Friction

Chapter 6

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.