Page 8 of I Know How This Ends

Unbelievable

U R exactly why good men are so wary about online dating.

What’s your bank details I’m going to send you my half of last night’s cheque right now you don’t get to win you silly cow

Hello

Margot reply to me RIGHT NOW

I could block Other Henry, but I don’t.

There’s satisfaction in watching the fireman reveal himself. Every time my burner phone beeps, I get another rush of pleasure.

This could have taken weeks to come out all on its own—me, blinded by lust and inordinately white teeth—and what a terrifying

waste of time that would have been.

MARGOT BLOODY ANSWER ME FFS

At some point, Henry will rage himself to sleep like an angry toddler.

In the meantime, I continue working.

None of my “job”—as my mother puts it, using her index fingers as quotation marks—comes naturally to me, which is a brand-new experience.

I was comfortable at the Met Office. I examined the data, I processed the data, I made forecasts based on the data.

I was good at it. Now I’m running around sourcing interesting content, making videos that take six times longer than they should, replying to DMs with private weather forecasts and answering an influx of emails from brands and potential sponsors who have nothing to do with the topics I talk about but would like to be shoehorned in somehow.

But no matter how busy I am, I somehow find time to stalk Lily. I’ll skip lunch, forgo a shower, yet still pick up my burner

phone and scan it methodically for Lil’s most recent social media updates.

Lily Howard—or @LilSunnyDayz, as she’s known worldwide—is a “lifestyle influencer” and prolific in her content creation. She

has a life so beautiful it has its very own, slightly tawny filter that makes everything look like a new form of daguerreotype,

as if she’s a modern Victorian. It’s all whimsy and lace and butterflies: a porcelain teacup with a robin on it next to a

nibbled croissant; a photo of her in a huge camel coat walking down a beautiful street, red hair all the way down her back.

There are “arty” shots where it’s just her neck and shoulder; her toes on the edge of a blue lake; cuddled up in an enormous

wool knit, knees tucked underneath it as if she’s too tiny, too cute, too implausibly adorable to buy a jumper that actually

flaming fits her.

There are “real” shots—hiding under a duvet in the morning with her sunset hair perfectly ruffled—and there are mind-numbingly

expensive branded sponsor shots: a specific gold necklace, a subtle designer belt, the slow drip-drip of buy it, pay the money,

and you can have a glow just like mine.

And it’s not a new thing, that’s what’s so galling. She hasn’t fabricated any of this for an exquisite internet persona: she’s

simply upgraded slightly.

Lily has always been this person.

She was the girl at school everyone watched and copied: what is she wearing, what is she doing, how do we somehow bottle her magical essence and spray it laboriously all over ourselves like Davidoff Cool Water?

Lily has this mysterious, slightly strange lilt to her voice, but instead of everyone mocking her for it—as I was, having been born in Australia—it inexplicably spread.

If Lily bought a backpack that was slightly too small, the backpacks around us shrank as if we were in Alice in Wonderland ; when Lily cut herself a bad fringe with her mother’s kitchen scissors, so did everyone else.

And she was genuinely nice —that was the hardest part.

Lily was never judgmental, never sneery, superior or smug. Lily would go out of her way to compliment everyone, just to make

their days a little brighter. It was like she had so much of her own natural glow, she could afford to just leak it at will. As if the rest of us were jealously hoarding whatever sparkle we could muster while she effortlessly spread in

shifting rainbow colors across the sky like an aurora: pure sun energy meeting invisible lines of a magnetic field, making

the light dance.

Which made it all the more inexplicable that she chose us to be friends with: the gang we’d formed in primary school and which had moved up seamlessly through the years. Eve Williams,

with her neon socks, pale, lopsided plaits and tarot cards; Jules Achiuwa, sarcastic and foul-mouthed, with heavy black eyeliner

even at twelve. And me: reserved and watching. Observing everything, collecting data, methodical and slightly gray no matter

what I was wearing, like a tired owl. Lily brought all her prism-like colors with her and we reflected them and loved her

for it.

And now two million random strangers love her for it too.

All she has to do is post a photo of her wearing a crochet dress and smelling a bloody pink rose and it’s a lovefest of adoration

and approval: How are you so cute though, Lil you’re gorg, what a pure soul you have 3 3 Keep glowing bb!

