We went out for a night to celebrate, the three of us, when we reached 100,000 followers. We commonly did go out together, but this night was a little extra special. Zanna asked me to go to a party shop and buy six balloons, a one and five zeros, which she posed next to in a party dress for me to photograph and post. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of those followers I was responsible for. Why Zanna had never asked me to pose for a picture at one of these events.
Zanna’s brown eyes, liquid-lined, a perfect flick, bounced between Shane and me that night, celebrating the “Big 100K” as she called it. As he and I spoke, joked, laughed, her lids narrowed, pupils sharpened. She wrapped an arm around Shane’s shoulder, pulling his attention with a needy arm, and when he turned to look at her, she smothered him with a pillowy, long kiss on the mouth. But after the kiss he looked straight back at me and continued our conversation, eyes barely meeting her own.
Her mouth set, I felt her gaze boring into me and smiled through it, acting natural. Yes, Zanna and Shane were already physically together, but Shane and I were a better match. We spoke more. We laughed more. We had more in common. Our outsider-ness. My loyalties lay with Zanna, my best friend, but it was becoming harder to hide the fact that I was in love with her boyfriend.
“Maybe people think we’re all going to bang each other, like we met you off an app for swinger sex,” Zanna had said to me.
I was the third wheel, and I knew people had started to think it was strange. That it was sad. It didn’t help that I’d recently spent Christmas with Shane, Zanna and her family.
Poor Paige, why can’t she get her own boyfriend? Weird Paige, why is she always buzzing around this couple like a wasp around a margarita?
“Here they come, the threesome,” Gianna would snark, on any given day.
“The ménage à trois,” Sara sneered.
“The tricycle,” they said and laughed. At me. They always laughed at me. No one questioned Shane and Zanna, the beautiful poster couple.
“I wish I could have what you two have,” Gianna simpered.
Of the many hundreds of compliments Zanna loved to receive, it was one of her favourites. Being chosen by a fine specimen of a man sets you apart from your peers.
Clingy Paige, so good of Shane and Zanna to tolerate her.
Two is the natural order of things. Couples are normal. So, the imposition was always supposed to be mine. It never occurred to anyone that perhaps I was wanted, filling a growing cavern between people drifting apart. Relationship Polyfilla.
“Please, get married already,” Gianna whined mushily in the direction of the so-called happy couple.
She giggled at Zanna’s exaggerated eye roll, a distraction from Shane’s stiffening posture, the flicker of frustration in his eye, his jaw setting. Misdirection was the key to the magic, and I was the biggest misdirection of all. The elephant in the show, who allows the magician to set up the big trick. Shane palpably relaxed when I was there, something Zanna felt too. I eased the pressure on a relationship going slowly under. They were both unhappy, and I tried to help, I really did. I wasn’t entirely selfishly motivated.
Maybe I became too bold in the way I looked at Shane, because it wasn’t long after that night that Zanna changed. She changed towards work, and towards me too. Reaching 100,000 followers had lit a fire under her perfect upside-down heart-shaped arse. Her aspirations exploded with the catalyst — a sliver of success. She began to refer to herself as an “entrepreneur” and “media expert”, a “creative director”. Anything to avoid being called a blogger, which was too small for her now. It was now a “personal brand”, she said. My role shifted too, from writer to live-in personal assistant.
Zanna and I had been “hustling”, she called it. “Fake it till you make it” took on a new, all-too-literal meaning to me. We were sent free stuff and it got more and more lavish and we gained more and more followers. But Zanna pretended to be given a lot more besides. She bought a Chanel handbag, an “investment” she said, and posed with it. Sipping from a cocktail with a straw, the simple black flap bag sat, almost ignored, leaning against her thigh.
We wrote:
One mojito, two mojito, three mojito . . . and the rest is history. Thanks @chanel
It was ambiguous, I reasoned. It couldn’t be called a lie, could it? Not outright. Let people assume the bag was a gift, or maybe we were thanking them for their great customer service, or simply for existing, I consoled myself, even while comments came in. Lies were not part of my initial journalistic ambition.
