I already had half a million followers. I wasn’t even sure how I managed that, honestly. The proper hashtags and producing a new video every day had certainly helped, but the channel was frankly blowing up. I was getting emails every day from people who were interacting with me and had even had one person explicitly call herself my fan. I had a fan. It was wild.
And at the same time, I started thinking that perhaps I should tell people in my life. If half a million people were following me now, and I was getting over a million views on some of my videos, it wasn’t going to be long before I was out with my sister and got recognized. Then it would be a lot of explaining to do to make sure she didn’t think I was hiding it from her.
Besides her, I didn’t really have many people to tell. Sure, I could tell Wendy and Finn, but I figured it wouldn’t take Dee long before she told her best friend for me. Aside from them, there wasn’t anyone else that I felt like I needed to break the news to. Though there was one person who I wanted to impress. Would he be impressed if I told him?
I imagined how I would tell him, should I run into him again. Gerry was the quiet, strong type. I wondered if it would make him shy away from me to know I had people paying attention to me in that way? I mean when I told him I wanted to be sideline reporter, a job that certainly involved being on television, he didn’t seem too bothered by that.
I was getting ahead of myself, though. Why would he care? He was just a guy I knew through other people and two interactions between ourselves personally. And he was too old for me. He was most likely not going to be impressed by some young girl with one leg and a famous vlog. He’d be interested in older women, more mature and sophisticated. Sexier. With two legs.
Shrugging all that off and deciding not to beat myself up today, I called for Dee. She was in the living room and had been waiting for me to join her so we could do a marathon of terrible comedy films from our youth.
“You okay?” she called from the living room.
“Yeah, I just wanted you to come here for a second.”
“Alright,” she said. “On my way.”
As she made it into my room, I turned the monitor over so she could see it and sat back in the chair. She looked between it and me for a second, seeming to have an issue figuring out what it was that she was seeing.
“I started a vlog,” I said, prompting her.
“That you did,” she said. “And you’ve done a bunch of videos. How come I didn’t know about thi—” She stopped. Her eyes seemed to bounce from side to side and then open really wide. She turned her gaze to me, and a smile stretched across her face so big I could see every tooth she had. “Holy shit, Malia, you have half a million followers! This video has almost two million views!”
“I know!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t want to say anything about it until I kind of knew what I was doing.”
“I’d say you knew what you were doing now. You could be making money off this, you know?”
“I am, actually,” I said, sort of sheepishly. “It all kind of came together really fast, but I have a sponsor as of today.”
“No way. That’s great!”
“Thanks,” I said excitedly. “I really feel like I’ve just gotten started too. All I’ve really talked about was challenges getting around and getting used to that. I have so many ideas about what to do when I get the prosthetic and start driving again and stuff.”
“That’s so exciting,” Dee said, “I love it! I love it! Do you need any help? Is there anything I can do to help you out?”
“Really? You would help?” I asked. “Because having someone hold the camera for me sometimes would make it a lot easier to do some stuff.”
“Sure,” Dee said. “I’d love to. I can do anything you need me to do.”
I smiled, and the two of us sat down to talk about other ideas I had and ones she came up with. It was so good to know that she was behind me. I had worried a bit about that. There were people online, even some of the people who had already emailed me, who thought what I was doing was performative and exploitative. They didn’t see the help that it would give to other people like myself who found themselves not knowing what their future held.
On top of that, it would help to show that amputees weren’t useless, like a lot of people seemed to think we were. That life continued on after and that there were goals that were still in reach, no matter what those goals were. My life wasn’t over just because I didn’t have one of my legs anymore.