PART 3 — THE VIDEO
I didn’t check my phone until I got home.
My apartment was a studio, barely three hundred square feet, with a kitchenette that hadn’t been updated since the Reagan administration and a window that looked out onto a brick wall. The rent was four hundred a month, utilities not included, and it was the cheapest place I could find within biking distance of campus.
I locked the door behind me, dropped my keys on the counter, and pulled out my phone.
It was frozen.
The screen was completely unresponsive, overloaded with notifications. I stared at it for a long moment, my exhausted brain struggling to process what I was seeing. Finally, I did a hard reset. When the screen flickered back to life, the notifications started pouring in again. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
Text messages from numbers I didn’t recognize. Friend requests from strangers. Mentions on platforms I barely used. My email inbox had exploded from forty-three unread messages to over two thousand.
—What the…
I opened Instagram first. It was the platform I used least, mostly just to follow a few photography accounts and keep in touch with some high school friends I never actually talked to anymore. My last post had been six months ago, a blurry photo of a sunset with no caption.
Now I had over fifty thousand followers.
The number was so absurd that I laughed out loud. It had to be a glitch. A hack. Something. I refreshed the app three times, and each time the number climbed higher.
Then I opened TikTok.
The first video on my For You page was me.
I was kneeling on the floor of aisle seven, my arms wrapped around Max and Mr. Briggs, my face turned up toward Donovan with an expression I didn’t recognize. Defiance. Fear. Something else. The caption read: “TEEN CASHIER SACRIFICES JOB TO PROTECT VETERAN AND SERVICE DOG FROM ABUSIVE MANAGER ”
It had fourteen million views.
I scrolled down. There were dozens of versions of the same video, posted by different accounts, with different music, different captions, different commentary. Some had slowed down the moment I jumped in front of Max, adding dramatic orchestral music. Some had zoomed in on Donovan’s face, his expression frozen in entitled fury. Some had focused on Mr. Briggs, on the way his hands were shaking, on the way Max pressed against him.
The comments were endless.
“This kid is a HERO. Someone find him and give him a job!!!!”
