chapter 9
A couple nights later, around 1 a.m., my phone buzzed.
Leslie Hall just posted a new video.
I rolled over, opened the app, and pressed play.
Same concept. Same visual pacing. Same shot composition. Same story structure.
Same music.
The only differences were her face and her brand name slapped on the end.
My stomach turned—part disgust, part grim satisfaction.
At first, the response was the usual flood of praise.
You never miss, queen.
So fresh, so original.
No one else is doing it like this.
Then the comments shifted.
Is this… that song?
Wait, does she know where this track came from?
This feels… wrong.
Someone posted a side-by-side of old screenshots explaining why the track had vanished from streaming.
Others started noticing the caption.
Tell me I’m not crazy, but if you read the first letter of every line…
“It was me. I stole this idea”??
Is this some kind of twisted joke?
Leslie scrambled.
She deleted the video within the hour.
She was too late.
People had already downloaded it, reposted it, slowed it down, circled the acrostic in red. Commentary videos started popping up overnight.
If she’d really created it herself, she might have caught the hidden message.
But she hadn’t.
Her management agency panicked. The next morning, they pushed her into a live stream with a polished apology pinned at the top of her screen.
I joined from an anonymous account.
On camera, she looked washed out and tired.
“I didn’t know about the context of the music,” she said. “The video was edited by my team, and there was a miscommunication. We take full responsibility and will be more careful in the future. I’m so, so sorry.”
For a while, the chat was the usual mix of anger and blind forgiveness.
Then the tone shifted.
That’s a lie.
I’m in your editing team. We had nothing to do with that video.
You cut us out right after your second viral. We haven’t touched your footage since.
More accounts chimed in.
I was her assistant. She screamed at me for suggesting changes.
She hasn’t let us make decisions for months. It’s all her.
She keeps calling us “brain-dead” and “useless” behind the scenes.
The chat went feral.
Holly—I mean, Leslie—stared at the screen, frozen, like she hadn’t planned for the betrayal to go both ways. Someone off-camera said something. She abruptly ended the live.
Hours later, her account was restricted for “policy violations under review.”
Her agency released a lukewarm statement about “reevaluating their partnership.”