Chapter 7


December 14, 2010 at 10 AM, Fort Worth, TX: Preston

"So you're still alive?" Daka asks with a smarmy little grin when I walk downstairs to get something to eat. He's sprawled out on the couch holding his new iPhone and he's pretending to be taking a video of me in my GTA pajama pants. I do a quick dance for him next to the couch and he acts like he's zooming in on my butt like a pervert. If he was any more in love with that phone he'd already have kids with it. "I didn't think I'd see you again until January."

"Shut the fudge up," I mutter as I smile and head to the kitchen. I can see him watching me around the corner with his stupid phone still pointed at me. How can he be five years older than me and still act like such a little kid?

"You would know all about fudge."

"And what the crap is that supposed to mean?" I know he's just messing around and he always says the same stuff to get a reaction out of me but calling me fat is the quickest way to get on my frickin' nerves. The worst thing about siblings is they know just where all your buttons are and exactly how to push them but they never get in trouble for any of it.

"I don't know. Maybe you should go ask Ethel M's. They want their store back."

"You're just jealous because you have no taste in food, D." I start digging through the fridge and the pantry to find enough stuff to get me through until dinner and my day is made when I find the last bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. Those things are the shizz.

"That doesn't mean you have to have a taste of everything, bro."

"I don't taste everything. I don't eat cat food."

"No, everyone else eats cat food because there's nothing else left to eat." He's standing right behind me at the counter now but I ignore him and start looking through the freezer to see if there're any frozen waffles left. Premade, toastable, near-unburnable waffles have to be the greatest thing ever created. I'm not a bad cook but I'm just too frickin' lazy to make them from scratch most of the time, especially when Daka's around to tell me what a good wife I'll make someday. "Are you gonna leave us anything this time?"

"Are you gonna go to work sometime?" I grab the box of apple cinnamon Eggos and turn around to look at him and his fancy-schmancy uniform.

"Are you gonna work sometime?" I swear, if he was any more envious of me and the money I make from my YouTube channels, his precious Navy garb would be green like a seasick leprechaun.

"I was working last night until four in the morning."

"Running in circles on COD isn't working. Or working out. You should try it sometime."

"You just don't like packing sandwiches for lunch when your little brother can afford to buy take-out for the whole family." He raises his eyebrows and I know I got him. We stay silent for a minute while I cook my waffles in the bright red toaster.

"Six? Are you gonna work that off, bro, or are you just gonna buy a bigger chair?" That one really hurts. He's starting to piss me off now and I can feel my face getting hot.

"Naw, D. I just stay in bed all day. No rules, no restrictions - just freedom."

"That's a great way to get a girlfriend. Chillin' in bed all day with your pants off, talking up twelve-year-old boys on your headset, eating your feelings... You realize when they say you're 'rolling in dough' they don't mean actual dough, right?" He's getting to me and I hate it. I'm not witty like him and he just makes me wanna deck him sometimes.

"That's cute. How would you even know what that saying means, Dak?"

"Personal experience. You have some right here," he walks over and pokes me in the stomach, "and here." He pokes both of my cheeks and makes my face puff out. We just stand there and stare at each other for a few seconds with his fingers still pushing in my cheeks. I slap his hands away and pretend to turn back to the toaster, then I swing around and jump on his back when he starts to walk away.

"What did you say?"

"You heard me!" I lock my arms around his neck and drag him down backwards so he's level with me, which must look really pathetic on his end because he's like six inches taller than me. His perfect little uniform hat falls off on the floor and I hope it gets toast crumbs and cat hair all over it. "Guess what, Prissy Pressy. I heard you sweet talking your boyfriend in your room the other day. Does he like 'em soft and doughy?" We struggle for a minute and he slams me back into the fridge but I don't care. He isn't getting away with it this time.

"You're a liar!"

"Yeah, right. Talkin' about how hot he thinks you are and how handsome he is? When's your first date?" I tighten my headlock and he elbows me in the gut but I don't even feel it. I'm seeing red right now and I'm a whole new level of pissed. He can get away with calling me fat sometimes but there's no way in heck he's getting away with calling me fat and gay.

"Your funeral!" He gives a muffled laugh and the tussle continues until I hear someone else coming downstairs. Mom stops halfway down and stares at us and she doesn't look impressed.

"Watch the temper, Preston. Let him go." I hesitate for a second before I move away from him and I smirk as I watch him pluck cat hair off his precious hat. His face has to be just as red as mine is, but his would be purple if Mom hadn't shown up to save his butt again. "What started all this?"

"Preston started eating the house again." She just glares at him for a second before she looks at me.

"I came down to get breakfast and he called me fat and doughy." I can tell she's trying not to smile because she's not supposed to find it funny but all three of us start laughing at the same time.

