XVI.I
I never understood the expression 'shit hit the fan' before. Maybe it was because I didn't make it a habit to curse all that much, or because I had never led a particularly dramatic life, or maybe it was a combination of both of those things. But in my sophomore year of college, I started to understand that expression all too well. Actually...way too well. Is that grammatically correct?
Doesn't matter.
By now, you're probably starting to wonder about this entire ordeal. Who was the werewolf? Was he actually trying to figure things out about us or were we just paranoid? Was Kennedy bugging my stuff? If so, why was she bugging my stuff? And is anything going to come of you guys literally killing a man?
The answers to all of your questions are quickly coming, I promise. They're also the answers that I want to make the most clear throughout this entire thing, since it's kind of the reason I'm writing this in the first place. Not that it matters. You're still reading, aren't you?
Just to clarify, the fake influencer account was starting to put Kennedy and my heads in the clouds. We were sure that we were never going to get caught, that we were going to be able to continue running this account and accepting ad campaigns and making more money than we ever thought we would have during our times at college. I was ready to quit my job at the grocery store completely. The only thing keeping me there was a strange loyalty to the people who worked with me. I didn't want to leave them one employee short with the holidays approaching.
But I didn't need the money anymore. For the first time in my life, I didn't need the money from an almost-full-time job.
In November, once our income increased even more due to a high-profile ad campaign that didn't even require too many pictures posted with the product, that loyalty to the people I worked with started to become a bit more nonexistent.
In November, we also discovered that we had overlooked a few important things that not only make a fake influencer Instagram account seem real, but make that same fake influencer seem real.
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"I need you to come over."
Rebecca was wary about going anywhere near Kennedy since she believed she had discovered the other girl bugging her laptop. But it had been six days, and she was pretty sure she couldn't avoid Kennedy much longer without appearing suspicious.
"Why?" Rebecca asked, balancing her phone on her shoulder as she tried to beat two eggs in a bowl before transferring it to the pan sitting on top of the stove. "It's like nine o'clock in the morning. I'm surprised you're even awake."
"I have Google alerts set up for Drew Parley, you moron." Kennedy snapped. "This one woke me right up."
Rebecca's heart started to beat a bit faster as she sprinkled spinach, mushrooms, and feta cheese on the egg before flipping it in half to make an omelette.
"There was a news article about Drew?"
Kennedy sighed loudly.
"Yes. Now get over here so we can be panicked together."
Rebecca waited. She could practically hear Kennedy rolling her eyes.
"Please."
"I like the manners." Rebecca replied, transferring her omelette to a plate and starting to eat it quickly, "I'll head over in five."
She hung up before Kennedy could complain and finished her breakfast quickly. It was a big day for her. It was her first Saturday where she didn't have to go to the grocery store. She had quit two days earlier, opening herself up to 38 extra hours of free time every week.
Evidently, it was 'free time' that Kennedy was intent on occupying.
Rebecca finished her omelette and ran out to her car, figuring that if she could get to Kennedy quickly, she could also get away from her quickly.
"So what's going on?" Rebecca walked into Kennedy's apartment without bothering to knock and found the other girl standing in the kitchen. "It can't be too bad if you didn't feel the need to come over to my place."
"Your place is small." Kennedy snapped, "Read this."
Are influencers so popular that they're starting to be...fake?
She handed her phone over and Rebecca found herself looking at a relatively short article on a website that she didn't recognize. Its title was a bit nerve-wracking, but Rebecca continued reading anyways.
Instagram influencers are nothing new. They're people who are famous for being pretty, or fit, or flexible and good at back flips. They all fall into the general same category: they're hot, thin, and rich.
The latter usually comes after they become influencers, though. Top influencers have millions of followers and post almost exclusively sponsored posts, for which they can make upwards of $30,000...for posting a picture. Top influencers have net worths in the millions, which is ridiculously high for people who don't seem to do much other than take pretty pictures of themselves and think of subpar captions to go along with them.
In all honesty, the world of Instagram influencers seems awfully boring. Which is why one influencer in particular seems to stand out as something of an outlier—not boring whatsoever.
