Girl (In Real Life)
If I ever got abducted by aliens, my parents would make a YouTube video about it before they called the police. I know they love me. I mean, they tell practically the entire world on a twice-weekly basis. Along with sharing everything else about me too. It’s not easy when the two people who love you the most are also the ones ruining your life...
Eva has been famous since before she was born. The whole world knows about her first tantrum, her first spot and now even her first period! All because her parents overshare her entire life on their super successful internet channel.
AND. SHE. HAS. HAD. ENOUGH.
Enough of stupid outfits and viral posts, constant teasing at school and no privacy ever. She is taking back control of her life – even if it means sabotaging her own parents.
A funny and heartfelt novel about growing up in the spotlight and realizing that life is about more than likes, comments and follows…
For Felix
CONTENTS
1 WELCOME TO OUR CHANNEL
2 TAGGED
3 THE CREEP CABIN
4 HAPPY FIRST PERIOD
5 SPUD
6 THANKS FOR WATCHING
7 DON’T READ THE COMMENTS
8 GOOD MORNING
9 CARYS
10 “WE VLOGGED OUR DAUGHTER’S FIRST PERIOD”
11 NOPE
12 LUCKY
13 TROLLS
14 DON’T LEAVE A TRAIL
15 LOGGING IN
16 JUST ACT NORMAL
17 GUILT TRIP
18 SHARK ATTACK
19 FERROMAGNETIC FLUID
20 SABOTAGE
21 LET’S GET PHYSICAL
22 UNPLUGGED
23 WAR
24 SUPER FREAK
25 CLEAR-OUT
26 EMERGENCY
27 FIRST RULE OF JU-JITSU
28 SECRET WEAPON
29 PLAN B
30 FARMOR
31 A STORK IS NOT ALWAYS A STORK
32 HELP
33 GOODBYE
34 WARNING
35 DON’T SAY A WORD
36 SORRY
37 CONFESSION
38 THE TRUTH
39 IN REAL LIFE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first thing you should know about me is that I’m not extraordinary. Not even in the slightest. When people find out I’m that Eva – Eva Andersen, the one with the YouTube channel – they expect someone special. Only, I’m not. Sorry if you find that disappointing. But I’ve got kind of used to disappointing people lately.
I know there are probably a lot of people out there who would like to swap places with me. My life looks pretty good – from the outside anyway. And I get a lot of free stuff. Like, way more than I can ever use. There are boxes of new products in the garage that we haven’t even opened yet. Last November, we got free tickets to the Alton Towers Ultimate Fireworks display, and all the big rides were open. The vertical drop on Oblivion in the dark was pretty amazing, even if I did feel kind of sick afterwards. Last summer, we got to stay in this luxury treehouse in Portugal that had parts of the tree growing inside. I have my own iPhone, tablet, Xbox, laptop and even a custom-made charging station with my name on it. I have stacks of wellness journals, bullet journals and monogram journals (I don’t even know what they are). And every kind of fairy light you can imagine, from panda bears to pineapples. Last week, I was sent lollipops with real edible gold inside them. Sometimes, all that stuff can be exciting.
But sometimes it can feel like it’s crushing me. Maybe that sounds weird, and maybe if there wasn’t a camera pointed at me the whole time it would feel more fun. But the camera is always there. Staring, like a giant eye that never blinks, recording everything that I do. And then there are all the other eyes – hundreds of thousands of them. Every single one of them watching me.
It would be so much easier if I was an outgoing person. That’s what my friend Hallie says and she knows everything (apart from when she ties her braids in an extra-high bun and claims she’s taller than me). But she’s right about that – everything is easier if you’re an outgoing person. When I was younger, I would sing and make up dumb dance routines and show off in front of the camera. Being the star of a YouTube channel was a lot easier when I didn’t care about what people thought. Or maybe before I realized what they thought. But now, I feel like a snail who wants to curl back inside its shell, only someone’s smashed it off.