Being good at Instagram is not as easy as it looks; neither is building a following. It takes work even if, like Zanna and so many others did, you buy a few thousand fake followers to get you going. We still had to create the content. My boss invested in a Canon camera, which she instructed me to learn how to use. I stood outside Camden McDonald’s, hands around the camera turned to claws by the cold, laden with bags full of glittery clothes for what Zanna was calling our “party edit” as she changed in the toilet. I kneeled on cold pavements to get the editorial, leg-lengthening shots Zanna wanted as the flow of bemused tourists and mocking teenagers moved around us, smirking or laughing. After we were finished, I was sent with the clothes, tags still on, to return them all to the stores Zanna had bought them from while Zanna called a taxi home “to warm up in the bath”.
After my hands, stiff with chilblains, had warmed up on the Tube home, it fell to me to edit the images to Zanna’s whims, remove blemishes, flatten her stomach and get rid of that little bit of fat under her chin she was obsessive about. The Zanna on screen smirked at me over a glittery, padded shoulder. She said, I’m a cool girl and I’ll teach you how to be like me. It’s easy, don’t you worry. We sold a dream, and a lie.
You’d think we were at least good at the tech side of it all. But we weren’t. Zanna spent £2,000 on a website redesign, complete with a tech expert to help us with any issues over the phone. All we cared to learn was exactly what we needed to do to gain followers on Instagram. That was always the heart of the business. To do that, someone had to be constantly working on the platform. That someone, of course, was me. My duties were to post the content, write the captions, choose the best hashtags, post the posts at the best time of day and respond to every single comment and direct message as though I was Zanna. I also had to constantly follow and comment on other, bigger bloggers’ accounts to raise Zanna’s profile. It was endless. There were no days off in Zanna’s world.
Slaves to Instagram’s algorithm, we jumped through the various — ever changing — hoops to boost our posts. The algorithm set the rules and we played catch-up and guessing games, which rippled through the blogging community. It was an arms race to boost exposure with the right content. Nothing drove engagement, though, like brand collaborations.
The more we worked with brands, the more the pressure to hit certain targets became a reality. They asked to know the stats, how many people saw our Instagram posts, the engagement, the clicks. And followers don’t necessarily equate to engagement, something that was becoming a constant struggle for us. As brands became more clued up as to how to check the legitimacy of influencers, their real reach, Zanna became obsessed with these stats. We’d done a number of sex toy posts, feminist and sex positive, we reasoned. But the Instagram algorithm wasn’t favourable to them, and for a while we suspected our account was punished for it.
“Urgh, why are people so shit? Why don’t they like the posts? Dickheads,” she’d say, hitting the arm of the sofa with her fist.
“We need engagement of four per cent, ours is like two. Ask more questions in the captions,” she barked at me as she messaged friends, family and Shane, demanding:
Why haven’t you liked and commented on my post?
Zanna noted who was quick to “like” pictures and who wasn’t. She muttered, “Does Sara think I don’t notice she never likes or comments? Bitch.”
This was better than when the anger was directed at me. She would demand to know why engagement was down, why there were fewer comments. Why wasn’t my writing engaging? she’d ask. She’d passively aggressively send me example after example of other Instagram captions that were better than mine, blog post ideas I should have had. Where she once was inspired by my writing, now it was never good enough.
It was always about the followers for Zanna, because followers meant money. Money meant success. Success was what she was trying to show her family — and her father — she could do. This success also manifested, for Zanna, in showing off her wealth. Being a “girl boss” for Zanna seemed to translate into hitting material milestones. I never heard a whiff about savings, but she bought Cartier Love rings, bags worth thousands of pounds, extolling their resale value and the “investment in her personal brand”. Zanna couldn’t separate signs of luxury from wealth, and being the subject of envy from happiness.
