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Leah Rilke had always wanted to be a writer.
It started with stories she’d write for her mom, back when she first figured out how to hold a pen. They’d be a page long at best, always starting with ‘Once upon a time’, all written with shaky, barely discernible letters. She used to leave out the capital letters and full stops because “it was boring”, handing a new tale to her ever-patient mother every night after school, like it was homework.
In high school, English was always her favourite subject. She’d run over the word count on assigned projects by three times, handing her exasperated teachers a carefully thought-out essay only for it to be tossed on a pile with the others and graded arbitrarily.
It was around that time she stopped looking for feedback on her writing.
Short stories became angsty teenage poetry, but she could never really get into it. She always ended up making herself cringe and getting frustrated with the limitations of rhyming schemes and line length. If Leah could do anything right, it was a good run-on sentence.
After that she tried Wattpad: a very short and much regretted stint. The lack of a frame left her characters falling flat, and her storylines stunted. Plus, all the Harry Styles-mafia-boss-budget-porn stuff was really not her thing.
She did try fanfiction, though, and enjoyed that for a while. Having characters readily available, fleshed out universes, a guaranteed audience – it was nice. A good outlet for a while, a way to feel like she was actually creating something, leaving something behind, until –
Until.
A couple weeks after she’d met Jeff, the conversation had turned to different writing styles, and he told her fanfiction was just a ‘cheap way for mediocre writers to convince themselves they were special’.
And. Well. That was that. She stopped writing completely after that, actually.
It’d made her feel small, his success, his superiority. At the time, she’d kind of loved the feeling – like she was so grateful to just witness his genius, absorb his talent. What was the point of trying to create something when she could just watch him do it instead?
Except he left. He made art and she made mistakes. And he left.
For a long time after, she didn’t feel that same urge to leave something behind on the world anymore. The drive she’d had as a girl to make a mark evaporated, and now she’d finally grown up, all she wanted was to be small again. To go back in time until she disappeared completely, leaving no trace behind.
Then there was the car.
There was the hand-job at the party, the music in her ears, the dancing under a streetlamp. There was the screech of tires and the hospital bed and her mother’s tears. There was the car.
And then all Leah wanted was to write her mom a story again. No punctuation. Short, sweet, happy ending. Once upon a time, the hero wins, the end. That sounded nice.
Her therapist suggested she try writing as a way of processing her feelings, somewhere to blurt out all the blood and gore of Jeff and everything he caused. It was journalling first, supposed to empty her mind, but that just ended with her spiralling and twisting until memory gripped her lungs in a vice. Naming five things she could see, four things she could feel, three things she could hear… Grounding techniques on breathing exercises on bullshit, until she could finally catch her breath again.
Yeah. Journalling wasn’t for her.
So she tried writing in the third person – an objective observation of exactly what happened, like she was nothing but a passive witness to her own undoing. Which, in a way, she had been. But still. That didn’t work either.
Desperation to impress Jeff long gone, she tried fanfiction again, putting all her messy hurt into a fictional world and hoping it’d stay there. It was the best one yet, in a therapeutic sense, but still not perfect. Where the journalling had left a little too much room for painful self-reflection, this was too disconnected from herself. She needed something real, but not too real. Honest, but not too honest.
And then it came to her.
She’d listened to a few podcasts, before then. The pretentious educational kind, the riffy banter between two unremarkable best friends, the murder mysteries and patronising advice and TV recaps. And then there were the fictional ones – ‘Welcome to Night Vale’ and ‘The Bright Sessions’, weaving universes in altered voices, telling a story without just – well, saying it.
It was perfect.
She started on YouTube, creating a whole fake alias in the hopes nobody from her artsy school would be able to identify her, if they came across it through some unfortunate coincidence. @tidepool7, plain black profile picture, free online software to alter her voice until it couldn’t be recognised. Job done.
As for the actual story of it, she got a little stuck at first. Originality was difficult at the best of times, but trying to be original in a way that could still reach the main aim of this whole thing, help her like, heal or whatever – that was even harder. Eventually, it was a combination of studying Lord of the Flies in English and feminism in sociology that led to her inspiration, and she drafted a rough plot for the first few episodes of what she’d decided to call ‘The Wilds’.
Eight teenage girls stranded on a desert island, as part of some twisted experiment. One of them being basically the mirror image of Leah (renamed Ava, though, for the whole anonymity thing). As for the other characters, she was a little ashamed to admit she’d taken some inspiration from her friends at school – it sped the whole process up, and after all the failed attempts at processing (as her therapist called it), she really just wanted to get on with it.
The first episode was 23 minutes and 12 seconds of Ava, narrating the beginnings of crash landing on the island with brief interludes from the other girls: how she’d ended up there, all her cliché heartbreak and angst. She didn’t exactly come off as likeable, to be honest, and Leah thought maybe that was something she should reflect on, but that was really too much to ask for one day, so she hit upload and moved on.
That first video got twelve views, one like, and a comment offering ‘h0t miLf pics for $$$’.
Solid start.
Still, Leah figured she wasn’t doing this for anyone but herself, so she kept going. Episode two from Thea’s perspective – one of the twins, mysteriously missing a hand, absolutely not based on her friend Rachel at all. Then Maeve’s episode, drug dealing survivalist, again with absolutely no resemblance to any real persons, of course. It went on like this, until there were six episodes, and somehow, an honest to god following.
