In an attempt to reverse the slide, however, she’d arranged a meeting with her former social media creativity director, Trevé, who she hadn’t spoken to since the disappointing leak of her sex tape. As she sat in the waiting area, staring at him through the glass walls of his office, she could see him talking to a young woman who had recently appeared on a reality-television show where all she did was sit in a laundromat, inexplicably wearing a bikini, while handsome young men came in to express how deeply in love they were with her. Elizabeth narrowed her eyes as she watched the girl, whose name was Sofiii, with three i’s, throw her head back and laugh uproariously at whatever Trevé had just said before taking her phone from her pocket and pointing it in their direction. This would be good for a few hundred Instagram likes.
‘I’m sorry, there’s no photographs in here,’ said the boy behind the reception desk, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and whose chiselled features and blistering blue eyes guaranteed that he would not be stationed there for long.
‘I’m not taking a picture,’ she lied. ‘I’m just checking my make-up.’
The boy raised one perfect eyebrow, unconvinced, but returned to his own phone while she took a snap of the scene that was playing out before her and posted it under her @TruthIsASword identity.
@TruthIsASword Fake boobs Sofiii looking for panto work this Christmas? #desperate #gorgeous #slut #lipfiller #tragic #sisters #talentless #freakshow #heroinaddict #dearfriend #nohateplease #whore #girlpower
This quick burst of nastiness did for her temper what a glass of fresh orange juice might do for a diabetic whose blood sugar had run dangerously low. Still, she resented being kept waiting and tapped her foot on the ground impatiently, incurring the irritated stare of the receptionist.
‘Problem?’ she asked.
‘It’s hard to concentrate when you’re tapping your foot like that.’
‘Do you really need to concentrate when you’re playing Candy Crush?’
The boy laughed and shook his head. ‘Candy Crush?’ he asked disdainfully. ‘I’m sorry, did 2017 call? Does it want its games back?’
Elizabeth’s face grew red at the slight. It was one thing to ask her to quieten down, but another entirely to accuse her of being off-trend.
‘Do you always speak to your clients in such a rude fashion?’ she asked.
‘You’re not a client.’
‘I used to be.’
He smiled. ‘Ah, the worst words in the English language,’ he said. ‘I used to be. We get a lot of used-to-bes showing up here, hoping to reclaim their relevance.’
‘It was my choice to move on,’ she said, cut to the quick. ‘Trevé is a dear, but he wasn’t doing all that I needed.’
‘And yet here you are. Back again.’
‘Yes, but … but …’ She scrambled to think of something cutting to say, but nothing sprang to mind.
‘What did you say your name was again?’
‘Elizabeth Cleverley,’ she said. ‘She/her,’ she added, hoping this might win her a few points in his eyes.
‘Oh, please,’ he said, laughing contemptuously. ‘Seriously, that’s beyond cringe.’
‘I was being ironic,’ she said, chastened.
‘No you weren’t,’ he replied, tapping something into his phone and snorting. ‘Fuck me,’ he said.
‘I’d rather not, thanks.’
‘You’ve got less than 7,000 followers.’
‘Have I?’ she asked, feigning ignorance. ‘I never look, to be honest. I have a blue tick,’ she added, sitting upright.
‘Six thousand eight hundred and sixty-seven, to be precise. No, wait, you just lost two – 6,865. And yet you’ve tweeted almost 70,000 times. That’s an NTR of …’ He tapped something quickly into his phone. ‘About 10.2. You’re literally a Negative 10.2. No wonder you’re here. You hear about people with high NTRs, but you don’t ever expect to meet one in real life.’
Elizabeth glared at him. NTR? What the fuck? ‘I literally have no clue what you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘NTR,’ he repeated, putting his phone down on the desk and leaning back to stretch out, ensuring that his too-short T-shirt rose up above the waistband of his jeans, revealing a perfectly sculpted six-pack. She stared at it, willing herself to look away. ‘Negative Twitter Ratio. It’s a basic rule on social media. The number of your tweets should never exceed the number of your followers. If you’ve got, say, a hundred followers but have tweeted ten thousand times, then you’re just screaming into a void.’ He scrolled through the app. ‘Look at this guy, for example. Says he’s one half of a podcast. But he’s tweeted 120,000 times to about 5,000 followers. That’s a NTR of 24! You’d wonder how the poor guy still has a fingerprint on his thumb after so much tweeting. Someone needs to tell him that not every random thought that goes through his head needs to be immortalized for the sake of four likes. Don’t worry, Elizabeth, your account is nowhere near as embarrassing as that, but still, you have a NTR of 10.2. I, on the other hand, have around 430,000 followers, but I’ve only tweeted 7,000 times. That’s the way it should be. So I have a Positive Twitter Ratio of 62. Hashtag winning.’
‘Four hundred and thirty thousand followers?’ she asked, trying to keep the envy and disbelief out of her voice. ‘Who are you? What have you done?’
‘A bit of everything,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Some runway. Some commercial. Some magazine. A little reality. I did a stint on Hollyoaks when I was younger, but it wasn’t the place for me to develop, you know? It’s one thing to be on a soap but another to show up at the Soap Awards and act like it’s the Oscars. Plus, I’ve got some really great stuff in the pipeline, but I’m not at liberty to talk about that right now. Sorry.’
‘Of course you’re not,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘How convenient.’
‘I’ve also got some important followers.’
‘Really?’ she asked, intrigued now. ‘Who?’
‘Dermot O’Leary. Ed Sheeran. Mabel. Some of the writers at GQ and Esquire. Oh, and Haz, of course.’
‘Haz?
‘Harry.’
‘Harry who?’ she asked, her eyes opening wide. ‘Prince Harry?’
‘Christ, no. That would be mortifying. Harry Styles.’
‘What …?’ she asked, putting her hands on the sides of the chair to settle herself. He couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. ‘No … you can’t have …’
‘We’re, like, mates,’ said the boy, as if it was neither here nor there. ‘Honestly, I can’t talk about him, though, so please don’t ask. He really values his privacy and I respect that. He’s the same about me.’
She looked around the waiting area, hoping to see a water dispenser because she was beginning to feel dehydrated.
‘Harry Styles follows you,’ she said, more of a bewildered statement than a question.
‘Yeah, but we mostly talk over text. I don’t even check his tweets most of the time. They’re, like, more for the public, you know?’