We churned out pieces about self-love, social media, being a “girl boss” and Zanna’s (entirely fabricated) morning routine, in which she had me claim she included a morning sun salutation, mindfulness and a latte. For this we pocketed £2.5k from an alternative milk company. Later that company got exposed for dodgy palm oil behaviour. Zanna frustratedly deleted the post after followers commented on it. “Fucking cry-babies whinging over baby orangutans, who gives a shit?” she said.
It’s hard, as an influencer, I learned, to maintain a high standard when it comes to who you work with. Zanna was after the Chanels, the Burberrys, the La Mer. She argued it back and forth with her agent, but the fact is, these brands pay less. As companies became more adept at finding the influencers with the high engagement, pickier about who they worked with, she was forced to lower her ideals. She ummed and ahhed over working with a brand of constipation relief medication, which was paying a huge sum.
As social media became a far more popular way for companies to advertise, stranger and stranger companies looked to get bloggers on board. Vegan cheese, kitchen disinfectant, even laxatives.
“I don’t know if I really want people to look at me and think about shit,” she said, as she assessed the proposal from the brand, sent over by Tom the agent.
“Can’t we sort of put a girl-power spin on it, you know? Say you’re being super empowering for talking about taboo subjects for women. You could be leading the conversation?” I suggested.
“I mean yeah, but ultimately, I’m still talking about shit. My shits.”
Eventually, though, the lure of the cash was too overwhelming. I worked it into a euphemistic piece for the blog about routine and “feeling light”. It was really the work of genius. Zanna posed for a picture with a morning orange juice, fresh and beautiful in the kitchen, the small packet of tablets tucked behind the kettle.
Still, I became concerned about Zanna’s choices when it came to the blog. Hungry for money, for more, she would rarely turn down a brand for the right price. I gritted my teeth and wrote anyway. A paid post with an iron, all about looking after clothes in which, for the images, Zanna insisted ironing in her bra was perfectly appropriate. This isn’t what I would do with this platform, I would think, and yet my ideas were rarely heard. She’d begun to be snippy with me. She pulled the camera from my fingers and demanded to know why I couldn’t shoot images that met her Vogue spread expectations. If I ever retorted that I was a writer, not a photographer, she’d sneer that I wouldn’t get anywhere without a photography portfolio in this day and age. Zanna was quite the expert in what my future career would require from me. Her expertise always happily aligned with whatever she wanted me to do.
The blog became more and about her, the images of her on it, than anything to with the content of the articles. Though I ground away at the content of the posts, she hardly gave them a second glance, only interested in the likes. And the likes were brought in by racier and racier pictures of Zanna. She instructed me to photograph her in her lingerie. She worked with a videographer to create an almost soft-porn-like video for Instagram. Doing her makeup to sultry music in lace lingerie. “It’s my body, I want to own it,” Zanna said, pressing post on the risqué video. Soon, other people wanted to own it too.
As the content became more provocative, the responses to her content become more sexual. Men, popping up in the comments, offering to do things for her. Offering to pay for a membership to a private club after she posted an Instagram story about wanting to get in.
One man replied and offered to pay all her fees, just like that. “No strings attached,” he said.
I said: “Those strings are about as subtle as Silly String.”
One man, in his fifties with dyed black hair, and a wife and children, offered £20,000 over Instagram direct message to meet Zanna in a London hotel. “Just to meet, nothing has to happen,” he said. It was the biggest offer she ever got.
Zanna whispered, “Should I?”
“Absolutely not!”
“But it’s £20,000! I’ll pay you £500 to be my bodyguard for the night.”
“He’s probably a murderer.”
“For £20,000 maybe I’d risk it.”
She said to me the next day: “Some Instagrammer is claiming she got offered £50,000 for five nights in Dubai with a guy.”
I pulled a sick face. “Urgh, gross.”
Zanna mused with a little “mmm” sound and nodded absentmindedly. After a brief silence she asked, “Do you think I could get that much?”
While she told me the blog was about her ideas — our ideas, and my words — I was working on little less than a vanity project for Zanna, whose main interest seemed to be only to see herself in pictures, and have strangers respond positively to them.
