Chapter 1
Ali woke up in her childhood bed on the morning of her dad’s funeral with a song in her head. ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys. Memories of long-gone Saturday mornings when Miles would sing the Beach Boys as he ambled down the creaking stairs of their ramshackle three-storey Georgian villa by the sea to make rasher sandwiches drifted through her head.
Ali closed her eyes and felt a loss so vast it was like falling. What will I be without you? Even though her dad had been drifting away from them for years, his Alzheimer’s advancing at a glacial pace, in the past two years it seemed that as fast as he’d forgotten her, she’d forgotten him. Or at least she’d forgotten the Miles she’d grown up with – who he was before the vacant stare and food-stained pyjamas.
She rolled over, burying her face in the pillow, and was hit unexpectedly by a glimpse of Miles from her teens, trying to get her up for school. A wet facecloth to the face was his main method. Truly evil. She smiled into the damp pillow.
What’ll I be without you … ?
And what will I be with you? She poked her belly and sighed. Very hard to believe there was a blueberry-sized Sam–Ali mash-up cruising around in there. And, according to the pregnancy calculator she and her best friend Liv had consulted five days before, she was already almost eleven weeks along. And Sam, the father and her former, sort-of boyfriend still didn’t know. Even worse, she was pretty sure he never wanted to see her again.
Her phone buzzed under her pillow. A calendar reminder to share a #spon post about a pregnancy supplement. Awkward. She cancelled the reminder, opened the calendar and scrolled through the endless scheduled sponcon leading all the way to September and her fictional due date. Fucking hell, who has a fictional due date? Then she spotted the email notification and felt a swell of sickening anxiety. She had been ignoring all notifications in the five days since she’d been exposed as a pregnancy faker – there was a tsunami of hatred in her inbox just poised to hit her should she wish to read any of it – but this email address caught her eye: [email protected]. The subject line read: Prime Time Investigates. She gingerly tapped the message to expand it.
Ms. Jones,
David Holmes here. I am a researcher on Prime Time and was hoping to speak to you about participating in a special episode focusing on public shaming. We are keen to work with you to get your side of the story heard. To provide balance, we are also approaching some of the victims of your scheme and the creator of the below video. I know it may be a daunting prospect for you but please don’t worry, we will endeavour to present you as fairly as possible…
Ali glanced at the linked YouTube video at the bottom of the email and threw the phone to the bottom of the bed. Why the Internet Hates Ali Jones (The Full Story with Receipts!!!!) UGH. Ali groaned. She’d been staying as far from the internet as possible to avoid exactly this kind of thing.
She stared at the pale-green, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling above her, mandatory in all teenage girls’ rooms. I am not watching it. I’m not, I’m not, even as she sat up and searched through the duvet for the phone.
It’s self-harm, Ali. Do not watch that crap.
She retrieved the phone. I’ll just skim-watch it. I need to know what they’re saying. She loaded the video. Gleeful voiceover narrated the screenshots of her Instagram account before finally settling on the picture of her in an unflattering dress that sparked an immense outpouring of congratulations about her being pregnant when she was most certainly not.
‘Ali Jones was just your average insta-nobody until she was announced as a wild card nomination at the 2019 Glossie Influencer Awards. On the day her nomination was announced, it seemed Jones had even more exciting revelations to come. An Instagram post appeared to be breadcrumbing a pregnancy reveal and when host Blake Jordan welcomed her to the stage, she made it official.’
‘That is not what happened,’ Ali hissed as footage of Blake Jordan on the stage at the Glossies WildCard launch appeared. He was holding the envelope that contained her name and keeping the audience in suspense. ‘Phew, sorry for that pregnant pause there! Though our next nominee knows all about that… Please welcome Ali Jones and her “little surprise” to the stage!’ he crowed.
Ali clearly remembered panicking as she struggled through the crowd to the stage. She had just come from her dad’s nursing home, she recalled. It had been a very bleak day. She watched herself scrambling up on stage, helped by two waiters. After she was installed on the third plinth beside the other nominees, Blake had tried to get some banter out of her but it was clear from the video she was utterly paralysed by his announcement of her supposed pregnancy.
If I could just go back to that moment… Ali knew regrets were futile but it was surreal watching the exact point when her life went into a tailspin. Of course, at the time, she was so obsessed with getting big on Instagram and trying anything – drinking, outfits of the day, getting her lips plumped – to distract herself from her dad’s horrendous decline that she didn’t immediately correct Blake. Why didn’t I just explain?
She watched as Blake clicked his fingers in front of her face to try and snap her out of her reverie.
‘You dilating, hun?!’
Here it was, Ali held her breath as the Ali on screen finally spoke, unwittingly setting in motion the events that would ultimately lead to her downfall and this very fucking real baby she was now carrying:
‘Sorry! I was just saying I’m going to double in size, LOL.’
Ugh. Ali X’d out of the video and buried her face back in her pillow.
The last few months of faking pregnancy symptoms on her Instagram to gain followers – she’d gained over 100,000 in the end – felt like a deranged fever dream. If only it had been. And now she was pregnant for real.
What on earth had she been thinking, telling everyone she was pregnant for a few followers and a shot at being named influencer of the year? Of course if it had just been strangers online that would’ve been one thing but she’d dragged Sam down with her. Every time she thought of Sam, who she had allowed to believe was the father of her fake baby, she felt a despair so profound it scared her.
God, how did it all get so fucked? A squirm of sickness in her tummy seemed to be answering her.
‘It was a rhetorical question,’ she muttered to her stomach. It was mad how utterly blindsided she’d felt when she saw the positive pregnancy test and then how quickly she’d come around to the idea. The baby was like a little beacon of promise and hope amid the dreariness of planning her dad’s funeral, being cast out by the Insta world and being publicly shamed online.
‘It must be a biological quirk.’ Liv had laughed grimly in a voicenote the night before, when Ali mentioned her growing optimism. ‘There’s no way you should be buzzing over this baby. You don’t know anything about babies. My sister says parenthood is hellish. And she’s got a husband. How’re you going to raise it?’
‘We’ll raise it together!’ Ali’d mugged, to Liv’s annoyance. ‘Or we’ll convince Sam to move in with us and we can be sister wives while he does the night feeds.’
Despite her joking, Ali knew that telling Sam was not going to be easy. She hadn’t heard from him since he’d found out that the baby that she’d claimed to be expecting with him was an elaborate Insta-sham. And he’d found out in the worst possible way, stumbling across the thesis on Instagram that Liv had been working on for her master’s. Page after page had detailed Ali’s Insta-insanity. Then her dad had died just hours later, and the world had dropped out of orbit.