Eating Crowe

EATING CROWE

a novel

Kevin Williams

A Betton Universe Novel

The notification came at six forty-three in the morning.

I know because I was already awake. I had been awake since five, which was becoming the pattern — the specific restless early consciousness of someone whose relationship with sleep had gotten complicated, lying in the dark of a Highlands bedroom listening to the rain do what the rain does up here, which is whatever it wants, which is always.

My phone was face down on the nightstand.

I had started putting it face down at night six months ago. Not because I didn’t know what was on it. Because knowing and seeing are different things and I had gotten very precise about which one I was willing to do at two in the morning.

At six forty-three I picked it up.

The notification was from a Google alert I had set up eight months ago for professional reasons that had since become something else entirely. I had meant to delete it. I kept not deleting it. This was its own kind of information about me that I was not going to examine before coffee.

Rainwater Sessions — Michaela Rainwater hits 2 million subscribers.

I looked at the number.

2,000,000.

I put the phone face down.

I lay there for a moment looking at the ceiling, which was the same ceiling it had always been, which was doing nothing, which I appreciated.

Then I picked the phone back up and opened my own analytics.

* * *

The dashboard loaded with the specific neutral efficiency of software that does not care what it’s showing you.

Subscribers: 441,203.

Down from 447,891 last week.

Down from 498,340 three months ago.

Down from 581,000 fourteen months ago, which was when everything had a different shape and I was slightly ahead of Michaela Rainwater in every metric that the platform used to measure such things, which felt like it meant something at the time and which I now understood meant nothing at all.

I looked at the numbers for a moment.

Then I opened the comment section on the most recent video.

I should not have opened the comment section on the most recent video.

* * *

The most recent video was the third one.

I had known, making it, that it was a mistake. I had known it the way I knew most things I did anyway — clearly, completely, without the knowledge changing the outcome. The first video had been genuine, or as genuine as I could manage when I was also managing the situation, which meant it was about sixty percent genuine and forty percent damage control and the audience, who had been watching me for years and knew my register, had clocked the forty percent immediately.

The second video had been a mistake in the specific way of things you do when you are responding to the response rather than to the original situation. I had said things I meant and things I didn’t mean and the things I didn’t mean were the ones the clips got made from.

The third video I had made at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night after a live where someone had asked the question in the chat and I had blocked them and three other people had commented on the block and I had blocked them too and by the time I ended the stream I had blocked eleven people and the clip of the blocking had forty thousand views by morning.

The third video was the one the internet had decided was the real me.

They were not entirely wrong.

* * *

I scrolled the comments.

I shouldn’t have. I did it anyway. This was also a pattern.

three apology videos and she still doesn’t get it

the blocking on her lives is sending me she literally cannot handle one question

michaela is at 2 million btw

danica > chelsea no contest

she looks so tired in this video

the original video had more dislikes than likes lmaooo

she knows what she did

genuinely feel bad for her but also she did this to herself

michaela thriving different era

anyone else notice she blocked like 11 people on the last live for asking one question

the accountability is not there and hasn’t been there and won’t be there

she looks so tired in this video — this one appeared three times. Different accounts. They were not wrong about that either.

I put the phone down.

I got up and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window the way I had been standing at the kitchen window for two years, watching the Highlands morning do what it does, which was be beautiful in the specific way of something that doesn’t require your participation.

It had always been beautiful.

That was the thing nobody told you. The mountains didn’t care what you did. The rain kept coming. The fog kept sitting in the valley. The specific quality of a Highlands morning at four thousand feet kept being exactly what it was regardless of what was happening in your comment section or your subscriber count or the four streets between your house and someone else’s house.

I had built a channel on this. On the quiet. On the specific intimacy of a microphone and a voice and a room that felt like safety.

Michaela had built a channel on it too.

Michaela was at two million.

I drank my coffee.

* * *

The live that night went the way the lives had been going.

I had three thousand concurrent viewers, which used to feel like a number I was proud of and now felt like a number I was aware of in the specific way you’re aware of a thing that is declining. I did the setup the way I always did — the lighting, the microphone check, the opening that I had been doing for four years and which came out of my mouth with the automatic ease of something I had said so many times it had stopped requiring my full attention.

The chat moved the way it moved. The regulars. The lurkers. The people who came for the content and the people who came for something else and the people who just had the stream on in the background while they did other things.

For forty minutes it was fine. I was good at this. Whatever else was true, I had always been good at this.

Then someone asked the question.

Not in a hostile way. Just — asked it. A new account. Pink username. Something like hey chelsea long time viewer do you ever talk to michaela anymore with a little heart emoji at the end, the specific guilelessness of someone who genuinely wanted to know or the specific strategy of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had put the heart emoji there to make it harder to respond to.

I saw it.

The chat saw me see it.

I blocked the account.

The chat saw that too.

Three people commented on the block. I blocked two of them. The third one I missed because my hand was shaking slightly and I hit the wrong button and by the time I found the right button the comment had been screenshot and was already somewhere I couldn’t reach it.

I ended the stream twenty minutes early.

* * *

I was sitting in the dark of my living room at ten forty-seven — I noted the time automatically, the way I noted most things, the habit of a woman who had been precise about everything since long before the channel — when my phone buzzed.

Not a notification. A DM.

The account was verified. The profile picture was a woman I recognized from the wider ASMR ecosystem — had seen her in recommended videos, in comment sections, in the peripheral vision of a space I had been living in for four years. Larger platform than mine. A different kind of content than mine, at least publicly, though I had heard things from people who knew people about what was behind the paywall.

Lexi Diamond.

The message was short.

Hey Chelsea. I’ve been watching your channel for a while. I think you’re incredibly talented and I think you’re in a rough patch that doesn’t reflect what you’re actually capable of. I’d love to get on a call sometime and just talk. No agenda. Genuinely just think there are options you might not be seeing right now. Let me know.

I read it twice.

I knew what I was looking at. I was not naive about what I was looking at. I had been in this space for four years and I understood the topology of it and I understood what options you might not be seeing meant when it came from a specific kind of account with a specific kind of following and a specific kind of content behind the paywall.

I knew.

I set the phone down.

I looked at the ceiling.

I thought about 441,203 subscribers declining week by week. About eleven blocks on a Tuesday live. About a comment section that had become a referendum. About a Google alert at six forty-three in the morning.

About four streets.

About a Saturday morning on a Highlands sidewalk two months ago when I had watched them come up the street together before they saw me and understood in approximately three seconds what I had fumbled and what it had cost me and what it was going to keep costing me.

About I don’t know what it is yet and what I had heard underneath it.

I picked up the phone.

I typed: I’m free Thursday.

I put the phone face down.

The rain kept doing what the rain does.

I had always been good at knowing what I was walking into.

This time I was walking in anyway.