Chapter Text
Mia isn’t, like, a complete idiot.
Okay, her mom had tried to talk her out of it — had sighed in her after-work uniform of old sweatpants and white wine, said that most successful accounts were the results of super involved momagers, and that beauty culture and makeup and social media are damaging to young women’s sense of worth or whatever. When Mom snapped after weeks of pushing and pulling, crying, guilting, bargaining, she’d set it up with her information, security locks, comments turned off.
But Mia already had her own Youtube account set up, her own email. She just needed an excuse to be filming. And the thrill of lying, carving out a frame of privacy where she can be herself without Mom or Dad approving it first is all so exciting.
Which is good, because the start of her channel is lowkey a flop. She doesn’t really get why, she does all the same things super popular channels do: vlogging, tutorials, story times, tea reports, everything. She rarely breaks, like, 50 views.
It gets a little better in the summer, but she’s so busy, too. Her parents always sign her up for a million things because they still work all day. She even still has a babysitter, which is ridiculous, if you ask Mia.
Not that Mia doesn’t like Laura. She’s known her since she was, like, a baby, and Laura was in college, and now she’s married and has two sons who are, like, real, annoying babies still, so it kinda works for them both that Mia doesn’t actually need supervision anymore.
She’s at Laura’s, belly to her living floor, trying to edit one of her videos. It’s easy enough to cut out awkward moments with the program that came with her computer but trying to do anything funny or actually cool is serving to be basically impossible. The boring videos are fine for the account her mom set up, but if she actually wants anyone to watch them…
Eventually she just has to lean face down into the floor, her face red and hot with frustration. People do this as their jobs, whole teams of people, and she’s just supposed do everything herself on a crappy tablet her mom was done with? It’s not fair.
“Having issues?” a deep voice asks behind her, and she jolts to sit up, rubbing furiously at her eyes.
Laura’s husband, Alec, isn’t like other dads in Mia’s neighborhood. She’d gone to school down in California and come back with him all sunny, tanned, and confident. He’s old enough that Mia’s mom and dad had grumbled through the ceremony but he definitely isn’t as old as Dad, and definitely a whole lot cooler.
“It’s fine,” Mia says automatically, glancing at him for a second before turning away completely. Her head feels like it’s emptied out completely. It always does around Alec, even though he’s never been anything but super nice to her.
As even more proof that her response was a total overreaction, Alec comes to sit down next to her, legs criss-crossed. “Oh, doing a bit of production work, huh?”
“I guess,” Mia mumbles, hands automatically going to her hair and pulling it tight between her fingers. “I’ve been doing, like, stuff on Youtube for a couple months now, sorta.”
It feels like babbling, and it makes embarrassment bubble in Mia’s stomach. All getting older has done for her so far is make her painfully aware of how insufficient she is, unable to to string together a coherent sentence, body thin and awkward, just barely starting to stretch outward and shed its baby fat.
But Alec just makes an interested noise and leans further over the tablet. He says, “Hey, a lot of people are making a living doing that sort of thing nowadays. How’s this program working for you?”
“So bad,” Mia immediately blurts. “Or, I mean, it’s fine, but—”
“It’s not suited for a rising star such as yourself,” Alec finishes smoothly, and Mia’s face burns again, a deeper warmth. “Listen, my company uses some more pro applications and I have some extra sign-ins. They might be a little too beefy for this thing, though.”
Alec does sort of job that no one will describe past “in the film industry” to Mia. This possibility had never occurred to her, and she brightens with excitement, spine straight. “I have a laptop at home! It’s, like, pretty good. ‘S why I keep it in my room.”
Really, her parents don’t let it leave the house, and it’s supposed to stay in the living room, but no one really notices if it’s not broken or actually lost.
Alec smiles, face crinkling and teeth white. He casts a long arm over Mia’s narrow shoulders, fingers grazing down her arm before squeezing an elbow, hugging her close for a moment, the deepness of his cologne filling her nose. “That’s great, Mia. Count it as a fifth grade graduation present from me, yeah?”
.
Sixth grade. God. In some ways, Mia is super excited. She’s definitely outgrown elementary school and all the babying that entails. On the other hand, her mom has been making more and more vague — or not so vague — comments about growing up, womanhood, changes, and Mia wants some of that. Independence, responsibility, boys. Some of it sounds like total bullshit.
