Arianna Smith's Arc

Chapter 3 of 23

Back home, Arianna sat at her kitchen table with her fancy phone in her hands. The contest was clear now. To win, strangers had to share her song. But she had no place to send them. No page. No fans. Just a file buried in a list. She stared at the screen. Purr-cy pressed against her arm and mewed. "I know," she said. "Nobody knows I exist." She scrolled through her fan accounts. She followed Kylie everywhere. She had liked ten thousand posts. But she had never once posted herself. She had no space that felt like hers, a place she could invite people into and say, here, listen. She thought about all the years she had watched from the outside. She was tired of watching. Arianna opened a blank profile and started to type. Her thumbs shook. She wrote her name at the top. Then she stopped. What would she even say? She had spent so long hiding. She almost closed the phone. Then she thought of Kylie behind that table, looking through her. She thought of the drive still in her coat pocket. She made herself keep going. She uploaded a bright, swirling picture she had drawn for the song's cover. She wrote a caption: "I wrote a song about loving someone who never wrote back. It's called Return to Sender. If it means something to you, please share it." She pasted the link to the submission page. Her finger hovered over Post. Her stomach twisted. Once she pressed it, the whole world could see her. They could laugh. They could scroll past. She could look foolish. She pictured the girl on her favorite shirt, bold and sure of herself, never hiding. Arianna pressed Post. For a long minute, nothing happened. Then a like appeared. Then two. A stranger commented, "This made me cry." Another shared it. The number climbed. Arianna covered her mouth. People she had never met were passing her song along. Her private hurt was moving through the world on its own. By midnight, the post had been shared over a hundred times. Her follower count was no longer zero. She finally had a place that was hers, a door she could hold open. She set the phone down and let out a breath she felt like she'd held for years. Then she refreshed the contest leaderboard. Her song had climbed off page forty. It sat now near the top of the middle. But at the very top, one demo held a huge lead. Thousands of shares. A polished cover. A fan with a real following, far ahead of her. Arianna stared at the gap. She had a stage now. She also had a rival to beat. The race had truly started, and she was behind.