My [Secret] YouTube Life

by Charlotte Seager

  Sliding off the bed, I go over to the mirror and peer at my face.

  I don’t look how I think I look – or how I want to look. My eyelashes are tiny without mascara, and my chin is covered in tiny red bumpy spots.

  But I don’t look bad, not exactly. I don’t look amazing, like an Instagram model. But I do look . . . nice.

  Tilting my head to one side, I run my hands down over my body, feeling my soft skin beneath my shirt. Slowly, I peel off my jumper and polo shirt. My stomach stares back at me.

  I unbuckle my trousers and slowly slip them off – until I’m standing there in the mirror in just my underwear.

  My body doesn’t look like a Victoria’s Secret model’s. My hips are bigger, and my boobs are smaller. But knowing that doesn’t fill me with disgust.

  I look at me. Not me on Instagram – the real me. I look OK.

  Not beautiful. Not ugly. Not thin. Not fat. Just OK.

  But not just OK. I look . . . like me.

  I pull a funny face in the mirror and almost make myself laugh out loud.

  Maybe I don’t actually have to look like the girls on Instagram. Maybe I don’t have to be skinny with huge breasts, lips and bum. Maybe I don’t even have to look as good as someone like Lily.

  Lily’s life wasn’t perfect, was it? And she always looked amazing.

  And mine isn’t either, but it doesn’t need to be. I have Suze. And I guess Mum, Dad and Aidy. And even Rish. He’s my friend, sorta.

  At that moment, Aidy starts battering on my bedroom door.

  ‘Wait!’ I cry, leaping up and throwing on my clothes as quickly as I can.

  A split second after I’ve finished doing up my trousers, Aidy bursts into the room.

  ‘Issssssssa!’ he yelps, flinging himself at the bedpost and rolling on to my legs.

  I try to prod him off, but he immediately starts giggling. Reluctantly, my lips stretch into a smile. I try to nudge him again, but he rolls round and clutches my knees, beaming up at me.

  ‘Right. That’s it, little man!’

  I grab his toes, hold them down, and tickle him.

  ‘Stop!’ he shrieks, rolling around with laughter. ‘Stop!’

  My mobile bleeps with a text. I let go of his legs.

  ‘Your phone!’ he shouts, and leaps up – charging out of the room.

  My eyes crinkle as I reach for the message.

  It’s Suze. She’s sent me a picture of a double-decker ice-cream dessert her and Abi have ordered, with strawberry sauce and blue sweets spilling over the edge.

  S: See! I can Instagram too ;)

  I send her a crying-with-laughter emoji.

  I: Never said you couldn’t! But umm this is WhatsApp, not Instagram . . .

  As I unlock my phone, I notice I also have a message on Facebook.

  My face falls.

  Oh God, who is going to be messaging me on Facebook – Chloe, Louise? – what are they going to say?

  I take a deep breath and open the chat box.

  It’s from Rish.

  R: Nice of you to say bye

  There’s a ding as another message arrives.

  R: You around for lunch tomorrow?

  I: Sorry!! No. I’m going to swing band at lunch

  R: You? At swing band?

  I stare at his message for a second before replying.

  I: Yes :) I go to swing band with Suze

  Rish sends a thumbs-up emoji by way of response.

  I scroll back to look at the photo of Suze’s ice cream that she sent me. The angle is all wrong – you can only see half the dessert, and you can tell she doesn’t know how to adjust the brightness levels. The vanilla isn’t crisp white, the blue sweets blend into the bowl and the strawberry sauce doesn’t pop out from my screen.

  But somehow it doesn’t look wrong – it looks right.

  Like me.

  ONE YEAR

  LATER

  CHAPTER 62

  Lily

  The wind rattles a chime dangling from the thatched porch of the old stone cottage, the front door wrapped with green vines and pink hollyhocks. Chris, who has two boxes balanced on one shoulder, curses as an antique bell falls out of a gap in the cardboard and lands heavily on his bare foot.

  I start giggling.

  ‘Glad to know someone found that funny,’ he says, kneeling down to pick up the bell and squinting through the sunlight.

  I smile back at him and hoist a couple more boxes out of the van and down the stone cobbles of the cottage. I pause halfway down the path to balance the boxes on my knees and rub my aching limbs.

  We’ve been at it all day, moving boxes out of the van into my new home. It’s one of my houses I had rented out in the next hamlet along from our village. The couple came to the end of their tenancy, so I’ve decided to move in.

  When I reach the front porch, I stand at the entranceway and sigh, feeling a wash of love for the building already. I fell in love with it when I bought it a couple of years ago. It’s kind of old-fashioned, and the décor is a bit naff, but I’m planning to redecorate it in a country-cottage style with Mum’s help.

  I run my fingertips along the thick wooden beam hanging low across the dining room. Chris comes up behind me and places his arms round my waist, then begins nuzzling my neck.