It’s bullshit coming from Mom, too; she’ll spend forever talking to Mia about personal responsibility then veto most of the things she wants for her back-to-school clothes shopping. Things that don’t look like they’re for kids. Lace. Cold shoulders. Rips high on the thigh.
“No,” Mom says.
“Why?” Mia demands, and the closest thing to a real argument she gets back, later, is a dismissive response of, “Well, look how that turned out for Kylie, Mia. She got knocked up how young?”
“She’s a billionaire, Mom.”
They reach a tenuous truce as Mia watches the energy drain from her mom’s face, her eyes going far off. She doesn’t get most of the stuff she really wanted, but she does get some things she can see some of the DIY videos she’s watched on Youtube going well with, so it’ll be fine. Probably.
At dinner, Mom orders a glass of whine practically before they’re seated at their table. She lets Mia order off the adult menu. Mia orders a salad, and she laughs.
“What?” Mia demands. The waiter, a boy with dark swooping hair, glances between them rapidly. Mia refuses to look at him. She can feel his eyes lingering and doesn’t want to know if they’re filled with the same sort of— of— contempt.
“Nothing,” Mom says, gulping. “My baby’s growing up.”
The next morning, Dad goes into the office for the afternoon and Mom stays in bed late. Mia decides to do a haul video.
“Hi everybody, welcome to my channel!” she says, back straight, smiling to the little blue light next to her computer’s webcam. It’s not a super creative opening, she knows. Talking to an empty room isn’t as hard as she’d heard in some how-to videos she watched before starting, but being spontaneous still doesn’t come very naturally to her. The default is better than forcing something stupid, she thinks.
“So, I go back to school in, like, two weeks, which feels totally fake. I usually like school but I’m actually, like, super nervous this year? I get good grades or whatever but a bunch of my friends are in a different district, so I’ll basically be starting over, and it’s, like, sixth grade, so there’s already so much going on…” she trails off, then shakes her head, resetting, smile in face, and then no smile, but still open and friendly. She’ll probably cut that. “Anyway, I’m super excited to start junior high! And I just got, like, a whole new super cute wardrobe to start the year.”
She goes through everything, including some stuff from last year that are still cute. It feels more awkward that she thought it would her body feels awkward. Hopefully no one will say anything mean. They should be. Mostly it’s her fifth grade friends who comment, mostly saying the sort of things that were fun in person but honestly kind of cringey to read in a public comment. Other comments are usually nice, too. Random things calling her cute, or sweet, or even beautiful.
Maybe that’s what is making her nervous. She doesn’t get any views at all compared to a lot of people, but still enough that maybe total strangers are watching her now. Being watched is maybe not a new feeling for Mia. But here, like this, she’s in control of how people see her.
Maybe that’s why she wiggles into a skirt that’s gotten super short since she first got it. Slid a tank top that’s straps had loosened in the wash, without a bra — not that she needed one the way some of the girls she knew like Cindy Schmidt who’s needed a bra since third grade and now needs two and still gets in trouble with administration for having too much cleavage. Many times, Mia has offered to switch with Cindy Schmidt.
Mia watches herself in the video preview on her computer screen, trying to see how she’ll be seen. That feeling like embarrassment rises in her again, but she doesn’t stop, either. She thinks she’s too skinny, still so flat and narrow. She has to pull her denim shorts up to make it look like she has a butt at all, until she basically has a wedgie.
Some people think she’s beautiful.
The version she’ll post to her Mom-approved channel will have to be super short. Mia’s not even sure she checks. Doesn’t matter; the stuff Alec gave her works super well.
.
Her channel hits 500 followers a few months into the school year.
“Oh, wow, that’s exciting, sweetie,” Laura says. She’s distracted, but she’s also making dinner, and also, her children are barely contained nightmares, so Mia can’t really hold it against her.
Alec echoes her congratulations. He’s sprawled in the bend of their sectional, shirtless, Nico curled against his sides with red eyes. His brother had headbutted him earlier — is still in the midst of that temper tantrum in the other room — but he seems mostly calm now.
Mia really likes their family, despite the mess. She’s sitting on a far side from Alec but she reaches out her toes just until they brush Alec’s thigh, then jerks them back when his gaze turns to her.
