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A Bad Case of Influencer Part 3

The finale of A Bad Case of Influencer.

* * *

 Garry squints as he sends the drone up. Jeres has pulled some serious strings to get this shot done. He notes that this past month since she dropped in ranking, Jeres has suddenly caught some sort of daredevil bug. It seems to work.

Her first “New Jeres” shot was of her lying on the tarmac in a car park, wearing a gold bikini, her body dangerously near the wheels of a BMW cabriolet. That post went viral when a famous Instagrammer from America reposted it, commenting “<3 this—reminds me of Helmut Newton.” Jeres got over 18,000 Likes and 396 new Instagram followers that day.

To celebrate, Colin brought over a nice chilled bottle of moscato that they enjoyed with McDonald’s French fries.

Jeres had struck on the magic formula: sexy girl + slightly scary position. Her daily posts were gathering Followers like dropped hair on a Magiclean dry mop. The most popular ones were the one of her doing a yoga Dancer Pose at the edge of an infinity pool in a full-body corset, and the one of her running away from a motorcycle gang, wearing a gorgeous ensemble by an iconic Italian brand, complete with handbag “flying” behind her.

The photos were so attention-grabbing, Mr Brown even spoofed her yoga one. Jeres was a bit insulted at first but soon realized that his post drove even more people to her Instagram account. As a thank-you, she reposted his photo.

Now standing on this steel platform, Jeres feels this is going to be her most important Instagram shot yet. This will shoot her into hyperspace of Instagram fame. This will make her the Kim Kardashian of Singapore.

Clad in a long, see-through floral print chiffon gown, paired with vertiginous Kurt Geiger heels, Jeres feels like a million dollars standing on the metal platform 50 metres from the ground, smack in the middle of the construction site. She hopes that that idiot Garry understands what she’s after.

The drone flies up to her eye level. She taps on her phone and puts Garry on speaker.

“Yes. You can pose liao.”

Jeres puts on her best fashion face, tightens her core, makes sure the split in the skirt shows off the length of her artificially bronzed legs.

After three minutes, she stares down at her phone. “Garry, are you done?”

Silence.

“Garry! What the hell?!”

“Jeres, sorry… I can’t get the shot.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s this ugly plastic thing in the background lah.”

Jeres turns around slowly. True enough, a big blue-and-white sheet is flapping hideously from the structure behind her. She lets off a string of unimaginative expletives.

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“Come down lah, we go and find somewhere else.”

“WTF Garry!” Tears are threatening to ruin her perfectly sculpted face.

“Never mind lah, we can find another spot. Come down now lah. It’s dangerous and also it’s getting hot. And the cement trucks are coming in already.”

It’s true. The perfect plan to shoot at sunrise is being foiled. But Jeres just cannot let it go. Suddenly she has a brainwave. She’ll take a selfie. She has her phone and she has her selfie stick.

“I’m going to take a selfie, Garry. Just wait for me. I don’t want to waste this effort.”

“Jer— ”

She presses the red icon on her phone, and pulls out the selfie stick from her pouch, attaching it to her phone. She can still do this. Yes. She. Can.

She positions herself at the edge of the platform and, looking away, does a test shot.

Doesn’t work. Can’t see the dress. Can still see that fugly blue tarpaulin. The only way is to get all the way to the edge, raise the stick higher to capture the dress.  Wind, she needs some wind.

The wind comes. Jeres is ecstatic, this is going to be perfect. She shifts her left foot an inch to the right.

Garry stares in disbelief as he watches Jeres fall from the platform like a scarf with a stone tied to it. His feet are rooted to the ground. His mind seems to be in a million places: Run forward and catch her! Forget it, she’s going to die! Film it! Call the police! How to save her? Quick, take photo!

For such a thin girl, her body makes a very loud sound, is his last thought before he dials nine-nine-five.

 * * *

 The Straits Times runs a two-page obituary on Jeresalynne Chionh. “Life of a genius cut short”, it declares. Her famous Instagram photos are replicated in vivid colour. The one that goes on to win a social media award is the final photo she took.

To everyone’s amazement, Jeres’ iPhone survived the fall. When the police checked her photo album, they discovered something amazing. Her last shot was of her in mid-air, eyes shut and lips slightly parted as if she was having a wonderful dream. Her turquoise hair formed a pair of exquisite wings around her head. The dress floated gloriously around her. It is a stunning image.

