This morning it was the email that did it. It had come in at seven-forty-two, from her business manager, a soft-spoken man named Gary who had been handling her money for three years and who had always signed his emails with a little smiley face. This one did not have a smiley face. This one said, in four short paragraphs, that her account was overdrawn for the third month in a row, that her credit cards were at their limits, that the lease on the apartment was two months in arrears and the building's management company had begun legal proceedings, and that unless she was able to close the deal with Lumière Cosmetics today, as she had promised him she would, he did not see how he could continue to represent her.
She had read it standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand, and then she had walked very calmly into the bathroom and closed the door and put both hands on the edge of the marble sink and cried.
Ninety seconds. Then she ran the cold tap and splashed her face and looked up at herself in the mirror.
She was twenty-five years old. She was small and slim, five foot four in bare feet, with fair skin that freckled across the nose if she stayed in the sun more than ten minutes, which was why she never did. Her hair was platinum blonde, almost white, a color it had not been naturally since she was six years old, and which cost her four hundred dollars every five weeks to maintain. Her eyes were a pale, washed-out blue, and without makeup, she thought, they made her look like a frightened rabbit. She did not let anyone see her without makeup anymore. Not her friends, not Tyler, not the camera. Especially not the camera.
The camera was how she lived. Or how she had lived. Four years ago, when she was twenty-one and working behind the counter of a frozen yogurt shop in a strip mall in the town where she grew up, she had posted a video of herself doing her makeup in the shop's bathroom mirror on her break, talking about a breakup, half laughing and half crying, and it had been seen by three million people. She still did not entirely understand why. Something about her face, people said in the comments. Something about how real she was. Within six months she had four hundred thousand followers and a manager and a deal with a hair care brand. Within a year she had moved to the city. Within two she had a million followers, an apartment on the twenty-sixth floor of a glass building downtown with a view of the river, a closet the size of her mother's living room, and a boyfriend named Tyler who owned three restaurants and a bright orange supercar and liked to be photographed with her.
And then, slowly, then all at once, it had begun to slip away.
She could not have said exactly when it started. The numbers had simply stopped going up. And then they had begun, almost imperceptibly, to go down. A few thousand followers a month. Then ten thousand. The brands that had once called her every week began calling every month, and then not at all. The algorithm changed, people said. The audience moved on. There were younger girls now, prettier girls, girls who were more real than she was, or better at seeming real, which on the internet was the same thing. Brooke had tried everything. She had posted more. She had posted less. She had done challenges and trends and collaborations and a disastrous podcast. She had spent money she did not have on clothes and trips and restaurants and a stylist and a photographer, because you had to look like you were winning, everyone knew that, the moment you looked like you were losing, you were finished.
She looked like she was winning. She was a very good actress. Nobody knew that she was eleven weeks behind on her rent, or that she had sold three of her designer handbags on a resale website under a fake name last month to cover her car insurance, or that her mother back home had called four times this week and she had not picked up once, because she could not bear to hear her mother ask how she was doing and have to say, great, Mom, everything's great.