My [Secret] YouTube Life

by Charlotte Seager

  There’s a heart-stopping silence. I drop the kettle and run to him.

  ‘Little man, are you OK? Let me see your head.’

  I perch on my knees and cup his soft face in my hands. A small red egg is appearing on his forehead.

  ‘Up,’ I say, tilting his chin.

  He bravely lifts his head as his bottom lip starts to tremble. He rubs his eyes fiercely with his chubby fist and a single tear rolls down his cheek.

  ‘It’s OK, only a tiny bump. You’ve been so brave.’

  I give him a hug, and he nuzzles his hot head into my hair.

  ‘I know – why don’t we play aeroplanes together? Neeaaoow.’

  I fan out my arms and whirl round. He gives me a little half-smile, but then sticks out his bottom lip.

  All at once his face crumples.

  ‘M-Mum! M-Mum!’

  ‘Don’t cry – it’s OK. Hey, look at this!’

  I do a body-builder pose to try to make him laugh, but he’s opened his mouth wide and is bellowing.

  ‘MUUUUUUUMMMMUUUUUMMMM!’

  Mum snaps open the back door. Her neck is corded, the tendons jumping out alarmingly.

  ‘What the hell has happened? What have you done to him?’

  She snatches up Aidy in her arms as he burrows his wet face into her neck.

  ‘I didn’t do anything! He ran into the worktop!’

  Mum pinches her nose and breathes out slowly.

  ‘Sometimes I just don’t know what to do with you.’

  Aidy twists his head round, blinking fast.

  ‘Issa didn’t . . . She didn’t . . . She helped me . . .’ he gasps in between sobs.

  ‘Shh, I know, darling. She’s done enough.’ Mum glowers at me.

  This is so completely, utterly unfair.

  ‘I didn’t do anything!’ My voice is getting louder.

  ‘Just get out!’ snaps Mum, stroking Aidy’s head.

  Aidy is watching me with wide eyes.

  ‘Issa helped!’ he cries.

  ‘I wish you would learn to grow up!’ says Mum.

  I can feel blood pumping in my neck. I’ve had enough of this.

  ‘Well, I wish I wasn’t forced to spend my life with you in this prison cell you call a house!’ I shout back.

  ‘Just go!’

  ‘Gladly!’

  When I get upstairs, I slam my bedroom door shut and curl up on my bed. I wind my duvet round and round me like I used to when I was a kid until I’m cocooned in softness.

  It’s just so unfair. It’s all so, so unfair.

  I stare down at the duvet. I wish my mum didn’t behave like this. Other people’s mums don’t behave like this – they actually care about their daughters. Other girls’ mums seem to either be their best friend or they let them just get on with it.

  I can’t imagine being friends with my mum. I don’t even want that, not really. I just wish she’d leave me alone to do my own thing. I wish I didn’t have to be part of this family who so clearly don’t want me.

  Tears start rolling down my cheeks. As I reach out of the duvet and rub my eyes, black smears appear on my sleeve, ruining my white top. I don’t even care.

  I need something to blot out the pain of living in this family. I need to step into a world where people don’t scream and shout and hate each other.

  I pull my phone towards me and click open Lily’s vlog channel, LilyLives.

  There’s one video of hers that I always go to when I’m down.

  It’s from years ago, when Lily and Bryan had just moved into their flat. In the video their whole life is packed up in boxes, and they’re sitting cross-legged on a stripped-wood floor in their living room.

  Bryan pulls out a threadbare rug for them to sit on and balances his guitar on his lap. Lily has lit candles, and the whole room is bathed in a warm light.

  ‘OK, guys,’ Bryan says to me. His rings clink as he plucks a couple of guitar strings. ‘This is a song for Lily.’

  His black beard tickles the top of the guitar body as he starts strumming. Lily’s face is shining against the glow of the candle flames.

  Bryan stops playing.

  ‘What’s up? Are you crying?’

  ‘It’s nothing, no. It’s nothing,’ says Lily, shaking her head.

  But her eyes are glistening. He puts his head on one side.