  ‘What do you want doing with those? I think they’re just bits of paper,’ he mumbles into me, nodding towards a stack of boxes on a sagging, floral-patterned chair.

  I give Chris a quick peck on the cheek and untangle myself from his embrace to get a closer look.

  I’d asked Bryan to send through any of my mail that accidentally got sent to the London flat, so this must be it. The box is spilling over with bill letters, council tax notices, bank statements from months ago.

  ‘I don’t need any of this,’ I say mildly, plucking a piece of paper at random.

  ‘OK – all going in the skip,’ jokes Chris, swinging the box on to his shoulder.

  Suddenly the stack of letters topples over and papers splay out across the floor.

  ‘Christ,’ he says, and I roll my eyes. He kneels down to pick them up.

  ‘Here, let me.’

  As I’m throwing them back in the box, I notice a brightly coloured pamphlet that must have been posted through Bryan’s front door. On the front is a picture of a beaming brown-haired teenager, who looks vaguely familiar, with the word ‘LIAR’ printed across her face. At the bottom of the paper is a scribbled note:

  I knew Melissa Davies was lying all along! I never doubted you, Lily!

  Love, your biggest fan,

  Keely Thorpe

  xoxoxox

  Melissa Davies? Why does that sound familiar?

  I frown. Wait a second . . . that girl in the picture. I know her! She’s the girl who took the photo of me and Chris, isn’t she?

  It can’t be.

  I unlock my phone and type ‘LilyLoves cheating girl photo’ into Google images. It’s flooded with that same screenshot of the girl, with various abusive messages.

  Oh my God. It happened to both of us. This is an awful thing to happen to her . . .

  I start searching for a way to contact her, but it’s like she’s erased herself from the internet. Her blog no longer exists. There isn’t a Facebook page, Instagram or Twitter. It’s all other people’s screenshots.

  Nibbling my lip, I open my emails, and in a last-ditch attempt type ‘Melissa Davies’ into the search bar.

  One unread email pops up, entitled ‘I’m Sorry’.

  As my eyes scan the page, Chris leans over me, his lips on my shoulder.

  ‘Stop working. Turn off your phone,’ he murmurs, kissing my neck.

  ‘One second, I need to do this.’

  I hit reply.

  Melissa,

  I just wanted to write to you to say you have absolutely nothing to apologize for. It wasn’t your fault at all. I should be the one apologizing.

  I just wanted to let you know that, for me, it was utterly overwhelming –
YouTube, Bryan, all of it. I’ve seen what happened to you online, so I know that (like me) you know how it feels to have millions of people talking about you. I wish you didn’t know what that was like, but I wanted to tell you that it does get better.

  I’m sorry for letting you down. I know I should have been more honest about my relationship with Bryan – about everything, really.

  I hope you understand, but even if you don’t, I just want you to know that I am truly sorry.

  To all 3,054,263 of you.

  Lily x

  CHAPTER 63

  Melissa

  The concourse is weirdly silent. You can even hear the slow tick of the clock by the main corridor. I’m crouched over a table in the sixth-form block, an assortment of revision cards spread out over the desk. I’m not exactly great at art, but I’ve decorated each revision note with crude pictures and multicoloured labels that show what I’m learning.

  Rish rakes his hands through his hair and pushes himself away from the desk.

  ‘I can’t do this any more. We need to get out.’

  I look up. Suze got the GCSEs she needed to get into grammar school, so now I only see her at weekends, while me and Rish have the same free periods, so we’ve ended up spending almost every day leading up to exams in the sixth-form block together revising. Him for his A levels, and me for my mocks. It’s exhausting.

  I glance at my phone. ‘We’ve got about thirty minutes until third period.’

  Rish slams his hand on the desk, rattling the table. ‘Right. Let’s go.’

  After signing out at reception, it feels oddly freeing to just walk out of school. I giggle as Rish almost skips into the park. Once we get to our old stone block by the river, where we always sit, Rish gives me a lift up so I can scramble on top, and then swings his legs round so we’re both sat facing the ducks.

  ‘What do you reckon, Mr and Mrs Duck?’ says Rish, pointing at a pair. ‘Or Mr Duck, Mrs Duck having an affair with that stud over there? Mr Duck getting suspicious.’

  I squint at the flock.

  ‘Hmm . . . I reckon that little duckling knows about the affair but is keeping quiet.’

  Rish raises his eyebrows.

  ‘But he’s told the other ducklings, look.’

  One tiny duck starts squawking and nudging into the others. Suddenly they tumble over one another into a fluffy mess, and the mother duck turns round, confused.

  Me and Rish burst out laughing.

  ‘Man, we must have been inside too long. Laughing at ducks,’ he says.