I should be used to it. My parents started posting stuff about my life before I even existed, on this blog called Everything But the Baby. They had ten thousand subscribers by the time I showed up. They’d shared everything they did in the five years it took to have me – even the gross stuff. That’s longer than I waited for my hair to grow all the way down my back. Mum keeps the scan photo next to her bed in a picture frame that says Our Miracle. Only, to me, it looks more like a floating alien. Showing everyone that picture was their first ever YouTube video. Nine minutes of my parents crying and hugging each other, along with millions of love-heart-eyes emojis popping up. I can’t watch it without cringing. I doubt anyone can. Dad always says, “Eva went viral before she even came out of the womb!” Like that’s an accolade anyone would want.
Anyway, the video where I star as a floating alien was only the beginning. My parents called their new channel All About Eva, and I guess the name is pretty accurate. There’s something from almost every day of my life. Only somehow, the Eva in their videos doesn’t feel that much like me any more.
It’s probably because recently, I’ve spent most of my time wishing it wasn’t me. Like the first day back at school after the summer, when Alfie Stevens in my class found the clip of me going down the X-Treme Blaster slide at Tropical Islands Water Park. As I drop six metres into the plunge pool, my swimsuit wedgie is visible for exactly 1.8 seconds. My friend Spud told me not to worry about it. He said, swimsuit + high velocity = wedgie. Apparently it’s simple physics. Although physics has never felt very simple to me. I’m still not sure which was harder to survive: the X-Treme Blaster or the first day of Year Eight.
When I got home that day, I begged Dad to edit my wedgie out of the water park video, but he said it was the only footage they had of me going down that famous slide. “And besides,” he said, “no one in their right mind would even notice the wedgie with your gawky belly flop!” Which was not exactly reassuring. So, my swimsuit-wedgied belly flop is still on YouTube, along with ten thousand other embarrassing moments of my life. But all the stuff that my parents don’t want anyone to see? That never goes on the channel. Like the flapping chicken-arms thing Mum does to get her deodorant to dry, or Dad using his electric nose-hair trimmer.
In case you’ve never watched an All About Eva video, let me give you the highlights reel:
Age 0 – Introducing Eva. 325k likes.
A stump of umbilical cord is still attached to my stomach. It’s blackish-yellow, like a too-ripe banana, and that’s not even the most disgusting thing. The video includes Mum doing my first nappy change.
Age 1 – Eva’s First Steps! 293k likes.
This is supposed to be a secret, but these weren’t even my first steps. Mum had been filming me non-stop for days because she was certain I was about to walk. Then the one time she put the camera down, I tottered across the living room. Accidentally doing important milestones off-camera really annoys my parents. My first steps happened twelve years ago and Mum still goes on about it.
Age 4 – Eva’s Cutest Tantrums! 441k likes.
A compilation video of me crying that’s over fifteen minutes long. The first comment says, Spoiler Alert: she’s spoiled. In the last section, I’m at the dinner table pushing my plate away and shouting, “I DON’T WANT A PEA!” Alfie Stevens had that as his message
tone for the whole of Year Seven.
Age 6 – Christmas Day – Eva Complaining to Santa! 2.8m likes.
No one ever hears my side of this story, so here goes. The Ultimate Hamster Grooming Salon was literally the only Christmas present I wanted. It was for grooming my hamster, Coco, after Mum had banned me from giving him baths in the sink. When I met Santa in his grotto, that was the only thing I asked for. Anyway, I got the entire collection of Rebel Dolls instead. The video of me shouting my complaint to Santa up the chimney has been shared over a million times. The camera’s shaking because Dad was laughing so much. They call it All About Eva’s first big success. I mean, technically Dad refers to it as the moment “Vi skød papegøjen!” which means We shot the parrot! But like anyone can understand Danish sayings apart from him and my grandmother. It was the most views their channel ever had and they got thousands of new subscribers. It’s kind of depressing when your likes peaked at six years old.
A few weeks after Eva Complaining to Santa! went viral, the company that made the Ultimate Hamster Grooming Salon sent me one for free. There were five different kinds of fur brushes and this special powder to sprinkle inside the cage that hamsters like to roll in. It was too late for Coco though. He died a few days after Christmas. Dad said he died of old age. I said he died from a lack of grooming. His funeral is probably still on YouTube.
