Summer's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Summer stared at her phone screen, her thumb frozen over the refresh button. The account had appeared three days ago. Same tight tops, same confident poses, same style philosophy written in the bio word for word. But this account had twelve thousand followers already, and the number kept climbing. Every post used her exact aesthetic—the one she'd spent six weeks building with zero results. She needed proof she'd been first. Summer walked to the herb garden behind her apartment—a dome of twisted vines where she'd shot her earliest content. The space had been her studio before she even knew what she was doing. She ducked under the canopy and found what she was looking for: a painted stone wedged between two pots of rosemary, half-buried in moss. She'd carved her own name and the date on it months ago, back when she first started planning her account. The stone was rough, amateurish, but it was dated. It was proof. Summer photographed the stone, then scrolled through her camera roll until she found the old test shots. There she was, same tight black top, same confident stance, taken under this exact canopy three months before the copycat account existed. She posted everything—the stone, the photos, the timeline—with a single caption: "I was here first." Within an hour, the copycat account went private. Within two, Summer's follower count jumped by eight hundred. But the comments weren't what she expected. Half called her brave. The other half said she looked desperate, petty, like someone clinging to scraps. Summer read through them all, her jaw tight. She'd won the fight, but the victory felt hollow. The followers were real, but they'd come from drama, not from her style. She closed the app and looked at the canopy around her. The vines were still there. The herbs still smelled the same. Her aesthetic hadn't changed, but now everyone would remember her as the girl who had to prove herself, not the girl whose style spoke for itself.