"Okay, so this is what's gonna happen. You're gonna stop telling Preston he's fat, and you're gonna stop trying to beat your brothers up. Get it, got it, good. Now you get to work before they make you stay late again." She points Daka to the garage before she heads over to the front door to grab her purse and keys and slip her shoes on. "Hurry up, Caleb! I've waited long enough for you this morning!" Caleb slowly makes his way down the stairs to join her on her errand-running, and I can see the lump of his Nintendo DS in the pocket of his jeans. At least one of them takes after their best older brother.

"Do you need me to do anything today?" I ask as I grab my paper plate of now cold waffles and fold one in half and start eating. She glances at the food in my hand and at my face before she rolls her eyes again and smiles.

"No, just clean up your mess. Your room is starting to smell like a trash can so make sure you do something to get rid of the stench."

"Will do. Have fun." Caleb just glares at me as he puts his sneakers on and shoves his hands in his pockets to hide the DS.

"Stay out of trouble, Pressy," she calls as she locks the front door behind her. I nod and go back to the kitchen to grab my pop and my Doritos before I go upstairs to check on my YouTube channels. I had a ton of uploads go up early this morning and I can't wait to see how my first real collab with Rob went. Working with me probably didn't do him a ton of good, but his channel is three times the size of mine and I'm hoping to get a chunk of new subs from our first good video together. I check my e-mail to see if I got any DMs from anyone but it's all good. Nothing from Rob and nothing from the Bacca or Mitch. I check my subscriptions feed and finish my food while I watch the newest part of Rob's Ancient Aliens Series (which is freakin' epic. I'm totally stealing the idea from him and doing this series over the summer or something). My main channel had a pretty slow day and only gained a couple hundred subs yesterday, but almost all the comments on those two videos are either people having fangasms over the video or people recommending different gear combinations for the next run. Just an average day there.

"Now for the moment of truth." I fold my plate up and toss it in the trash can and switch over to my Minecraft channel to see what's up over there. I check my channel stats and cross my fingers for a nice boost from Mitch and Rob... But something doesn't seem right. Yesterday I had ninety-one thousand subs but I'm back down to eighty-seven thousand overnight. "What the heck happened here? Where did four thousand subs go? What did I do?" A fresh flame of panic is growing in my lungs and it feels like my whole body's on fire. I screwed something up real bad to lose two weeks' worth of subs in less than a day, plus however many I earned from my new collabs with Mitch and Rob.

Did I piss Jerome off? Is it gonna keep getting worse? What do I do? How do I make it stop? I go through the comments and ratings on my video with Mitch and everything's great. I skim through the stuff on the new solo Bridges game that got posted this morning and everything still looks good. That just leaves the Party Games video with Rob.

"Fuck." I never cuss but I think this situation seriously deserves it. I close my eyes and grit my teeth as I click on the video title because I really, really don't wanna see what happened here. Whatever went down on this vid was bad enough to take a big bite right outta my channel and I don't wanna face it. But I have to do something before the Bacca sees it and calls in SWAT to murk me. The actual rating bar isn't too bad with about a thousand likes and a little over a hundred dislikes. I mean, it isn't good but it could be worse. Whatever it is that screwed me over must be lurking down in the comments. I take a deep breath and slowly scroll down until I can only see the first comment.

'i love u preston! u inspired me to make my own youtube channel and i already hav 50 subs! u are my favorite youtuber and i hope to meet u in person someday! keep making cool videos!' I don't know if I'm annoyed or thankful this was the comment I landed on but it makes me not wanna read any more. I'm dreading this so bad right now.

"Okay, Preston. Just a little more. You need to find out what's going on so you can take care of it. You can't just run away from problems like this, gosh darnit." I inch down to the next comment but it's just crap posted by a stupid spam bot. I hate those things more than ever now. When the third comment crawls into view, ish starts going down:

'i knew it! i told everyone you were a fagget the first time i saw your videos! you should change you name to tbnrfags and quit youtube'

'GAY!!!!!!!!!'

'go kill urself fag'

'I used to like you before you started recording with all the gay Minecraft guys. Unsubbed!'

'It was funny when you made fun of him with bajan last time but you cant flirt with ron and put it on your channel. WTF!'

'why would u record with a gay guy? r u dating him?'

'are you gay Preston?'

'Is he your boyfriend?'