  ‘I’m just so happy,’ she whispers.

  Bryan leans across the floor to hug her.

  I wish this was my life. I wish I had a boyfriend like Bryan. I wish I lived in London in a stylish flat and had the best make-up money can buy.

  I open my laptop on the picture I published of me and Andy – but I can’t feel happy. The comments aren’t working their magic any more. I frantically click through the photos I took in the garden, but none of them are good enough. None of them are pretty enough. None of them are right.

  Let’s face it: I am never going to have a life like Lily with an amazing boyfriend, a cool job and a multimillion-pound flat.

  I look at my crappy room and feel gross lumps of glitter eyeshadow sticking to my tears. My make-up is a smeary mess. I know I look disgusting.

  I wish I could wave a magic wand and change everything.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lily

  I press my forehead against the cool, hard glass of the train window. The air has a faint disinfectant odour, and the seats are warm and clammy beneath my legs. Towering industrial blocks glide past the tracks. I sigh and my breath steams up the window. I feel utterly numb.

  Instinctively, I glance down at my phone. When I walked out on Bryan, I rang my mum in tears, and she demanded I come home straight away. I’ve got three missed calls from Mindy – wanting my input on decisions about next season’s tote-bag designs, and which upcoming sponsorships I’m willing to accept. My phone starts buzzing again, and I turn it off.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do about work. I’ve barely brought anything with me. At least I’ve got my laptop and portable camera, so I can do some vlogging and be on my emails. But the last thing I feel like doing is filming. I just want to go back home, where I feel safe, and forget about Bryan, YouTube, all of this.

  But it doesn’t stop – I have to upload my sponsored videos. For that I need my big camera, my tripods, the memory card, the files saved on my main computer.

  I don’t know when I’ll be coming back to get them. What am I going to do? Why am I even leaving?

  What happened to us?

  Bryan has never spoken to me like that before. I don’t know why he said those things about money. I make more than I did before – what’s the issue? I can pay him more if he wants. What does he want? As the tower blocks flatten out to terraces, my mind flicks back to when I first met Bryan.

  We were at university and I had just arrived as a fresher in London. Before then I had always imagined university as being some kind of giant sleepover with your friends – so much freedom, the time to study something interesting and no real-life responsibilities. I was scared about swapping my sleepy village for a wired city, but I was also excited.

  The problem was no one in my halls was like me. On my first day, I remember one boy repeatedly asking me which school I had been to. I couldn’t work out why – there was no way he would have heard of my tiny village school.

  When I finally told him, he asked, ‘Is that a public school?’

  After finding out it wasn’t, he huffed and turned away from me – shutting me out of the group.

  The girls weren’t any better.

  At the end of first year, we had midsummer ball, and I spent all day getting ready. I curled my long blonde hair into ringlets, applied fake lashes and wore this long, slinky grey dress that made me feel like a model.

  The other girls were dressed in dainty, Laura Ashley-esque frocks that came down to their knees – and low shoes that my mum would have worn.

  When she saw me, Emma, the girl who lived in the room opposite, pulled a face.

  ‘Er, what are
you wearing?’ she said.

  The others started sniggering.

  At that moment, one of the guys barged past, straightening his bow tie.

  ‘Oh man, Lil, you don’t want to be intelligent, do you?’ He smirked. ‘You can just stand there and look pretty.’

  The girls all laughed. My cheeks grew way too hot. No matter what I did, it felt like I wasn’t the same as them. I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong.

  In the first few days, I realized I could never tell them about my beauty channel. It was already something I was mildly embarrassed about. No one else I knew made weird videos of themselves in their bedroom, and I only had 12,000 followers at that point. I ended up not filming the whole time I lived in halls.

  My friends already thought I was stupid – what would they have said if they heard me talking to myself in my room, making a video about the best waterproof mascara or my favourite smudge-proof lip stains? I was terrified they’d stumble across one of my videos online and find out.

  I met Bryan in my first week at an arts club with my sort-of friend Camilla, who was obsessed with pulling alternative rock guys.

