I stare at the view count on the screen in front of me, my fingers are frozen on the keyboard.
“Nat?” Shane asks, craning his neck to see my screen. “Natalie? Babe? What’s wrong?”
“I, uh… think I’ve gone viral.”
“Shut up!” Shane’s shout breaks me out of my stupor, and I quickly refresh the page. The thumbnail shows my face, made up with smoky eyeshadow with my long, brown hair pulled back with a headband, grinning like a fool and brandishing my ukulele. The song takes more than a uke, but that’s my thing. There have been over a million views—about seven thousand more than there had been before Shane started screaming my ear off.
“Holy fuck…” I whisper.
“Sweet holy fucking ballsack, Nat. That’s huge!”
I don’t bother telling him to watch his mouth. Shane has never had much of a filter.
We’re sitting together on my bed with its pink sheets and purple bedframe. My dorm room walls are bright white and adorned with polaroids clipped to strings of twine. There’s also a foam LARP sword mounted on the wall—it was a prop from one of my videos. My closet is overflowing with pastel dresses, yoga pants, and brightly colored accessories. The corner of the room is taken up by my instruments, mixing board, and computer. My laptop, decorated with Kuma-chan stickers, is resting on my lap.
Across the room, my roommate’s bed is empty—her bedsheets neatly creased and tucked in, a stark contrast to the controlled chaos on my side of the room.
Shane has his hand on my shoulder, and he’s leaning over into my space so I get a whiff of his sweet-smelling cologne as his short, black hair tickles my nose. He’s almost as invested in my channel as I am and he’s been in most of my music videos.
My subscriber count is steadily rising, just like the viewer count. I don’t know how it happened—this is the sort of thing I’ve read about in YouTuber biographies. But to actually see it happening… how can this be?
I’m just… me.
Just Natalie Summers—SweetSummerRain on YouTube.
I’ve been posting vids since I was seventeen, and none of them ever received more than ten thousand views. I had a loyal band of five thousand subscribers—most of them more in love with Shane than with my music.
How did this happen?
“The Vlogbrothers retweeted your video,” Shane says, apparently reading my mind again. He’s scrolling through his phone, his manicured fingernails slightly trembling as he follows what I think is probably a Twitter feed. “Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. Mindy Kaling’s retweeted it, too!”
“Mindy Kaling?”
“And Tyler Oakley. Holy shit. Do you think that means he knows who I am?”
Shane wasn’t even in this video. That’s the weirdest thing. It was just a dubstep ukulele song I’d written myself. I’d videotaped myself playing on my bed, messed around a little with the lighting, but overall it was just… me.
What in the ever-loving fuck is so special about me?
Shane gets up and starts jumping on the bed making the springs creak dangerously, and his hype is enough to draw me out of my shock and disbelief and into sudden and all-encompassing joy. To an outsider, it probably looks like we’re having seizures jumping up and down on the bed and screaming our lungs out.
“Viral! Viral!” Shane is shouting.
I can’t shake the massive grin I have on my face. I feel my breathing start to shudder as I giggle uncontrollably. I can’t believe it. I can’t understand it, but the numbers and the tweets don’t lie.
Something happened—something good.
Something careers are made of.
Finally, a sudden crack made Shane and me stop jumping and fall into a pile on the bedsheets. Shane is still laughing, though, at this point, he’s probably laughing at how ridiculous I look with my skirt up over my belly exposing my pastel blue panties with the little bows on them.
“Super cute,” he says, before reaching over to pull my skirt down and cover me up.
“I’ll get you a pair for Christmas,” I tell him.
“Please, I’m already Amazon Priming that shit. Save your sugar mama ways for something good.”
“I can’t afford to maintain a kept man.”
“You just passed a million views. The AdSense alone should cover me for a month.”
I smack him on the stomach and sit up retrieving my laptop from underneath one of the pillows. I’m grateful neither of us managed to step on it while we were dancing around like lunatics.
Still grinning, still breathless from laughing and feeling a flush of exhilaration I haven’t felt since I got my first hundred subscribers, I scroll down to the comments section on the video. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of comments. Well and truly beyond anything I’ve seen before. As I scroll through them, I feel the weight of what’s happening begin to settle in my mind.
A million people have seen my video.
A hundred thousand have subscribed to my channel.
Both of those numbers keep rising as I watch, and each time I think maybe I’m dreaming, the sight of those numbers and comments reminds me I’m not.
The comments… well, the comments section is a dumpster fire. Some of them are outright racist. I’m Americo-Liberian, and my eyes are dark green. People are either delighted with how exotic I look or disgusted that someone with my skin color would dare to show her face in public. I begin to delete them, but there are so many. After a moment, I feel Shane’s hand covering my own.