'I ship TBNRless! :D'

"What the heck, guys? Can't you take a freakin' joke?" I've had fans jokingly ship me with other YouTubers or video game characters before, but they seem like they're taking it seriously this time. There're no comments about the actual video - everyone's either calling me a fag or asking if Rob's my boyfriend. They don't get that we're just kidding around and there're tons of people saying they hate me or they support our relationship. "What relationship? There is no relationship! Come on!" I scroll through a couple more comments but they're almost all the same. I land on one that's kinda different, but not really:

'Ive been watching MrWoofless since before he started MC and Im glad he found someone who would be nicer to him than Nessa. Ill start watching your channel too! #subbed'

"Who do you think you are? Jerome?" The Bacca must be seeing all this and laughing his butt off right now. He probably knew this was coming as soon as I said I'd recorded with Rob again and he's been waiting to see what I'd do. I put my head down on the desk and just try to calm down before I lose it. This's so stressful and humiliating and I don't have a single freaking clue what I'm supposed to do about it. I can't just go crying to Jerome to give me the answers or he'll look down on me more than he already does. "I wonder what Rob thinks about all this... He's probably used to it by now." I sit there for another few seconds before it sinks in.

Of course. Rob! I open a new window and go over to his channel to scroll through the comments on his version of the video. I expect to see the same stuff as I had on my channel, but his video got a higher rating and almost no hate comments. Actually, almost all his comments were cutesy and had hearts all through them and most of them were saying how much they shipped us together. Instead of having #TBNRfags or another insult on every comment, everyone's screaming #Poofless and asking for pictures on his channel.

"What the crap, Rob? How did this happen?" I keep scrolling and I stop and stare at a badly spelled chain story about our first date. They're already writing fan fictions about this relationship that never happened. I tab back over to the comments on my video and I feel like I just got unintentionally ROFLstomped by Rob and his ship-crazy fans. I have the most bipolar comment war ever on my video and his is full of hearts and smiles and freakin' flowers!

What do I do? I need to keep working with Rob but this Poofless thing is gonna screw both of my channels over once the news spreads. What can I do to make all this go away without pissing Rob off? Beyond just being afraid of ticking off the Bacca, I really don't wanna mess up my ties with Rob and lose out on the chance to work with him. And I guess I can't deny I kinda want to be his friend. Like the Bacca said, I could use a few more allies and this'd be a good place to start.

"Who knew flowers could be so terrifying?" I put my chin down on my arm and refresh the comments on our videos a few times but every time it's just more of the same thing. I'm holding out the hope that Rob'll do something to control his subs but he's probably too busy to actually deal with this right now. I stay there for quite a while and I think about just leaving it be and working on something else for a while when the troops start moving on Rob's channel:

'Everyone might not like TBNRFRAGS or his videos but he doesn't deserve all the hate he's getting on his channel so if you support #Poofless you have to support Perston AND Woofless! <3' The comment instantly gets upvoted and soon it's at the top of Rob's comment section with dozens of replies saying they'll see each other on my channel.

"Oh, no. Oh, no!" I tab back over to my channel and I can see it's already starting. I can feel my mouth hanging open and I'm so glad I don't have facecam on right now. There're hearts and emojis and hashtags and supportive coming out comments everywhere. There's so much Poofless I think I might actually know what a 'Poofless' is now. Some of the big hate comments are getting reported so often they're being removed from view on the comment feed and I almost feel grateful, but not really. I can deal with a little hate and some trolling... but how the frick do I deal with this? "If Daka sees this I'm gonna die from embarrassment. This is so bad." But as soon as I say that, it just has to get worse. A new comment gets posted on my video and it gets so many likes it soars up out of the reach of the #Poofless army for a few minutes.

'lets go send all the fanboy faggots back were they came from! stay on your own channel!'

"Crap. Don't do this to me, guys! Come on!" I go back to Rob's video and I watch his comment section start to fill up with the hate spam from my channel and the dislikes grow from fifteen to seventy in seconds. "Crap. What do I do, what do I do?" I tab back over to my video one last time and start typing.

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December 14, 2010 at 11 AM, Montreal, Quebec: Rob

'This is going to take a while to find equilibrium if he doesn't do something.' The kids are laughing as Garrett takes his turn playing Just Dance on my ancient Wii, and I look up from my phone in time to see him try to breakdance for bonus points. I turn back to the comment war between mine and Preston's channels, waiting for him to either step in or log out. His channel main page states that he is still online, but his most recent comment was posted last night after I messaged him. 'What is he going to do? What he does now is going to determine a hell of a lot in the future.'

"Robbie, Robbie! Did you see what I did?" Garrett yells as he tries to dance to 'Funky Town,' standing on his toes to pretend that he has platform shoes on like the silhouetted woman on the screen.

"Yeah, that was really cool. I don't think I could do that."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I would just wipe out and break the TV." The kids giggle and enact what they think I would look like if I tried dancing. I ignore them and focus on Preston's video again, watching a couple of my long-time fans battle it out with a troll who doesn't quite understand how to use a keyboard. Regardless of the outcome of this little battle, neither of our channels will ultimately suffer, but it will give me a clear gauge of Preston's character. It's really a harmless experiment - as long as he doesn't openly attack me or intentionally throw me under the bus. I check to see if he has logged out, but his status has not changed.