Sok Choo posts it on her sister’s Instagram account, and it trends for a week. Jeres becomes so famous in death even Ellen DeGeneres mentions her on The Ellen Show (“a triumph for Singapore!” crows the Straits Times).

But if she could look down from whatever heaven she’s in now, Jeres would surely be most touched by Kim Kardashian’s sweet Instagram post, featuring a sad-face selfie and the words “YOLO. RIP.”

 #influencer #shortstory #fiction #satire #KimKardashian 

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A QUICK POLL:

1. Should Jeres have died?

YES or NO.

2. Would you like to see this as an ongoing series?

YES or NO. 

3. Why?

(write me a line or an essay)

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A Bad Case of Influencer Part 2

A Bad Case of Influencer Part 2.

...

(To her amazement, her Facebook following isn’t shabby at 90K Likes, despite the fact she hardly touches it apart from linking her Instagram to it—a no-no according to the “gurus”. B*tch, please.)

Jeres would be quite happy to simply continue bewitching the public and getting paid to look pretty, if time was on her side. She knows that at the (ripe) age of 28, in one or two years, she will probably lose out to younger social influencers who are more willing to undergo more extreme surgeries to look even more Instagram-worthy; who are more willing to Snapchat what their boobs look like after augmentation.

(The thought occurs to her, fleetingly, that maybe Instagram won’t be around in two years, and neither will “social influencers”. But she brushes it out of her mind. No time for ridiculous notions! She needs to get her hair fixed right now.)

Sighing, she gets off her pink armchair and picks up her phone. She knows it’s a little too soon to call, but surely Dave at Tomlinson Hair will give her a much-needed hair makeover. She might even—gasp—give him a freebie Instagram and Snapchat in return.

Looks like she’ll have to call that dreaded Garry and ask him to come down and take her photos, and pay him ten whole dollars plus Uber fee. Not even her legendary dimples can melt that bastard’s heart.

 * * *

 Ping!

Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping!

Ping! Ping!

Jeres opens her eyes at the sound of her iPhone exploding… with Whatsapp messages and iMessages. She knows it’s something important. But just five… minutes…more…

“Ah Bee!”

The sound of her sister’s voice jerks her awake. She sits up crossly. “What lah? Why cannot let me sleep?”

“The ranking of Top Social Influencers is out in the Straits Times this morning!”

How could she have forgotten about the ranking, the most important mainstream event of the year, the only reason on earth web personalities actually go out and buy physical copies of the national newspaper?

It registers briefly that this scenario is heavy with irony.

Jeres heaves her 169-centimetre frame out of bed, and grabbing her phone, dashes out to the living room. Her father is reading—sitting in the branded massage chair she was gifted last Christmas—the Life! section. Jeres spots her own photo in the collage on the front page.

“Pa, can I borrow the papers?” she asks in her calmest, most neutral voice.

“You can wait. I’m still reading,” comes the expected response.

Jeres resists the temptation to throw herself into a dining chair in a show of temper. Maintaining peace in the home is very important. It is what keeps a social influencer from being thrown out of the house that she contributes zero to.

Nervously, she taps on Notifications that keep lighting up her phone screen. First message was from her best friend and fellow Influencer Gigi Hafiz (real name: Anika Hafiz): “Babe, hugs xoxo. It’ll be better next year.”

Jeres’ heart sinks and a bitter, metallic taste fills her mouth.

She taps on the next message. Colin, the maybe-boyfriend. “Jeresalynne. Ur much more than a number ok. Drinks on me 2nite. Pick u at 9.”

It must be bad. Colin never offers to buy drinks.

She knows if she goes on Instagram, everybody’s going to be talking about it. She doesn’t think she has the strength for that. Not on home ground.

Finally, her father puts the paper down. He fixes a stare at her, which, despite her best efforts at nonchalance, reduces her internally into a mass of melted lipsticks on the dashboard of a car parked outdoors.

“I don’t even understand what you do with your life, Ah Bee,” he finally says. Oh no, Jeres cringes, he’s going to ask me to find a real job.