Drew Parley, better known as @drewboo on Instagram, is one of the newer influencers playing the game. As of this article's publication date, she has 502k followers, averages 80,000 likes and 9,000 comments per post, and has a steady growth in followers—going up no less than 2,000 every day. She's gorgeous, her captions are actually clever, and her entire persona centers around herself—she hasn't used other influencers to gain a following.
Watching Drew Parley rise to fame online has made me want to know more about her. Where is she from? What is her family like? What does she do for fun? How did she get her Instagram to take off?
The thing is, Drew Parley's agent, dubbed only as "Ms. Eaves" on anything I can find online, hasn't returned any calls for an interview. In fact, Parley hasn't given a single interview since rising into the spotlight. She hasn't shown up on any other influencers' feeds, and she has only done ad deals with online companies that don't seem to have real-world headquarters for her to meet people in.
So then I decided to look a little deeper. I work for an online magazine, what else am I going to do all day?
I looked for Drew Parley. I looked for her on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pinterest, on VSCO, on LinkedIn, on...everything. I looked for Drew Parley on every social media platform I could think of to try and find out more about her life.
I couldn't find a single profile.
I found a lot of other Drew Parleys. I found a lot of guys and a lot of girls with that name. But none of them were green-eyed, blonde-haired, sparkling white smiling Drew Parley.
I'm sorry, but doesn't that seem...odd?
Homegirl is one of the most popular up-and-coming influencers who is probably worth a good chunk of money at this point, and she doesn't have a single social media profile aside from Instagram.
Maybe I'm just becoming a conspiracy theorist. Maybe I'm going crazy. Maybe I spend way too much time online. But let me know...is it weird? Is it weird for a popular influencer to not have any other social media accounts? To never have a picture taken with anyone else? To only have her Instagram account that became a thing in September of this year and has somehow skyrocketed within a matter of months?
All I'm saying is...I think we should be keeping a closer eye on Drew Parley. The idea of fame and wealth is so tempting that I've always been surprised more people don't try to do it in a fake way. But who knows? Maybe Drew Parley is the first.
Rebecca finished reading the article and wasn't quite sure if she knew exactly how she felt. She felt like everything was wrong. Like she couldn't believe that they had been so incredible stupid as to not give Drew Parley a life. They had planned everything around nobody being able to recognize Kennedy for who she was, but they hadn't planned anything about people finding Drew's life in solitude suspicious.
"So?" Kennedy asked as Rebecca handed her phone back, "Shouldn't we be panicking? This one no-name reporter is going to ruin our lives."
"Not necessarily." Rebecca replied, thinking for a second. She couldn't help but recognize that she was the one being calm in this situation while Kennedy freaked out. Whereas when Kennedy had killed a man and left him on the side of the road, Rebecca had been more worried about it than the girl who had actually been driving the car.
"What do you mean, 'not necessarily'? The article has already been read over 100 times."
"And how many followers does Drew have?" Rebecca asked, "Besides, you said it yourself. She's some no-name reporter. No one is going to take this seriously. But we also have to be careful about how we go forward from this."
They couldn't make a ton of social media accounts out of nowhere; that would look more suspicious than not having any at all. They would keep Drew as an Instagram-only problem. But they could slowly start to participate in more ad campaigns and modeling shoots with other people, instead of limiting it to just being Kennedy. So long as those people didn't know Kennedy in real life, they wouldn't know anything about their ploy.
"Let's start saying 'yes' to gigs with other people in them." Rebecca said aloud, "That way, it won't look like we're overcompensating for the article by making more social media accounts, but we can still prove that you're a real person. It'll just look like you're branching out and making a smart career move."
Kennedy sighed loudly, appearing to not even give the idea a single thought before agreeing to it.
"Alright, whatever. We can do that. But just make sure that they're with good people, okay? I don't want to be modeling for people who don't have any idea what they're doing."
"Ken, we don't have any idea what we're doing."
Kennedy shrugged.
"But we don't come across that way." She turned around and poured herself a cup of coffee, "We come across as professionals, I'm sure."
Rebecca kept herself from laughing and shrugged, wondering why Kennedy wasn't offering her a cup of coffee. Maybe it actually tasted alright this time.

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