'Are you trying to wait me out? You won't win.' I switch back to my video and see that the number of dislikes is growing exponentially. Although Preston's ex-fans think disliking and flaming my video will hurt me, all they are doing is generating more ad revenue for me by playing the video. I got rid of all of my fair weather fans a long time ago; someday Preston might thank me for this, pass or fail. If anything, I feel guilty for having to play my fans this way: they are legitimately defending me to the point that they now support a YouTuber they bitched about incessantly less than a week ago. 'I promise I will make it up to all of you.' I watch the kids spaz out through another bad eighties song before I check Preston's profile again and see that he finally stepped up to the challenge:

'I know this video is different from most of the stuff I post on my channels but there's no reason to be so DARUDE about it! You can say what you want about me but leave Woofless out of this. If you have a problem with the videos we do together then don't watch them! No true fan of mine would attack one of my friends and if you aren't grown up enough to handle a couple jokes get off the internet.' I read through it a few times before I am satisfied with his response.

' 'Friend,' huh? Maybe this could work out after all. I should help him clean up the mess.' I return to my own video and type out my response:

'Thank you to everyone who has a sense of humor and didn't have a meltdown about my videos with PrestonPlayz. Everyone has their own brand of humor, and sometimes not everyone gets the joke. We're going to continue to work together, so if you don't like his videos, don't watch them. Thanks again to everyone who kept their cool over the last week. <3' I can't help but smile as my fans like my comment and begin clearing out all of the negative crap Preston's anti-fanboys had posted. I scroll through the replies to my comment and I am surprised to see that he has responded with a heart emoji, which had already garnered dozens of likes and another flood of #Poofless comments. I return the favor on his video and earn a similar response from his viewers.

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December 14, 2010 at 10 AM, Fort Worth, TX: Preston

I slump back in my chair and let all the air out of my lungs. I feel like I just ran two miles and I'm exhausted. I refresh my video and check the comments again and I see that Rob replied to my comment with a heart emoji surrounded by little blue flowers. It's so cheesy and such a typical Rob thing to do that I start laughing hysterically. And with laughing comes hiccups. I sound like I'm having a seizure or something but I can't stop, and it hurts but it's just too dang funny for no reason. When Dad said I'd have an ulcer by the time I turned twenty this must be what he was talking about. I laugh until my sides are killing me and I have tears streaming down my face. When I finally pull myself together, I see there's a new DM notification at the top of the screen and I can feel my stomach sink back down to the floor. After this whole Woofless situation I swear I'm gonna need a shrink. I slowly move my cursor over to it and click, and when I see it's from Rob I can't tell if I'm relieved or terrified.

"Are we good now, dude? Please tell me we're good now."

'Hey,

I'm sorry about the little civil war on your video - it happens every time I record with someone new. Apparently I'm an acquired taste or something...? Everyone will get over it in a couple of days. Anyway, do you still want to record together on the 27th?

Sorry for all of the trouble this caused.

-Rob'

"Why's he apologizing to me? He crayfish!"

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December 14, 2010 at 11 AM, Montreal, Quebec: Rob

'Yeah of course! I'm still looking for a good map or something to do so I'll let you know. Thanks again for working with me and I'll see your handsome face in a couple weeks. Merry Christmas!

~Perston'

'Did he just misspell his own name?' I smile in spite of myself and reply with another heart emoji. He seems like he might be trustworthy, but then again, only time will tell. With any luck, he will at least be more dependable than his fan base. I suffer through the kids' rendition of 'Oops, I Did It Again' on Sing Star and run through all of my interactions with Preston again in my head. The last thing I need right now is someone else to avoid and lie to while I try to live out of cheap motels and vending machines, but the subscribers and views I will gain from my partnership with him might mean the difference between a week in a toasty warm room and a week in a freezing cold car. I zone out for a while and watch the kids jump around like maniacs, hoping I made the right decision to trust TBNRfrags. I have no idea how much time passes, but eventually my phone vibrates and brings me out of my reverie. I unlock it and Jerome's chibi Bacca face is grinning up at me, innocuous and sweet.

Jay-rome: Nicely played. 10/10

Me: ;)

'Big Brother was watching from the sidelines the whole time. I wonder how much of this he orchestrated.' Under its shiny, smiling, colorful surface, YouTube is a much darker, more ruthless world that is slowly being divided into factions where only Spencer's fittest will survive to see another year. Jerome is stealthily working around the clock to recruit new members to his corner, for better or for worse. Although I have little evidence and few reasons to doubt the Bacca's motives, after my little skirmish with Preston I can't help but feel used.

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Sometimes even the best laid plans fail. There is a short chapter that should have been written between chapters seven and eight, but it was added after its point in the plotline had already passed. It isn't necessary to read it to follow the main plotline, but if you want to read it, it is called "Senpai" and it is published in "Bonus Hearts."

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