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” she tells him, quietly. It’s not something that needs to be a secret, really, but it still feels like one. Mia’s really starting to develop a taste of them.
He pours another one of his smiles in her direction. The air feels thin. “Oh, my pleasure.”
Just then, a crash comes from the direction of Lukas, followed by silence, then an even more enraged bout of screaming. Laura just barely doesn’t run.
“Uh,” Mia says, “should you…?”
“Nah, the boy’s fine,” Alec responds with a dismissive wave of a hand. “I don’t know where he got a flare for the dramatics from, but he definitely got his thick skull from me. So do you think you’re getting verified?”
“What?”
“On Twitter? You’re a creator on the rise, can’t have people banking on your celebrity!”
“Oh!” Mia says. “Oh, no. My mom says I’m not allowed to have one until high school.”
Alec scoffs. “Listen, Mia, you’re a young lady. There are many, many moments ahead of you where you’re going to have to realize, it’s not all about what your mommy says you can do.”
.
Middle school is not going as well as Mia had hoped. The classes are still pretty easy, but there’s a lot more work. Making friends is turning out to be the bigger challenge. She’d thought pretty much everyone would be in the same boat as her, in terms of meeting new people, but a lot of the other students seem to have been pulled from the same school—her dad explained, once she asked after a few awkward days, that their subdivision had just gotten redistricted, so it really was just her and a few other older kids that couldn’t be paid to give attention to a sixth grader.
So she turns to her channel more and more. She gets a twitter, set up with the same side accounts that created her Youtube page. She uses a fake name, kind of. Just Maya. Mostly, she just doesn’t want any of her family to find it.
Her followers keep growing — definitely more people than she knows, and in a way it’s super validating. No one she’s heard of, but they’re still nice. Alec had given her a crash course in marketing the other night and had told her about how important it is to make things personal for her viewers, so she spends as much time as she can responding to comments and DMs. Some people are super nice.
Others are. Like.
The video she did over the summer at Olivia’s birthday pool party is still her most popular video. It’d been the first time she was allowed to wear a bikini. Following that, it’s her haul video. Some others that people have requested, about dancing or gymnastics. She’s never done either of those things and she’s not very good at them, but they’re popular.
And like. Okay. There’s this boy on Twitter. Joe. He goes to high school in Texas. Joe’s super nice. Unlike some other guys, he can actually, like, hold a conversation, and they can talk about anything, like stuff on Netflix, stuff at school, her parents, how much her mom has been sleeping recently. And he listens.
Joe thinks she’s pretty. He thinks she’s pretty even when she hasn’t spent hours editing and reshooting. She can send him pictures of herself in bed, right out of the shower, after she’s messed around in her mother’s meager, expired makeup supply in hope that’ll live up to the latest MUA trend. His reaction is the same.
Sometimes, he sends her photos of him.
I could send u makeup sometime if u want haha
lol why do u have makeup?????
Lots of sisters with short attention spans. They wouldn’t notice if a few things went missing
They’d only get mad if they realized it was going to someone was pretty as you ;)
Her face flushes. She knows it’s stupid to get too comfortable online; her mom had told her roughly a million times. But Mia had Google Imaged him — she’d seen a few episodes of Catfish, thanks a bunch — when he first started messaging her, too good to be true, and found his Facebook. The pictures he sent were not from there. So she was pretty sure he actually was real, and very far away, and what’s Joe going to do, hop on a plane from Texas? He too young, too, a freshman, and doesn’t have that much money.
Another image sent through, and, wow, okay, his sisters really do have a lot. A lot of good stuff. Mia chews her lip, deep.
She sends Alec’s address. She’d tell him that Joe was actually Joanna, and they’re good friends but Mom and Dad don’t like her because she got in trouble too much, even though it was stupid stuff, and he’d believe her. Alec is easy like that. This could be easy.
.
Mia’s entire body is on fire.
That’s not true. Her chest feels shockingly cold. Bared. Her stomach trembles even as something deeper pulses to life with a melting sort of heat. A hand drifted down, almost as if to check that everything is there and real, not just a trick of the camera she’d pulled without knowing. The slight mound of her breast, the soft pinkness. Ribs sharp, stomach smooth. Fingers dip beneath elastic. Smooth, and hot, and wet.
