Jasmine Fontlee's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Jasmine Fontlee had posted every day for eleven months, and today's numbers looked like yesterday's, which looked like the numbers from the month before. She sat cross-legged on the floor of her rented room in a bright limestone terrace, laptop balanced on a stack of ring lights, refreshing the dashboard. Two hundred views. A serum review. A smoky eye tutorial. A morning-routine reel. All of it landed in the same shallow puddle. She needed to win Creator of the Year at the Ironpit Awards in eleven months, and to do that she had to beat the girl she had been losing to since school. Right now she wasn't even beating strangers. She scrolled her feed and saw the problem in one swipe. Her thumbnails looked like everyone else's thumbnails. Same lighting, same pout, same captions. Nothing to grab. Jasmine dragged her prop bin out from under the bed and started digging. Headbands. A ring light stand with a bent knee. A silk robe she'd worn in six videos already. At the bottom, wrapped in a pillowcase, was a pink vintage microphone she'd bought at a flea market last year for a bit she never filmed. Round grille. Chrome arms. Glossy bubblegum finish. She'd forgotten she owned it. She set it on the desk. It looked ridiculous next to her serums. That was the point. She re-shot the smoky eye tutorial with the microphone in frame, holding it up to her mouth between steps like a lounge singer taking requests. She narrated the blending in a low, mock-serious voice, the way she narrated her private cooking disasters to no one. She posted it before she could talk herself out of it and went to sleep at four. She woke to her phone hot in her hand. Forty thousand views. By noon, ninety. By the time she'd eaten, the number had a comma she hadn't seen before. Comments piled up under the pink microphone. "the mic bestie." "put her on tv." "do a cooking one with this energy." Jasmine read that last one three times. She pulled the microphone closer and tested the weight of it in her palm. The cooking series lived on a hard drive in her sock drawer. Twenty-two episodes. Burnt eggs. A collapsed soufflé. Her own voice doing David Attenborough over a smoking pan. She had promised herself she would delete every file the day she got famous. She opened the drive. By evening she had a plan and a problem. The microphone was the hook. The voice was the hook. The only footage she had that used the voice was the footage she had sworn no one would ever see. She could keep climbing with beauty bits and stay one of a thousand, or she could feed the audience the thing she'd hidden and hope they didn't recognize the woman burning the eggs. She dragged the first episode onto her editing timeline.