chapter 8
Back in the city a few days later, I quietly registered a new account under a different name. No face, no bio, no obvious links to the old me.
The first thing I did was follow Leslie’s main account and turn on every notification.
Without my “inspiration,” her uploads had already started to fizzle. The last viral hit was still pinned at the top of her feed. Everything after that felt safe. Recycled. Boring.
Her followers noticed.
Is it just me, or is the spark gone?
Feels like we’ve seen this before.
Did her editor quit?
In the comments, she insisted she was just posting “old footage from the vault” while she “recharged creatively.”
I recognized the background in one video as a park that had only just started blooming a week before. So much for the “vault.”
Meanwhile, away from the noise, my brain finally had space to breathe.
Ideas came back in a rush.
They were different this time. Sharper. Less concerned with trends and more with story.
One of them made me stop and sit up straight. It had teeth. Not just visual flair, but narrative weight.
I outlined it. Scripted it. Edited it in my head before I ever turned the camera on.
Then I added the hook.
For the background music, I went hunting. Not for anything illegal—just something with a very ugly story under the surface. A track that had been quietly removed from most platforms after people dug up the producer’s private messages, where he’d joked about hating women and glamorized violence.
It was still floating around on obscure sites. Technically usable. Ethically… radioactive.
I licensed a similar-sounding version from a royalty-free site, then layered in a subtle pattern that only matched perfectly when someone ripped my exact file.
Next, I rewrote my captions until the first letters of each line spelled out a vertical message:
IT WAS ME. I STOLE THIS IDEA.
If you read it straight through, it sounded like basic influencer talk. But once you saw the letters stacking, you couldn’t unsee them.
When the video was perfect, I exported it.
I did not post it.
I let it sit in my drafts and went about my day.