What hurt most was how Zanna changed towards me. Shorter, brusquer. As she leaned into being my boss, she twisted further from being my friend. My mind drifted to my work experience at the newspapers, where I’d been treated like nothing when reporters heard my regional accent and unremarkable last name, as Zanna barked orders at me across the kitchen table or when, at an event, she shoved her handbag and iPhone at me, demanding, “Take my picture, keep your shadow out of the shot.”
I asked her, “Do you ever wonder what the point of what we are doing is?”
She replied, “Paige, if I ever thought about that, I’d never do anything.”
*
We were in the living room, getting ready for an event to launch a new “healthier milk chocolate” when she found it. Zanna was being paid to be there, and to post the event to her socials. I was prepping captions at the same time as steaming the dress Zanna wanted to wear. Shane had smiled sympathetically at me crouching as I worked on the cuffs. The heart leaped a little, as it always did when he met my eyes, and hurt a little as it always did when he left the room.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she’d said, staring at her phone. Her face was wan, features wiped clean of emotion by pure shock. “Oh my God.”
Zanna’s outburst rang out over the blasting music. She said nothing further, staring at her phone agog. I got up and moved over to her, where she’d been sat painting her nails while I worked, and tried to get a glimpse past her shoulder at her screen. She held the screen reflexively up to her chest.
“What, Zanna?”
Zanna had jumped up from her chair and was gasping for air. Her chest went red, a crimson rising up to her face.
“What the fuck,” she shouted again. Shane came back into the room at the commotion, looking at Zanna with a mix of confusion and concern. She very rarely lost her cool like this, gulping airless at her phone like a fish. Shane, taking control, took Zanna’s phone roughly from her hands and squinted at the screen.
“It’s not real,” Zanna whined, trying to take it back.
He held the phone above her head and furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it, what’s Dahlia Duchesses?”
I was on my feet, arms hanging helpless by my side. I ought to be doing something.
“I’d never even heard of it,” Zanna whimpered.
Shane read aloud: “Dahlia Duchesses is the foremost London escort agency for gentlemen who anticipate the best. Our British escorts are fun-loving, engaging and open-minded.”
“What on earth,” Zanna muttered under breath, sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands. She shook her head in confusion.
Shane fixed his gaze on her with a face like thunder.
“It’s not real,” she cried again, this time with indignance. “Seriously, Shane.”
“Well, can I be sure?” He was tense, eyes boring into her.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Zanna said. “Paige, look at this.”
Animated now by irritation, she took the phone from Shane’s limp arm and handed it to me.
It was a website, the words “Dahlia Duchesses” in lush, curling letters on the top. Underneath it read: “The fastest growing escort directory in the UK! Rated ‘Excellent’ on Trustpilot!! Free Sign Up!!!”
“That’s a lot of exclamation marks,” I said.
“Scroll down,” Zanna barked. I did. There, among a number of clickable profiles with pictures, names, ages, and accepted sex acts listed, was a profile for Zanna.
“What the fuck?” I said. There was a picture of Zanna, one in a bikini taken from her Instagram.
“It’s already on fucking Prattle,” Zanna said. It was true. Zanna’s thread was inundated with new posts, all of them mocking.
Lol can’t believe one of them has finally been caught out, how stupid to use your own blog pictures. Well, we all knew these girls were doing it.
I think we all know where Zanna’s latest Celine bag came from.
I knew she was looking for a sugar daddy the minute she started posing those lingerie pics. So glad she’s finally been caught out.
“You’re escorting?” The words left my throat, almost a breath. Shane raised his hands to his head as if about to tear his own hair out.
“No!” Zanna protested, throwing both her hands up. “Honestly, why would either of you even think that?”
Shane and I looked at one another. I said nothing. I looked from her to Shane. My gut cramped.
“Why would someone make a fake profile of you?” he asked.
Zanna spluttered. “I don’t know — some loser, for fun. I don’t know. Shane, come on, please.”
She stepped towards Shane, who took a step back, massaging his head.
“This is ridiculous,” she said, storming into the bedroom, and slamming the door behind her as she shrieked, “Ridiculous!”