By the time junior year rolled around, Max hit over 5,000 followers. The milestone marked a huge turning point in his life. He went from being a kid that everyone kind of left alone, due to Ryan's wrath, to the most recognized and hated face at school. His classmates were relentless once they discovered his Instagram account, and the comments they left for him, along with the shit they said to his face, were way more fucked up than any of the comments he received from strangers.

A guy from Max's math class commented on one of his most liked selfies: I wanna rearrange ur face whenever i see u in trig.

Random kids in the hallway jeered at him, "Too bad you can't hide behind a filter in real life, you ugly piece of shit!"

They never missed a chance to knock him down a peg, "Why you gotta be so fucking full of yourself, pretty boy? You think you're better than us?"

Then, after his sixteenth birthday, came the death threats. Ryan and his buddies were the first to spray paint #dieweiser on the back of Max's pickup truck. Max got suspended for getting into a fight with Ryan.

A few months later, a group of anonymous shitheads in monkey masks jumped Max on his way home from a game. He ended up in the emergency room with multiple injuries and stitches that ran along the right side of his forehead, through his eyebrow, to his ear.

His mom had wanted to press charges, but neither the school nor the police could track down Max's assailants, and, unfortunately, Max and his mom didn't have the funds to hire a lawyer. In the end, his wounds hadn't been severe enough to cause a real ripple through the community, so the incident blew over. Life went on. Max's grades plummeted. He quit the football team and spent the first few weeks of summer recovering from his injuries. He started taking some painkillers. His nose healed slightly crooked, and he now had a thin colorless scar running down the right side of his face. Every time he saw those harsh reminders in the mirror, his heart would begin to pound in anxiety, and he would be taken back to that night when he thought those masked kids were going to beat him to death.

Max hadn't fully grasped the sharp brutality of hate until recently. It was overwhelming to process the fact that so many people despised him. Wanted to hurt him. Wished he was dead. His body had since healed from the monkey-masked attack, but his heart still felt beaten down and bruised beyond repair.

When his dwindling circle of friends called and texted to see how he was doing, Max shut them out. He withdrew from them. Even Chase. Lexi, too.

Late at night, he would stare at his painkillers and wonder what would happen if he downed the whole bottle. He came close, once, to giving into this dark, morbid thought, but then his phone suddenly started buzzing like crazy over a stupid shirtless photo he had just posted. Max put down the pills and picked up his phone to check the new comments and likes. In this very unexpected and ridiculous way, his followers saved his life that night.

Max didn't speak to anyone other than his mom for the rest of the summer.

Yet, as his real life fell to pieces, his online presence skyrocketed to 27,000 followers. The contrast of these two realities was kind of unsettling. When his fans started asking about the scar on his face in the comments section, Max lied through his teeth and claimed it was merely a stupid skateboarding accident. His followers wished him well and thought nothing more of it.

Max became extremely adept at hiding his true self from his followers' adoring eyes. His content continued to align perfectly with trending hashtags and popular memes, attracting new views at a steady rate, while also keeping up with the kind of posts that his earliest and most loyal followers enjoyed, shirtless pics and cute selfies highlighting the SoCal skater boy aesthetic.

Max's fixation with stats on Instagram quickly became a double-edged sword. The ticking numbers that represented his ever-growing fanbase kept him from harming himself again, but they also drew him further and further away from reality. It was much easier to bask in the popularity of his online persona than to think about going back to school. The mere thought of returning to Wilson High filled him with pure, unadulterated dread, and the first day of junior year was fast approaching. When the first day of school actually arrived, Max stayed in bed. He didn't go to school the next day either. Then, two days went by. A week passed.

Max never stepped foot in Wilson High again.

He chose, instead, to message one of his Instagram friends who was already living in Los Angeles. Jake offered him a couch to sleep on in his apartment for $300 a month. Three days later, Max packed up his truck and hopped on the I-15 towards Los Angeles.

His mom nearly had a heart attack when she found out Max dropped out of high school and ran away to LA, but he didn't care. Max was so fucking done with Temecula, and, at almost eighteen, his dreams were unstoppable. He was determined to make it big in "the land of fame excess." Whatever the fuck Miley Cyrus meant by that.