  Bryan crashed into the bar next to me wearing a fluorescent pink T-shirt and jeans that had more rips than material. His pupils were wide, and his forehead gleamed with sweat. He turned to me, slapping his palms on the table.

  ‘Lost my wallet. Fancy getting me a drink?’

  It took me a while to work out that Bryan was even posher than my university friends. As an only child who spent his life at boarding school, he started university with a portfolio of London property from his parents, which had been in his name since birth. I’d never met anyone like Bryan – someone who had enough money for a lifetime, and the belief that he could do anything.

  When I told him about my university friends, he started laughing.

  ‘Who wants to spend their life working twenty-four hours a day for some soulless bank or law firm? Live a little.’

  Over the next couple of years, he showed me what London was like. The real London, not my bubble of student bars, union nights and wannabe toffs. The thumping, endless gigs of local music. The free museums, sprawling parks and all-night house parties.

  The next time some guys from my hall laughed at me for not knowing what the FTSE 100 was, Bryan cut in.

  ‘Did you hear about the merger of Sentinel and Prime? It’s going to change the landscape of venture capital.’

  They then spent thirty minutes competitively interrupting each other to talk about finance.

  ‘They’re a bunch of arseholes,’ Bryan whispered to me later, once we were walking back to his flat. ‘I mean, do you even know what Sentinel Prime is?’

  I sighed. ‘No, you know I don’t know this stuff. I have no idea.’

  He grinned. ‘Well, neither do they . . . Lil – you must know Sentinel Prime. What did you watch as a kid? It’s the name of a Transformers robot.’

  When we first moved in together, I remember feeling like I was finally home. I no longer had to live in tiny, cramped halls with shared bathrooms and disgusting, broken kitchens. His flat was huge and immaculate. I didn’t have to spend my nights listening to jumped-up young men boasting about internships while floppy-haired girls hung on their every word. Bryan’s friends were all artists, actors and musicians – who never once asked me where I went to school.

  I felt like I had my life back – not the simple life I’d had in Suffolk, but a new, lively London life.

  The more time we spent together, the more I fell in love with Bryan. His music, his friends, his style – the easy way he looked at the world . . .

  I chew my lip and glance outside. The sun is beginning to set, bathing the quiet green hills in twilight. For a moment I watch the clouds moving gently against the golden sky.

  When I refocus on the window, the girl in my reflection has tears staining her cheeks.

  CHAPTER 14

  Melissa

  I walk into class on Monday morning and see Suze staring out of the window.

  ‘Hey,’ I whisper, sliding into the seat next to her and glancing at the whiteboard.

  Our form tutor, Mrs Brown, is still fussing at the front of class, smoothing her frumpy floral cardigan over her hips. She fumbles through the papers on her desk, rubbing her chin. Then she taps her ears, and her swollen fingers grasp the spectacles perched on top of her head. A slow smile catches on her lips as she slips them on to her nose.

  Suze is now texting someone, but when I sit down she covers the screen and turns her phone over.

  ‘Who are you messaging?’ I say, gently nudging Suze’s shoulder.

  Her cheeks pinken.

  Silently, she looks down at her planner and starts crossing off homework from last week.

  ‘Shush, everyone! Turn round to face the board. I need to be able to actually hear you, you know!’ shouts Mrs Brown.

  I inch down in my seat so I’m almost nose to nose with Suze.

  ‘Hey, what’s up? How was swing band dress rehearsal?’ I hiss.

  She shrugs. ‘Fine.’

  I sit up. ‘Suze,’ my voice falters. ‘What’s wrong? Why aren’t you talking to me?’

  She turns and looks at me. ‘So now you want to talk about it?’

  I open my mouth, then close it again. What is she on about?

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ says Suze.

  Sighing, she pulls out her phone and clicks open Google. In a matter of seconds, she’s pulled up a stream of photos from my blog. There’s the Brighton one, the little black dress, and – I take a sharp breath – there’s the Photoshopped image of Andy and me that I published last night.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she says again.

