AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It must have been bad enough for your beautiful, nineteen-year-old niece to kill herself after breaking up with her boyfriend, but to watch that boyfriend go on, year after year, growing bigger and bigger and more and more famous. To watch his YouTube subscribers tip a million, and then two and then ten million—to watch his followers lapping up his rhetoric, more and more of them hitting that like and subscribe… I had watched some of Conor’s videos since getting off the island, sitting on the toilet with the door locked and the shower running to cover the sound, and I had become more and more disturbed. Beneath the faux-reasonable tone was a vein of poison that his supporters celebrated openly in the comments. Yes, I could imagine that a man like Baz would not be able to stand by and watch that.
“Car crash TV” was what Joel had called One Perfect Couple, and he’d been more right than he knew. A car crash was exactly what Baz had been aiming for—an engineered one, with Conor at the wheel. But with Conor’s supporters weighing in on social media, it wouldn’t have been just car crash TV, it would have been viral car crash TV, and a double win for Baz: a ratings bonanza for him, and a career-destroying meltdown for Conor. Baz would have walked away a made man—the hero who exposed a YouTube guru for the problematic misogynist he was, and created the must-watch show of the year. The rest of us… well, we were just cannon fodder.
There was a long silence. I could see the other three women slowly turning my suggestions over in their heads.
“It would explain why they hadn’t sold it,” Santana said slowly. “If the draw was going to be this prominent YouTuber melting down on-screen… well they’d kind of have to wait for that to happen before they could present it as a USP. But… God. Could it be true? It seems… it seems crazy.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. But it’s the only way I can make sense of all these threads leading back to both Conor and Baz. I mean, your friend Cally—I don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?”
Santana shook her head. Her face was pale.
“And I don’t know much about reality TV, but it seems to me that what Baz was attempting, it’s kind of just an extension of what they all do, isn’t it? They pick volatile people, people who’re going to perform for the cameras, they wind them up as tight as they can, they engineer a bunch of high-stress situations that are practically guaranteed to make someone lose their shit, throw in some alcohol—and then they sit back and let the cameras roll and the tweets pour in.”
“Fuck,” Angel said. “I mean, it is crazy, but you are right—all these links to Cally, they don’t make sense otherwise. So Baz destroys his enemy, and creates the TV événement of the year. And fuck the rest of us in the process.”
“Jesus,” Santana said. Her jaw was clenched, a muscle there ticcing. When she spoke again, her voice sounded like it was coming through gritted teeth. “Jesus Christ. I knew this whole thing was shitty from the start. I didn’t even want to do it, it was Dan’s idea. He’s never wanted to be ‘just’ a model.” She put air quotes around the word. “He’s always wanted to be an actor or a presenter. I mean…” She trailed off, realizing her mistake. “He always wanted.”
“Fuck him,” Angel said. There was a contained fury in her voice that I’d never heard before. “L’homme de ma vie—my poor Bayer, he is dead. And for what? For nothing! For Baz to make his stupid plan! Seriously, fuck him!”
Zana was bent forward, and her hands were over her face. I couldn’t tell if she was crying, and if so whether it was with shock, grief, or relief. Maybe all three.
But when she sat up, I saw that she was laughing—laughing through her tears with a kind of bitter, mirthless fury.
“If this is true—” She was struggling to get the words out. “If this is true, then you know, you know the fucking worst thing?”
She gave a kind of hiccupping gulping laugh, and I shook my head. Angel and Santana were looking at her with a mix of horror and sympathy.
“We’ve made a fucking hero out of him,” Zana managed. She was rocking back and forth, almost crouching, her head in her hands, but now she threw back her head. “That diary—that fucking diary I wrote. We’ve made him into a saint. Have you seen the headlines?”
She dug in her pocket for her phone, tapped something into the search bar and held it out.
“Look. Look.”
I leaned forward, peering at the tiny screen. And there it was in black and white, headline after headline—most of them illustrated with Conor’s charming, grinning face.
YouTuber’s Tragic Death Saving Pals
Co-Bros Mourn the Loss of Their Hero as British YouTuber Conor Brian Reported Dead
Conor Brian: A Remarkable Life. A Selfless Death. A Last Gift to the World.
I pushed the phone away.
“That was what Baz achieved,” Zana spat. “He put us all through hell, just to canonize his enemy. And now we all have to live with this—this lie forever. And I have to live with what I did—with what I let happen.”
There were tears streaming down her face, and I didn’t know whether it was because of Conor or everything else. Maybe all of it.
“Look,” I said. I took the phone out of Zana’s hand, switched off the screen. “Look, Zana. Baz is dead, Conor is dead—they’re all dead.” A lump rose in my throat, thinking of Dan, of Joel, of Bayer, of Romi, and the poor, nameless producer—and of Nico, of his last words to me. You set me up. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This wasn’t what we agreed! And it was true—more true than any of us could have known at the time. We were all set up. None of us had agreed to Baz’s stupid, stupid plan. “They’re dead,” I said again, my voice more vehement than I had meant it to sound, “and there is nothing we can do to change that. We can’t help them. We can’t fix what they did or change what they suffered. All we can do is protect the living—protect us.” I looked around the circle. “And that is what I’m going to do. No matter the cost. Okay?”
There was a long silence. Then Angel nodded.
“Yes. Fuck Baz. Fuck Conor’s legacy. So it is a lie. So it is of lots of people. The living is what matters. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Santana said. Her face was wet, and she dashed at her eyes. “Zana?”
“Okay,” Zana said. Her voice was low. “But I hate that you’re doing this for me.”