“Don’t do it, Nat. Focus on the things that deserve your attention.” He points at the screen. “Look! Look at all the thumbs-ups!”
Typically, he knew what I was doing before I’d even really thought about it. After all, he’s known me since I was eleven.
And he’s right. The thumbs-up count does outnumber the thumbs-down count. I let that sink in as well. Once I take it all in, I look back at the comments section. I purposely put the negative comments out of my mind searching for the positive ones instead. There are many more of those which makes me smile.
Girl u play so well i am in awe of ur talent.
THIS SONG IS FIYAH 4 serious keep it up lady this is the best.
This song is so beautifully written—you are insanely talented! You should be writing songs for Sia or Rihanna!
Where can I get this on iTunes?
iTunes?
Spotify?
I NEED THIS ON ITUNES BEFORE I SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST
“The people want the song on iTunes,” Shane says sagely, reading the comments over my shoulder. “You should open an account.”
“But I’ve only ever posted covers,” I say. Even as I say it, I’m typing ‘How to sell music on iTunes’ into my search engine.
“You’ve got about a million songs you’ve never posted. I think you can pull something out of your cute little butt to put together an album.”
He gives my butt a pinch to prove his point.
While I’m searching the net for ways to sell my original song, I think maybe I should put it on Spotify? iTunes is probably a bit much?
Shane is scrolling through his phone and giving me a running commentary of what he’s seeing.
Friends and family are posting my video on Facebook, only to have it shared dozens of times.
An article which appeared on Buzzfeed has also gone viral.
The artists I admire are posting the video, talking about how much they like the combination of light ukulele and hard dubstep thumping.
People are starting to look into my other videos as well. The covers and remixes I’d played with. The short films I’d made with Shane—we take turns playing the princess. The tiny Vlogs where I would update my faithful followers about what’s going on in my life.
Everything I’ve put up, people are responding. It’s all a rush, so much is happening at once that I can’t really think through the implications. All I can think is, yay!
Now that Shane’s got me focusing on the positives, I’m starting to be overwhelmed in the best possible way. People like my song. Shane is quick to tell me they’re liking my other videos as well—their comments sections are blowing up to match this one. He checks my Twitter feed, which I mainly use to post pictures of cats, and tells me I have twenty-two thousand new subscribers.
Twenty-two thousand. That’s more than the population of Hyde Park where I jog every day.
I’ve always loved music, but consider myself more of an actress than a musician. Music is a great way to feel the rhythms of life, to push some of my emotions out, and to work on my vocal tone. Acting is where my heart is, and what I’m majoring in at Vassar. I’ll be getting my degree in a few short months.
“This is not what I was expecting,” I say, still a little bit breathless and not entirely because of the jumping around I just did with Shane.
I was anticipating what every young actress expects when she’s at the end of her college career—fear and deep guilt at not having picked a stronger minor to fall back on. I expected to try to move to Manhattan with Shane, and maybe a few other people from the program to build up a portfolio of tiny gigs on Broadway, and maybe—someday, if I hope and pray—I’ll be able to make a living off my talent.
But this… this could be something. If I luck out with a career on YouTube, well… people can make millions on YouTube. People can support entire entourages on YouTube.
Maybe this could be a thing?
Maybe I won’t have to wait tables in between auditions.
Maybe I’ll be able to work enough on YouTube to make some money, and use that to keep me going while I work on cracking Broadway? Maybe, maybe, maybe…
My head’s starting to spin with all the maybes. Sometime between me Googling how to set up an iTunes account and my silent, slightly overwhelmed freak-out, Shane has taken my hands in his.
“Breathe. Hey, come on, you’re overthinking. Whatever you’re thinking? Too much. Pull back.”
“What does this mean?”
Shane shrugs in that delicious, unaffected way of his tossing his bangs out of his eyes. “Does it have to mean anything? Can’t this just be an awesome story to tell someday? About how you went viral by accident?”
I start to waver into self-doubt. “You’re right. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I’ll just be a flavor of the month…”
“Oh, hell no. You’re too smart not to ride this wave,” Shane says. He gives me a long look flashing into concern before rearranging itself into assurance. “You can make something of this if you’re smart. I mean… look, you don’t have to start rethinking your entire life, okay? Just take each day as it comes.”
I nod slowly listening carefully to the man who has been my voice of reason since freshman year. He’s right. This may turn out to be a game-changer, or it might turn out to be a great story I can tell my kids someday. Either way, I’ve got some time to sit back and bask in what’s happening—the millions of people who seem to genuinely like my song and the thousands of positive people sending their vibes my way. I can let myself enjoy this.
After all, nothing’s going to change right away.