  An uncomfortably hot feeling sweeps across my head, ears and neck.

  ‘I-I . . .’

  Oh my God, why did I ever tell Suze about my blog? I should have kept it secret from everyone at school. That’s basic. Why am I so stupid?

  I don’t know what to say. Oh God. What should I say?

  I shake my head and give a little snort. ‘What are you talking about? What’s so wrong with having a blog?’

  ‘What’s so wrong with having a blog? I’m your best friend; I’ve never seen that dress; it doesn’t even look like you. And who is this guy? When have you been to Brighton? I don’t get it.’

  I look at my hands. I just wish she’d stop talking.

  ‘What don’t you get?’ I say sharply. I can feel my cheeks betraying me and flushing red. ‘What are you trying to say? That I can’t look as good as that? I bought that dress last weekend, actually. I went to Brighton for a christening a couple of weeks ago; I told you that the other day. And I met this guy –’ I stab her phone screen – ‘on Friday with Chloe and Louise.’

  Suze stares at me.

  ‘What is your problem? Do you not believe that I could have a life like that?’

  At that moment Mrs Brown looks right at me.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, will you girls STOP NATTERING!’

  We wait a few seconds before continuing our conversation in hushed tones.

  ‘It’s not that. It’s just . . . what you’re doing . . . It’s not right. What are people going to say when they find out?’ she hisses.

  I stare at the front of class, ignoring her. The more she says, the more my cheeks inflame. I’m red from head to toe. I just want to run straight out of the class, out of school and disapparate into thin air.

  ‘It’s the truth,’ I say, my jaw tight. ‘Why can’t you believe me?’

  Suze purses her lips. After a couple of seconds she lets out a long breath.

  ‘OK, fine. Look, you’re my best friend. If you say it’s true, I believe you.’

  My eyes widen.

  ‘Really?’

  She clicks her tongue against her teeth.

  ‘Fine. Yes, whatever. Let’s not talk about it any more. So who is this guy?’

  My whole body relaxes.

  ‘His name is Andy. I don�
��t know him, not really. He’s friends with Tom – you know Tom Taylor in lower sixth? Anyway, he’s really nice. He actually invited me to a party—’

  ‘A house party?’

  ‘Yeah, at this guy Rish’s on Friday. Why don’t you come? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.’

  Two spots of pink appear on Suze’s cheeks.

  ‘Oh no, no, I couldn’t. I’m busy with swing band stuff. You go. So what’s he like, Andy? Do you have any other pictures of him?’

  I carefully pull up his Facebook – making sure to avoid the photo I used for my blog – and let Suze see a couple of the others.

  When she sees the screen, she starts wriggling her eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, I wonder what you find so nice about him. His brains?’

  ‘Suze!’ I nudge her in the ribs.

  Her face creases up. ‘His posture? His good manners?’ She puts on a snooty voice. ‘His honourable reputation?’

  It’s so stupid, but I can’t help it – I start laughing too. All the tension from before leaves my limbs. It feels so good to laugh like kids.

  ‘Nooo! It’s much, erm, deeper than that,’ I say.

  ‘You mean lower?’

  Suze gives me a significant look, and I collapse into giggles.

  ‘Will you girls LISTEN FOR ONCE? The bell went five minutes ago!’ thunders Mrs Brown.

  I look up at her and realize we’re the last two people in class. Oh, shit. We’ll have to run to make it in time to the languages block.

  Suze and me snatch up our planners and almost sprint through the corridors. We arrive at French red-faced with tendrils of hair sticking to our faces.

  I link arms with Suze and, still giggling, we saunter into French.

  As we’re opening our textbooks, my phone buzzes with a new blog comment.

  Wow, Issa, you look . . .

  My hand flies over the screen. I glance at Suze, who is rifling through her pencil case, and shove the phone out of sight, under the band of my skirt.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lily

  The cottage where I grew up is in the middle of a quiet village by a river in the Suffolk countryside. As a teenager, I hated being in the middle of nowhere, but after living in London I love coming back to a place where there are more sheep than people and at night you can see the stars.