Haters could go choke on glass. He knew that his fans had his back, and Max was fully revved to grind his way up the social media ladder with everything in his arsenal.

Chapter 7

After two hours of driving on the I-15, Max arrived at Jake's apartment after nine o' clock on a Saturday night. Jake had invited a few friends over. Max recognized some of them from his Instagram connections. Everyone was involved in social media in one way or another. Ex-Viners. TikTok dancers. YouTube gamers. Most of them were in their twenties, but a few were also high school dropouts or recent high school graduates. They were all around Max's age.

The crowd of young, beautiful people mingled and drank. It was a grand old fucking time. Max ended up playing beer pong with Axel and Avon Wilder. Axel and Avon were the sons of retired daytime soap star, Rachel Wilder. They were also well-known vloggers in the YouTube community. The brothers ran a successful channel about nothing and everything all at once. They played modified versions of Russian roulette by eating live worms versus gummy worms. They jumped into half-frozen lakes in penguin costumes. They screamed their catchphrase at the beginning of every video, "We do it for the views! JK! We do it 'cause we love all of you's!"

Axel seemed to know everything there was to know about working as a social media influencer, and Avon's charisma on camera was truly unmatched. Max was in awe of them. He followed them around all night, asking questions at a million miles a minute, taking mental notes, and, to their credit, Axel and Avon only seemed to be mildly annoyed by his relentlessness. Max couldn't remember the last time he had felt so happy or so alive. These were his people. This was his tribe.

Max also lost his virginity that night to a very tan, very blonde, and very pretty girl named Everly Gray. She was an IG model with almost 20,000 followers and a fast-growing beauty channel on YouTube with over 40,000 subs.

They continued hooking up after Jake's party. Casual sex led to brunches with avocado toast and mimosas. Brunches led to fancy dinners and more Netflix and chilling. Max became a regular on Everly's channel filming videos titled "My BF Does My Makeup" and "10 Questions Girls are Afraid to Ask Guys." Views for Everly's videos that featured Max almost always shot through the roof.

Within weeks of his first appearance on her channel, Everly's subs began trickling over to Max's IG account. It didn't take long for girls to slide into his DMs. They passed along their phone numbers. Sent him topless photos. Asked to meet up in person. Max tried to be as friendly as possible with his new fans, but he was careful to never flirt back. He had learned this lesson well after his painful break-up with Lexi.

When Everly found out about all the females who had been reaching out to him, however, she freaked the fuck out. They fought. They made up. They fought some more. Then, one day, Max came home from the gym half an hour early and walked in on Everly and Jake. Topless. Pants-less. In bed. Max dumped her cheating ass and started looking for a new roommate.

In a stroke of fate, or fuckery, Axel Bronwen texted Max that same night. He was looking to put together a team of up-and-coming influencers to launch a brand-new channel. Max had branched out on his own after his success through Everly's channel. He now commanded almost 200,000 followers on IG and 100,000 on YT. These were numbers that hadn't gone unnoticed by Axel.

Axel's message flattered the hell out of Max: dude... ur exactly what we're looking for. brains, beauty, talent. i know u have what it takes to make it big, bro.

Axel told Max over the phone that he planned to rent out a mansion in Calabasas for about ten people, ideally five girls and five guys. They would produce individualized content and then collaborate weekly on larger projects under one channel, Wilder Ones. Max signed up to work with the brothers right away.

Within months of launching their new channel, Wilder Ones hit one million subs. Six years later, they hit the five million mark. At only twenty-three-years-old, Max became one of their top influencers. He was also the hardest working motherfucker in the house. He slept no more than three to four hours a night. From morning to night, he lived and breathed filming, vlogging, editing—only to wake up the next day to do it all over again with newer, fresher, crazier content. Like skateboarding off the roof of their mansion into an Olympic-sized pool. Or streaking through a public beach wearing nothing but a tube sock.

Sponsorships, collabs, event appearances, and business opportunities flooded Max's inbox. He could barely keep up with his emails. Axel suggested for him to hire a personal assistant.

This was how Lexi re-entered his life.