Treadmill

XXI.II

Friday seemed to follow that life-altering Monday as if the two days were supposed to come one right after the other. December had snuck up on Rebecca quickly and without warning; she felt as if she had just met Kennedy a few days before rather than a few months. December was a time for celebration and family and holiday spirit. It wasn't supposed to be a time where Rebecca felt as if her life were going in a million different directions and she wasn't sure which way she was actually supposed to be travelling.

In the past four days that Rebecca had spent thinking about what direction she should have been going, she had written more words on her computer than she had ever written before in her life. She had typed up blog post after blog post, uploading them one at a time as they seemed to develop into makeshift chapters; divided into sections of her life that had been strange to say the least and traumatizing to be the most accurate. She had set up her own little website, with a domain name connected to the site host itself so that she wouldn't have to pay for it. After all, she had lost her real job and her secret one in a matter of weeks and hadn't had the chance to apply for anything else that would hire her and pay her the same amount she had been making at a grocery store she worked at for years.

So, Rebecca had kept uploading her little blog posts on her severely underdeveloped site, 'Influencer Exposed,' and she had initially felt the weight of everything that had happened in her life start to lift off of her shoulders. She published her posts a few times a day, whenever she finished writing one, and she had published almost twenty posts in a matter of days. She hadn't told a soul about the blog, and she had used her real name due to not knowing any better, but there she was: Rebecca Eaves, on the Internet, writing down every terrible detail of what she had gone through since meeting Kennedy Abrams.

But after those few days of posting, Rebecca started to realize that people were actually reading the posts.

They were reading all of them. Reading and commenting and flooding Kennedy and Drew's Instagram pages with comments about the blog. Rebecca had woken up on Friday morning to find that the average view count on each post had gone up from 63 on Thursday night to 633 just seven hours later.

Rebecca stared at that number on her screen sleepily on Friday morning, her cucumber water sitting next to her and her bowl of strawberries and apple slices going untouched on the table beside the laptop. There was no reason for so many people to have found her blog, and she tried to think about it rationally for a moment. No one should have found the blog. She didn't use hashtags and she hadn't even bothered to look at the SEO settings that would help the blog get noticed on search engines.

She thought for another moment before opening a new tab and typing 'Drew Parley' into Google.

The third search result, below Drew's Instagram and Twitter pages, was Rebecca's third blog post: the one where she had first written about her and Kennedy's scheme to create an influencer out of midair. The post was the most-read one on the site, with over 1,000 views and counting. Rebecca clicked the link and was sent to her own blog, with all of her other posts popping up around the original as 'suggested reading.'

And then, everything made sense. People would simply search for this near-famous influencer online, and the third search result on their screen was someone claiming that the very influencer they were interested in had been derived from the imaginations of two college kids.

One of whom was currently sitting in prison for suspected murder.

Rebecca bit into an apple slice and chewed it slowly, refreshing the analytics on her blog. She watched the number of total views jump from 14,012 to 15,982 in that one refresh.