Gossip blogger haunted by Lena Dunham

Chapter 4

Emma finally churned out her Lena-covers-Vogue blog post. Jason proofed it and she ran out for lunch.

She hadn't eaten besides the latte. She was starving.

Cruising through the hallway toward the elevator, she almost forgot about the hallucinations - or the apparitions - or whatever the hell was going on when Lena Dunham turned up in the same room as her whenever she was alone with her iPhone.

But as soon as she felt that addictive pang she always felt after having gone a minute without checking her phone, she realized: it was Lena's nonstop social media presence that was causing these apparitions. She had to get from the 11th floor down to the sidewalk without checking her phone.

No, she told herself. No, no, no, no. Not worth it. Don't check the phone - not while you're alone in the hallway.

She'd be outside in like three minutes. Outside, she'd be just one more delusional psychopath in a huge crowd of them, totally safe. She tried to think of the things that gave her a hit of seratonin, besides Twitter or Instagram.

It took a minute. The elevator dinged, the doors opened, she got in. She tried to think of something, anything, that wasn't related to the internet or work or social media or TV.

Finally, she thought of Dylan, the Tinder guy. She didn't remember much of the time they'd spent together so far, but she felt butterflies when she thought of him. He had big arms, and he smelled really manly but still sweet. He dressed well. And he was in a band. Would he ever write a song about Emma?

Okay, the elevator was at the first floor. The doors opened. She walked out and was in the lobby - there was the surly front-desk guy. She was safe. As long as she wasn't alone, Lena couldn't find her. She pulled out her phone as she walked out the front doors and onto the sidewalk. It was safe to look now. Twitter first.

She first opened the tab for @ mentions to see who, if anyone, had deigned to pay attention to her online presence this morning, if only for a few milliseconds to hit "favorite." Hey look, she'd gained three new followers! Ugh, nevermind, they were bots. Someone had faved her most recent tweet - but it was the fetish creep who'd faved almost every one of her tweets ever since the time she'd tweeted something about nude pantyhose.

OMG - a push notification - her day's Timehop was ready. Flying toward the corner, she glanced up and saw a red traffic light up ahead, in real life. She gauged how long it was until she'd get to the curb, then slowed down appropriately to ensure she wouldn't dart into traffic while reading her tweets from this day in history.

Huh, not a lot had gone on in Emma's January 15ths past. She did notice one thing, though, using this cruel technological portal into the past: her face had grown incrementally jowl-ier in the past three years.

She'd spent these years, the years since college ended, blogging. Every weekday morning since graduation, she'd gotten up at 7 a.m. to scan Twitter and find material. She'd kept tabs on other people's lives as if she knew them, then she'd try to pull together three or five or seven or nine posts about these people's lives every day.

She'd written a few personal essays, too, and debated with commenters about how to properly refer to people of color and transwomen and which theoretical practices of feminism were best, in theory. She'd gotten into Twitter fights. She'd won a few. Or can you even win a Twitter fight? She'd certainly gotten the last word a few times.

The worst part of all was that when she thought about it, even though she always wanted to be an entertainer, she'd actually worked for years to become a blogger. It wasn't something she fell into. It was a conscious decision.

She'd started her own gossip blog in college while working at the school newspaper and fighting for the right to report on in-school scandals and drunkenly ranting about the first amendment at parties. Sure, she wrote scripts and screenplays and short stories on the side, and her official goal was to be in TV or film. But nothing got her blood pumping the way someone else's real-life scandals could.

Her first blog ended up banned from all of her school's IP addresses after she reported on a mildly rapey professor who creeped out all his female students. It became a whole thing and all these feminist websites covered it, treating Emma like she was a hero. She wasn't a hero. And that became clear once the feminist sites did some digging and realized she'd also made a name for herself by outing a beloved frat president for being gay. No one was going to pat her on the back for that one.

So her dreams of writing for Jezebel or Vanity Fair faded, and now she was relegated to working for what was strictly a gossip blog. Still, when she got the job, she'd jumped up and down and called all her friends and told them she was officially a journalist with a salary.

But writing about celebrities all day proved to be a lot less exciting than she thought it would be. At her college blog, she started on equal footing with her subjects and quickly gained power over them as soon as she hit publish. But now that she was covering celebrities, she was just another gossip blogger with zero access - the lowest of the low.

So yes, her face had grown incrementally fatter as she sat in her desk and wrote about other people and tried to avoid articles about how sitting at your desk can kill you. All the low-carb diets in the world couldn't help her. She'd wasted her pretty years drinking through college and blogging after. And still drinking. She was weighed down, falling farther and farther behind her successful peers, the ones who hadn't majored in English.

And she was especially far behind Lena Dunham.

These are the thoughts she had over the course of a split-second while looking at Timehop; in the time it took you to read the last few paragraphs, Emma actually checked Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for new notifications because it had been a minute since she saw that little light-up red flag sticking out of the corner of a miniature blue globe.

Oh, and now she was at Maoz and someone was asking how they could help her, so she decided to look up and tell them "falafel and French fries." She forgot about being paleo.

To be continued. Follow me on Twitter (@mollymulshine) to find out when the next chapter is published.