“You’re 28, still living in my house, eating up all my rice…”

Oh gawd, it’s the Korean serial version today, she moans to herself while she keeps her eyes in “regret” mode, looking down at the placemat sitting on the dining table, a gift from the pasta brand that sent her an unsolicited hamper of sauces and spaghetti last week.

Thankfully, her father does not go on. He simply hands her the folded up wad of print and ambles off to the kitchen to get his post-newspaper cup of soya bean milk.

Hands trembling, Jeres scans the cover page—she is featured somewhere left of centre in the collage. She does not want to turn the page but is unable to stop.

Pirelli Pang’s image takes up the length of Page 2. Looking a million dollars, she (with her shiny Red Velvet Hair) is wearing an Alice + Olivia embroidered, multi-colored patterned mini dress with matching gladiator sandals. Jeres notes cattily that Pirelli’s oversized silicone pouches masquerading as breasts makes what is supposed to be an elegant dress look vulgar. At the same time, she is sure the vulgarity does not hurt Pirelli’s popularity one bit.

The words hurt far more than the photo. Under the headline, which reads “SOCIAL SCORCHERS”, the cloying standfirst belts out: “Pirelli Pang (@callmepirelli) is the undisputed princess of Singapore’s Instagram universe. Outshining her closest competitors, which include last year’s winner Candy Chan (@candyanime) and runner-up Jeresalynne Chionh (@jeresababe), Pang shows them how it’s done.”

Jeres wants to put the paper away and not look at it at all (actually she feels like ripping it to shreds but her mother hasn’t read it yet). As if powered by a sadistic poltergeist, she finds herself searching frantically for her face. Her mind is a blur as she scans the first two pages. Candy Chan is Number 2, but the rest of the pages are filled with people she barely or does not recognise. Jeres stares in disbelief that she does not appear in the top six. There must be some kind of mistake.

She flips the page. There, on the top of Page 4, is a quarter page photo of her. It is the Bindi Photo. Next to her name, “7”.

“Jeresalynne Chionh, who ranked number 2 last year, fell from grace this year due to a series of unfortunate posts,” the story reads. What series of unfortunate posts?! screams Jeres in her head.

The article goes on to list just what: the infamous Bindi Incident (which cost her 26 Instagram followers), the time she took a selfie against the background of Singapore Civil Defence Force personnel carrying a body to an ambulance (which became a viral photo and the topic of many print media discussions about what constituted insensitive social media—but Jeres read none of that, it didn’t concern her) and the time she was Instagram’d using her Chanel handbag to press the lift button.

“That wasn’t even my post!” Jeres says out loud, indignantly. That bloody Colin. She should have untagged herself from his stupid post. So she is a little bit germ-phobic. Do these people judging her know the number of foreign talents staying in her HDB block? “These talents don’t enjoy the same education system as we do,” Jeres had told Colin, “so their standards of hygiene are likely to be different from ours.” Colin had quoted her next words almost verbatim: “Haven’t you noticed that [people of undisclosed nationality] never wash their hands after going to the toilet? I’m not touching that lift button. I can disinfect my Chanel later.”

Now she wishes she had made him delete that post. He did mention that it drew a lot of comments and Re-grams, but he never made her listen to what he was really saying: that it made a lot of people angry! Just for that, I’m going to order a whole bottle of single malt tonight! she decides in fury.

Number 7. She had dropped five places. How in the world was she ever going to catch up to Pirelli now? Last year Pirelli was a measly Number 4, but Jeres was already seriously worried because Pirelli wasn’t even a social media sensation till that year itself.

Jeres sits, slumped over the dining table, her head in her hands. Sok Choo, her sister, seeing that the worst is over, comes and sits next to her with a cup of soya bean milk.

“Here, drink, Cheh,” she soothes. “You’ll feel better.”

“I have to do something about this, Ah Choo,” Jeres says resolutely, gulping the drink. “I can’t peak at number two. I just can’t.”

Sok Choo nods, patting her sister on the back. “You just need to do something desperate, like XiaXue. She always shocks her followers so they never unfollow her.”

Jeres stares at her sister and suddenly sees the genius in her otherwise ordinary sibling. Of course. XiaXue was the first to have a multitude of surgical procedures done (copied by others). Then she coloured her hair an unapologetic pink (copied by others, in a range of colours). Then she got pregnant (copied by one other). Then she blogged about her unbearably cute kid (copied by many others).

