivia had pre-dated the end of his with me.

  “Ramble away,” Raffy said, splashing more whisky into our glasses.

  “I thought that if I vlogged all the time, he’d think I had this perfect life. But my life’s not perfect. It’s boring and a bit shit – all I do is go to work and write stuff to make people click, because the Google metrics say they will. The other day I made a smoothie with kale, to show how into being healthy I am. I fucking hate kale. And I buy clothes and then take them back to the shop the next day because I can’t afford them. None of it’s even real. I’m a fraud.”

  I sniffed loudly and took another gulp of my drink. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry, Gemma.” Throughout the time I’d been talking – ranting, more like – and caning the bourbon, Raff
y had been sitting opposite me, his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, barely moving except to top up our glasses and to push his hair back off his forehead. His face was very still, as if his attention was focussed entirely on me, but when he smiled it suddenly came alive, his teeth and eyes bright and somehow warm, even though their colour was cold.

  I said, “I am sorry. I’ve wanged on and on about me and not asked you anything about you.”

  “I’m just the guy who works in the coffee shop,” he said, his amazing smile flashing out again and lighting up his whole face.

  “Obviously, I know that,” I said. “But why?”

  “I like coffee,” he said. “Even though I’m shit at taking orders. And I like my mate Luke, and I offered to help him out when the girl who was working here went home to Madrid, because I wasn’t doing too much else at the moment. And I like talking to people.”

  “Having people talk at you, more like,” I said.

  Raffy shrugged and said, “That too. All part of the service.”

  I said, “I just need to go to the bathroom. ’Scuse me.”

  Standing up, I realised I was actually quite pissed. I had to concentrate hard to walk in a straight line to the loo, and when I looked at my face in the mirror as I washed my hands, I realised I looked quite pissed, too. My nose was all shiny where my foundation had rubbed off and there were massive black smudges of mascara under my eyes. Even my hair was a mess. I repaired the damage as best I could, thankful that the ‘what’s in my handbag’ vlog had involved installing a fully equipped make-up bag that definitely wouldn’t have been there before. I wished I’d thought to include toothpaste, but I hadn’t. Or condoms.

  I made my way back to the table where Raffy was waiting. He wasn’t tapping away at his phone, as most people do when they’re left alone for ten minutes. He was just waiting. He looked like he was thinking, and I wondered if he’d been thinking about me.

  I sat down again, this time on the chair next to him instead of the one on the opposite side of the table.