Her phone buzzed
Fuq I love your body so much
You look so amazing Maya you don’t even know
It’s unfair that the whole world doesn’t know to treat you like the diamond you are
Breathing heavy, Mia hesitates over a response. Thank you? You too? It feels so, so good to hear it, from Joe, but the idea is maybe bubbling up in her mind before the next message even comes through.
I know anyone would love seeing you tho
.
Some controversy somewhere bubbles up, and Mia’s videos start getting flagged, then restricted, then deleted.
it’s bullshit, i never did anything wrong with any of my videos but I’M the one getting punished just because somebody else—
“You know,” Mom says from across the center console, “you could talk to me if something’s bothering you.”
No, I couldn't, Mia doesn’t snap. Especially not about this. Things have been bad before class started, and service is so bad in the school that she hadn’t been able to see the full damage being unfolded until right then. Things suck, but a lot of things suck right now, so Mia finds some joke from her life right now to vent, “I’m just talking to a girl from class about how much of a joke it is that our math teacher bombed our test grades so much just because we didn’t use his super specific, pre-approved methods. Like, we still got the right answer without cheating.”
Mom hums and asks, “What grade did you get?”
Because of course that’s her first question. “Like a B. But that’s not the point.”
It really is, you’re getting fucked over for no reason
I know a site that might work better for you tbh. No pressure, it’s a little weird, but u could actually get paid too
“And what’s the friend’s name?” she continues.
Mia rolls her eyes, as little as she can manage. “Katie.” There are three Katies in her class, and all of them refuse to go by their full or last names. She is friends with none of them.
what site is it?
And, later, once she’s in her bedroom alone and it’s late enough her parents aren’t going to say anything about the glow seeping out beneath her bedroom door,
so this kinda looks a lot like a porn website
Some ppl use it like that but it’s really just what you make of it
What’s important are its modding is super chill which is good with all the bullshit censorship popping up everywhere
You can be whoever you want to be here
.
The first time Mia takes her shirt off on camera, for anyone to see, it’s the end of spring break. Her family has just gotten back from Disneyland. Alec had spent a whole month building up how amazing Southern California is, and instead what she got was five days of her parents sniping at each other, about everything. She’d skinned her knee, literally falling behind them as they rushed toward a reservation none of them wanted to go to all for different reasons.
Mia had thought about making the argument that she was too old for Disney, and maybe they could just go to the beach of something, but the money had already been spent. The whole thing made her cry, multiple times, and the whole thing felt stupid and immature.
She and Joe had been talking about it. Things are different on the new site. Having all the shows be live really forces her to appreciate the magic of editing, and how boring she is face-to-face, or face-to-screen. Even more than that, the audience had definitely tipped more one way. Joe had said not to promote the new account and instead just let people find her, and it doesn’t seem like many of the people her age were on the ride over yet.
Joe said that there wasn’t any pressure to do anything Mia didn’t want to do, that people would watch anyway. He reminded how beautiful she is, over and over. He said that, if she wanted to, she could set up a tip jar and an Amazon Wishlist, and people would pay her, that’s how badly people want her.
It was as good an excuse as anything.
When the first tip came in, the noise had startled her. She’d just said, “I don’t know, guys, it’s pretty warm in my room. What do you think I should do?”
Joe responded Open a window lol, but others said things like Do watever you like to get comfortable :)) or fucking tease or, finally, I think that sweater looks like it isn’t helping.
“It isn’t,” she said, after a pause. She leaned back against the wall and gripped the hem, fingers digging toward her palm through the knit. She didn’t, purposefully, make a show of it.
The chat sped up, a lot. Her viewership isn’t like it was on Youtube but it’s growing faster, too. She doesn’t quite read them, but let's that warm feeling, of being seen and something else, heat her up for real. Her viewers, Joe, Alec, call her a tease in a way that doesn’t really make it clear if it’s a good thing or not, but right then it doesn’t matter.
There’s a hot want in her stomach not quite like hunger, and she practically feels out of her body as she stares at her screen, a hand reaching towards the elastic band of her training bra—and what a stupid name for them, but Mom still wouldn’t let get the real thing even though she desperately needs help—and then nudging underneath, just barely, as she asks, “Do you guys think I’m pretty?”