#WitchcraftWednesday | ✔

Chapter 2: Not a Bad (Curtain) Guy

Wednesday bleeds into Thursday, and on Thursday morning, Nathan realizes he has made an erroneous judgment.

He wakes up early this time and, upon silencing his blaring alarm clock, sits up and reaches for his phone. Forcing yourself to get out of bed immediately after waking up, he firmly believes, is detrimental to your health. There's only one acceptable way to start your morning and that's staying among the sheets and allotting yourself at least fifteen minutes to dick around on social media, bleary eyes desperately trying to focus on a tiny screen.

Central to this belief system of Nathan's is Twitter: without a doubt mankind's invention most suited to mindlessly wasting time. Instagram's pretty pictures and vapid influencers with their fake smiles just don't do the trick like Twitter does. All Nathan wants, really, is to start his day knowing exactly what or who the collective Internet is currently pissed about. Enter his saviour, the Twitter 'Trending' page.

This morning's Number One Trending Tag is #WitchcraftWednesday.

The moment Nathan is mentally ready to comprehend this information, he chokes on his own spit and has an instant coughing fit. Because he only encountered the words 'Witchcraft Wednesday' once before, yesterday, when a girl calling herself a YouTuber showed up at his door and told him the name of her channel.

Five people. Five people, tops.

If #WitchcraftWednesday is trending, far more than five people saw Jamie Carrera's goddamn video.

Almost forgetting to breathe, Nathan clicks the hashtag. He immediately gets hit by a veritable, ever-growing deluge of tweets concerning the events that took place in his house the previous morning. It overwhelms him so much he struggles to read the messages properly, but he skims the feed and soon gets the gist of what's going on.

In Twitter's digital battlefields, a fierce debate rages regarding the authenticity of Jamie's footage. For every tweet loudly proclaiming the video's fakeness and calling it a hoax or other malicious attempt at deceit, there's another defending the YouTuber with equal vigor, citing her reliability and the high standard to which she holds her content, as well as the fact it would take a tremendous amount of dedication to make her video look so realistic. While these battle-hardened social media veterans duke it out in the trenches, another part of the hashtag's population rests comfortably away from the frontlines, creating GIFs of the Great Rolex Burning and turning Nathan's ruined curtains into the hottest new meme on the block.

Maybe Nathan just shouldn't look at the Internet anymore. Ever.

All he can think about is how his face is plastered all over the Internet for the whole world to see—a level of visibility he most certainly didn't expect to wake up to, catapultation into online stardom overnight. Part of him wants to see Jamie's video in full, not just snippets and GIFs and screenshots, the whole damn thing, but that would require him to look at himself on camera and–

No. Just no.

Instead of subjecting himself to the torture, he closes the Twitter app and opens Chrome instead, typing Jamie Carrera's name into the search bar. Actually, his clumsy fingers type 'Jsmie Careera', but Google fetches him the links he needs, anyway. The first thing he sees is the Youtube channel, Witchcraft Wednesday (Hold on why does it have six million subscribers?), along with one of those knowledge graphs displaying celebrity pictures and basic information. Nathan ignores this graph and makes a beeline for the Wikipedia page Jamie apparently has.

As it turns out, Jamie María Carrera created her YouTube channel almost eight years ago at the tender age of sixteen. Starting out with informative-yet-oddly-funny explorations of the darkest parts of Mexican folklore, she quickly gained a cult following, her number of fans only growing as she expanded and professionalized her online presence. Now, her channel is an amalgamation of videos on folklore, the paranormal and occult magic from all around the world; visitations of supposedly haunted places like the Island of the Dolls (Nathan wouldn't set foot on that particular abomination for a million fucking dollars); and an assortment of scary video game playthroughs. Witchcraft Wednesday's signature icon is, and always has been, Santa Muerte in gold and black.