In the meantime, I spend three hours diligently making a video about global warming and underneath will be: It’s a hoax you stupid bint, grow up. Can we not get political plz this used to be a fun account.

It’s hard not to examine the data, to compare and contrast.

Teeth gritted—I’m slowly developing the jawline of a bulldog—I scan her account quickly.

There’s a brand-new photo (sepia-tinted, always) of Lily on an empty tropical beach in a white dress, palm trees and turquoise, bending down with her hands on her legs, laughing with her eyes shut.

It’s a real laugh, and I can tell the difference because I know her: I know how her turned-up little nose crinkles when she’s really giggling, I know how her eyes disappear into sunny crescents.

These are the worst kinds of posts, for me.

Because, for just a minute, you become the person taking the photo.

You are two people: yourself and the person with Lily.

You can feel the affection, the love, radiating from behind the lens toward her.

Worse: you can feel the love radiating back.

Breathing out slowly, I think about what fake @Lucy_Jones7 would write.

Then I hit “like” and type: So beautiful. 3 3

Ugh. I have become the kind of person who trolls people online with random insincere compliments and it’s safe to say I never saw

that coming either.

A few seconds later—to my intense surprise—Lily “likes” my comment and writes: Thank you so much so are you. 3

“Oh sod off,” I snap loudly, throwing my burner phone across the sofa. “I’m a bloody squirrel.”

Then I stand up, stretch and glare at my makeshift green screen. I don’t get to sniff a flower for money, sadly; I have to

actually come up with information to impart. Today’s scheduled topic: silver linings . I am nothing if not a hypocrite. I know exactly what a silver lining is, just not how to find my own.

It’s taken a solid hour to get my hair, make-up and top half of my outfit to a point where I feel ready to sit in front of

two hundred thousand people. I never used to bother, but I discovered that the “better” I looked, the better my posts did,

the more followers I gained, the more money I made. It’s outrageous—@Hurricane_Humphrey rarely brushes his hair—but unless

I want to go back to the Met Office in Exeter, which I can’t, I have to play this game in all its patriarchal horror.

Exhaling slowly, I sit in front of a shade of green that makes my skin look even more corpse-like than normal. Then I switch on the ring light, take a deep breath, smooth my fringe down and hit record .

“Greetings, meteorologists! Margot here.” I beam for the camera, even though it feels like making pizza dough: pulling it

at the edges until my face stretches and snaps back. “Today I’m here to talk to you about silver linings! We’ve all heard

the expression, which can be traced back to a John Milton poem, Comus , or A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle . He wrote, ‘ Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud turn forth her silver lining on the —’”

I promptly stop recording.

Yes, that’s exactly what the general public wants when they are casually scanning social media for videos of a tiny puppy

being washed in a sink: quotes from a poet who died in 1674, after going totally blind. Lily would never.

So I try again: “Greetings, minimintiminologol—”

This time I can’t even say my own profession: delete.

“Greetings, meteorologists! Margot here!” I quickly reach for a sweet smile and fail; all I can see is Lily’s effortless crinkle.

“Now, we’ve all heard of a metaphorical silver lining , but what exactly is it? When light rays travel around the edge of an object such as a water droplet and bend—”

My phone beeps and I grab it with a sharp sense of relief. Saved.

Jules: Did you forget again?

No! I’m on my way! Ten mins!

Then I stare at myself in the video, which is still switched on.

It’s a face I’m recognizing less, even as the internet recognizes it more.

There are new lines of tension around my mouth, darkness around my huge eyes and something in my pale blue irises that reads as something it never used to: icy, cold, hard.

I am becoming a frozen person. My cheeks—angular at best—are becoming gaunt, scooped out like ice cream.

My long, dark, pin-straight hair no longer has any bounce or shine but hangs, dull and defeated.

Even my collarbones look sharp and angry.

There’s no light here, no sparkle, no rainbow or aurora.

I am gray like a moth without a light to hover around anymore.

“Stop being so bloody self-pitying, Margot,” I tell my image fiercely, and it tells me straight back. “It is deeply unlikable.”

And I switch the recording off.

“Finally!” Eve looks up, swaddled in a too-big white dressing gown like a tiny child freshly out of the bath. “I knew you’d

make it!”

Even without valium, Eve retains a slightly wide-eyed, sparrow-like quality: the perky optimism of someone who still looks

at clouds and sees ducks and bunnies, where I see only a cumulus that signals a storm coming.