Jeres simply has to do something—or some things—that nobody else has dared try before.

Jeres envelopes Sok Choo in the best bear hug her skinny arms can muster. “One of these days, I’m going to Instagram you!” she promises as she floats back to her room for a deep planning session.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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A Bad Case Of Influencer, Part 1

As promised, my original short story, A Bad Case of Influencer (c) Theresa Tan 2016. It was originally written for a collection of humour writing that eventually didn’t materialise. 

Jeresalynne Chionh sits down at her dressing table and stares at herself with the critical eye of a true Influencer.

She has had this hair colour—an ombre wash of ashen green and lilac—for a full month now. This morning on Instagram she noticed with a stab of panic that her arch-nemesis Pirelli Pang has transformed her look once again—killer bangs (why didn’t anyone tell her that bangs were back? So irritating!) plus a colour job the shade of The Fabulous Baker Boy’s Red Velvet Cake.

Jeresalynne (Jeres to her friends, Ah Bee to her family) grumpily unlocks her rose gold iPhone 6S and taps Instagram to take a second look at Pirelli’s hair, half-hoping to hate it. But no, there’s that smug face tilted at 45 degrees, camera slightly overhead to achieve a sharp chin (not too much or else you’ll look like that freaky Candy Chan with the anime eyes—like nobody can tell she uses an app?) and that glorious, shiny, superstar Red Velvet Head. Jeres flings her phone onto her bed in all-consuming ire.

So. Time to consider a new colour and cut. But who has time to sit at the salon for so many hours? Never mind that, where to find some loser who can drop everything and be with her for those many hours, taking casually charming photos of Jeres at various stages of her latest hair transformation. It takes a very special type of person to do this job—not every intern can remember Jeres’ best angles and how the photo needs to be lit.

Then there’s the question of which sucker salon can pay for this round. Jeres mentally counts off the many hair establishments that have paid her to post on Instagram and Snapchat as she is having her hair done at their salon. (One even had the audacity to ask for a Facebook post! Pfft! Who even goes on Facebook now, please lah. But she billed them an extra four-figure sum and wrote the post—she may be vain but she’s not stupid. Money is money.)

Jeres studies her face in the light bulb-lined mirror. She is undeniably pretty, she decides. Unlike her peers, she has only had one round of rhinoplasty and nothing else. Blessed with baby-smooth skin that requires none of those fat injections her competitors need, big eyes that are easy to enhance with good makeup, and twin impossible-to-copy dimples placed at just the right angle on either side of her smile, Jeres knows her face is her fortune.

It is this face that has earned her 201,865 followers on Instagram—as of this morning. Last week, she suffered a crushing 26 unfollows after wearing a bindi on her forehead while posing outside Buddha Tooth Relic Temple at South Bridge Road to herald Vesak Day. “Why cannot?” she suddenly recalls and resumes fuming. “What is this stupid ‘cultural appropriation’ deal? This is racial harmony—why don’t the idiots get it? I’m Singaporean, not some stupid American like Selena Gomez.”

(To her amazement, her Facebook following isn’t shabby at 90K Likes, despite the fact she hardly touches it apart from linking her Instagram to it—a no-no according to the “gurus”. B*tch, please.) Jeres would be quite happy to simply continue bewitching the public and getting paid to look pretty, if time was on her side. She knows that at the (ripe) age of 28, in one or two years, she will probably lose out to younger social influencers who are more willing to undergo more extreme surgeries to look even more Instagram-worthy; who are more willing to Snapchat what their boobs look like after augmentation.

(The thought occurs to her, fleetingly, that maybe Instagram won’t be around in two years, and neither will “social influencers”. But she brushes it out of her mind. No time for ridiculous notions! She needs to get her hair fixed right now.)

Sighing, she gets off her pink armchair and picks up her phone. She knows it’s a little too soon to call, but surely Dave at Tomlinson Hair will give her a much-needed hair makeover. She might even—gasp—give him a freebie Instagram and Snapchat in return.

Looks like she’ll have to call that dreaded Garry and ask him to come down and take her photos, and pay him ten whole dollars plus Uber fee. Not even her legendary dimples can melt that bastard’s heart.

* * * TO BE CONTINUED * * *