  I smile and glance at the time on my phone. I so desperately don’t want to go back inside and learn another ten dates about the rise of the Nazis before the Second World War.

  My phone lights up with a new email. Weird. Everyone I know has my number or WhatsApp. Who would email me? I click it open.

  Oh my God!

  It’s a message from LilyLoves.

  I stare dumbly at the phone for a moment. I love her new videos, even more so than before. It meant so much to hear how she suffered – the online abuse, the trolls. It felt so familiar to me that I actually cried when I first watched that video.

  If anything, it made me realize Lily is just a person, like me. She’s not someone I know, not like Suze, or Rish. But she is someone who puts herself out there online. Someone who cares about helping others.

  I hold up my phone and squint at the screen.

  ‘What are you doing, vlogging them?’ says Rish, nodding to the ducks. ‘Next you’ll have Instagram-filtered them into smooth blobs.’

  I know he’s joking, but I feel myself flush. I can’t believe he’s still bringing this up.

  ‘Shut up!’ I nudge his shoulder.

  Rish laughs so hard, I can see nearly all his teeth.

  I think back to my IssaAdores blog, and my whole body cringes. Rish knows I don’t have Instagram any more, or a blog. I can’t even remember the last time I took a selfie.

  ‘Ugh, please don’t remind me.’

  ‘Fine, fine.’ He grins.

  I look out over the river and see a woman on a bench holding a baby. Her lips are thin, her face is lightly lined, and she’s wearing a billowing jumper – but she’s laughing as the baby flings lumps of bread at the flock and the ducks keep missing them. Her face is a picture. Just watching them makes me smile.

  Without thinking about what my fingers are doing, I slip my phone back into my pocket.

  I’ll read it in a bit. Lily can wait.

  The ducks are really going for it now. Two of the brighter-coloured male ducks start snapping their beaks at each other’s tail feathers.

  Rish leans in. ‘Uh-oh, Mr Duck just found out,’ he whispers.

  His breath tickles my cheek and a tingling feeling sweeps up the back of my neck, ears and cheeks. I glance at his big face in surprise.

  He groans and lies down on the stone. ‘I really don’t want to go back and revise.’

  I tilt my head up to the sun and close my eyes. I can feel the rough stone beneath my fingertips, my legs swinging free, hear the gentle lap of the water and the sound of kids laughing as they chase the birds.

  And it’s real.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charlotte Seager lives in London with her partner David and her cat Ruby. She grew up in the Suffolk countryside and moved to London after university to join The Guardian as a writer on the children’s books site. She went on to be editor of the Guardian Careers desk, before moving papers earlier this year to join The Times and The Sunday Times as engagement editor, building online communities.

  Her interest in YouTube started as a 14-year-old using Google after school to try and find a way to create the perfect eyeliner flick, back when it was all fuzzy webcam recordings with no audio. Working as a journalist in London, a chance meeting with a couple of YouTubers sparked the idea for the novel, as she became fascinated by how different our lives can be online and offline.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is dedicated to my best friend, my Mum, who has always been my first reader. You gave me the confidence to write my own story, and through your endless empathy and kindness, taught me how to walk in other people’s skin. This book wouldn’t be here without you.

  I’d also like to thank you, Dad. For passing on all your secondhand books and teaching me to never give up. As a child, I remember watching you clock off as a telephone engineer and then work all through the night renovating the derelict, boarded-up pub we lived in. Looking back, I’m not sure that you ever slept. But watching you and Mum work so hard and achieve so much showed me that anything is possible.

  A huge thank you to my partner and (by the time you read this, husband) David. I won’t get too gushy, as you know I hate that, but your help has been everything. You’ve been with me every step of the way and you support me in everything I do.

  I also want to thank my brilliant editor, George Lester. Every one of your suggestions made the book better. Through your artful edits, you brought the story to life – and I’m so, so pleased that you are my editor.

  Thank you to my brothers, James and George. James: for teaching me so much about people and life – and George, for being a scarily astute first reader who (at 17) is already cleverer than I’ll ever be.

  Thank you to Martin Williams, the first published author I had ever met. Your comments when I sent you the first chapters were just the encouragement I needed to finish the book.

  Finally, I’d like to thank: the whole of the wonderful Macmillan children’s team, my agent Annette Green for believing in the book from the beginning, Poppy Simmons, for being one of my first readers. And all my closest friends (you know who you are) without whom this story wouldn’t have been half as fun.

  Most importantly, I’d like to thank you for reading my book. Over the months I spent writing this, all I wanted was for one person to read the story and connect with it.

  Thank you.

  Charlotte x

  First published 2018 by Macmillan Children�
��s Books

  This electronic edition published 2018 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5290-0205-8

  Copyright © Charlotte Seager 2018

  Cover design © Helen Crawford-White

  The right of Charlotte Seager to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset by Nigel Hazle

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