@the0224knows: gretchen is an evil evil witch and why do i kind of love her
@pandaa_._: no bc i need the next episode now
@99yurrrmum99: TIDE. can alex and olivia PLEASE just kiss already. you’re killing us.
It was strange, having a – could she call it a fanbase? People waiting for something she was making. Calling her Tide and shipping her characters (seriously, Toni and Shelby could never find out about the Alex/Olivia thing, even if Leah did secretly suspect it was a thing in real life too). It was strange, but not entirely unpleasant.
The channel expanded, slowly, hitting a thousand subscribers, then ten thousand in the next week. @tidepool7 now had an official Instagram account, hosting trailers for the next weeks episode, reposting fan art, and offering exclusive thirty second extra clips not featured in the main podcast. Leah expanded onto Twitter, too, posting ‘experimenter notes’ and answering fan questions.
@tidepool7: Field Note #134 – Ava and Sophia’s first interaction was in their sophomore year, in the bathroom between classes, when Sophia asked Ava if she could borrow a tampon. Ava said ‘No, but you can have one’.
@tidepool7: yes @goldenwildssz, every girl will get her own episode. check the Instagram for a hint of who’s up next week ;)
Ten thousand became twenty, blue checks appeared next to her username, and Leah dedicated more and more of her time to everything to do with The Wilds. Sponsorship deals, uploading all episodes onto Spotify, anything to fill her time with non-Jeff related thoughts. Her parents worried about the pressure she was under, at first, but she’d stopped crying and clinging onto his book, so they took it as a win.
It worked for her, finally. Leah in person and Tide online, telling a story that was true but not too true, with characters that were real but not too real. Making something she was proud of that a few thousand people happened to enjoy listening to. No big deal.
Enter: Fatin Jadmani.
Cello genius, notorious party girl, and uber famous TikTok star. Also, inspiration for the endlessly irritating Sophia in Leah’s podcast. Not that she knew that bit.
It started with one of her pointless videos: Get Ready With Me – Monday Morning Edition. She opened with artfully framed shots of her yawning and pulling off a sleep mask (hair and makeup done already, of course), launched into a skincare routine, then flashed her phone screen at the camera to show what she was listening to while she got ready.
The Wilds: Episode 6. And she linked the YouTube channel in the caption.
Leah – well, Tide – gained 50,000 subscribers in the next three days. 100,000 by the end of the week. A month after the video had been posted, she was at 497,388 and counting.
It was crazy and exciting, terrifying, overwhelming, and completely incredible.
And it was all Fatin’s fault.
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Leah should have been terrified.
Half a million people regularly tuned in to listen to her computationally altered voice, and though any logical eighteen-year-old would have crumbled under the pressure of maintaining something that had snowballed so quickly, Leah just – didn’t.
The thing was, in every other aspect of her life, Leah was scared. Every single morning, she woke to a blissful, bleary-eyed, ten-second respite, then panic brushed the sleep from her eyes and set her heart rate to double before she’d even had the chance to check her damn emails. Every tiny worry stretched out it’s aching limbs on the bed next to her, yawning wide and sucking all the air out of the room.
The days would start like that, fraught and shaking. Each time, Leah briefly wondered whether she could hide in wrinkled sheets until the sun set again, because at least that way, nothing could go wrong. That way, she couldn’t hurt anyone. And when her ten minutes of mandated morning terror were up, she’d drag herself out, spending the rest of the day trying to convince her nervous system that she wasn’t, in fact, being hunted for sport, and that it really could just chill the fuck out.
Her nervous system, shockingly, never listened. Stubborn bitch.
It was always like that. Butterflies in the stomach seemed like a romantic concept until you were a living, breathing apiary, too full of bees and terror to fit much else. Leah couldn’t remember the last time she’d been honestly, completely calm. All she wanted was five minutes where she didn’t think. Pop her brain out, run it under cold water, drop it back in. Hard reset: volume up, volume down, power button. Full frontal lobotomy maybe – whatever it took.
Sadly, those weren’t exactly practical options.
The only thing that worked, even if it was temporarily, was to focus her attention on something so demanding that there was no space to even consider whether someone hated her, if she was fundamentally unlovable, what colour t-shirt Jeff was wearing that day –
Point being, she welcomed a distraction.
The Wilds was just that. Frantically editing the latest episode for her 8 p.m. deadline, fielding countless emails from potential business partners, managing comments on four different social media platforms at once: it was high pressure, extremely stressful, probably far too much for one person to handle competently by themselves.
It was perfect.
Because, yes, Leah was doing the job of a full-scale production company completely by herself, but at least, for once, she wasn’t thinking.
As long as she remained anonymous, Leah could handle it. As long as the internet only knew Tide: benevolent creator and genius writer, she’d be okay.
Then again, she supposed it was only a matter of time before someone found out.
What she couldn’t predict, though? That the person who finally saw through her expert façade was probably the last person Leah would’ve chosen to tell. Someone who almost certainly didn’t wake up to their hands already shaking, someone who could never possibly understand how much this ridiculous little story meant to Leah.
Just her luck, right?
Fatin. Fucking. Jadmani.