Mum said Coco wasn’t very popular anyway, so they got me a kitten instead. I was allowed to keep the grooming salon though. And Miss Fizzy got used to the hair combing eventually. I was six when I chose her name, by the way. Now it’s kind of embarrassing. But still, her unboxing video is the only one I like watching. Mum tries to tie a pink bow around her neck and she hisses at her. Thinking about it, I guess me and Miss Fizzy were destined to get along.
Age 9 – The Letter on Instagram. 36k likes.
I guess this was what started to change everything. It was just this dumb letter I wrote one night before I went to bed. I’d been sent this stationery kit from some company my parents were promoting on Instagram, and I decided to write a letter to myself. I’d got this really low score in a spelling test and Mr Eliot had announced the results in front of the whole class. I wanted to make myself feel better. I used some of these motivational phrases I’d read in one of Mum’s magazines. I didn’t even understand what half of them meant: Impossible is just an opinion. The journey is the destination. You are the CEO of your life! I stupidly left the letter out on my desk. After school the next day Mum said it was the sweetest thing she’d ever seen. And told me it already had ten thousand likes on Instagram. It was like Mr Eliot reading out my test results all over again. Only in front of the whole world.
The entire thirteen-and-a-quarter years of my life is all there online if you want to take a look. Every moment preserved, like the jars of pickled red cabbage my Danish grandmother, Farmor, kept in her larder for years. Everything from my first breath to the patch of pimples that appeared on my chin yesterday. You can read comments from over a decade ago if you really want to. But I don’t recommend doing that. Maybe there’s something up with my brain, because it seems to delete all the nice comments I read and save all the bad ones. Farmor says All About Eva is “just one tiny stitch in the intricate tapestry” of who I am. And that I shouldn’t take it too seriously. She also says it’s a pineapple in its own juice. But I’ve never been able to figure out what that means.
Mum wouldn’t delete the You are the CEO of your life! letter, no matter how upset I got. She said I was overreacting and that I’d get over it. It’s what she says about everything. Even Dad agreed. He said #selfcare was trending and they were getting a spike in new followers. That’s the kind of thing that’s important in my family: Views and Shares and Likes and Dislikes and Subscriber Growth and Engagement Stats. Not feelings or visible swimsuit wedgies. That’s why sometimes it feels like that Eva – the one on the channel – is more important than the real me. If I ever got abducted by aliens, my parents would make a YouTube video about it before they called the police.
I know my parents love me. I mean, they tell practically the entire world on a twice-weekly basis. Along with sharing everything else about me too. It’s not easy when the two people who love you the most are also the ones ruining your life.
I’d been thinking about quitting the channel for a while. Probably because of all the filming I’d had to do over Christmas. Being told to “Give a bit more emotion, Eva!” kind of sucks the joy out of opening your presents. The matching “Let’s take an elfie!” pyjamas didn’t exactly help matters. And there are only so many times you can pretend to enjoy eating gluten-free roulade with “skinny” custard before you want to spew. Then there was the vlog they’d posted a few days before I had to go back to school: Surviving Eva’s Puberty! Do Not Mention Pubic Hair?!!!? My life may as well have been over. By the next morning, Alfie Stevens and his friends had already reposted bits of it on TikTok.
People from school were still commenting on it the next day. Dad was taking Farmor to the airport, but I wasn’t allowed to go because I hadn’t done my homework. So, I sat in the kitchen, scrolling through comments on Alfie’s TikTok and sucked yogurt through a straw. It had pieces of coconut in it that kept getting stuck, so it wasn’t exactly an easy way to eat it. I don’t even like coconut that much. But the yogurt company were sponsoring us to post a photo and I didn’t want to. I was still in a mood about the pubic hair post and I knew it would annoy Mum if I ate all the yogurt before the shoot. Hopefully I’d get out of doing it entirely. It was a bonus the slurping noises I made annoyed her too.
“EVA! Honey, can you please stop making that noise?” Mum called for the fourth time, in the voice she does when she’s annoyed but she doesn’t want to shout because she needs me to do a sponsored post later. I waited a few seconds then slurped again even louder. I don’t know precisely when annoying my parents became a major part of my life. But, without wanting to sound too big-headed, over the last few weeks I’d got really good at it.
Mum eventually came out of her office and shouted, “EVA! That’s enough!” Then she saw what I was eating and her jaw dropped. “THAT’S THE YOGURT FOR THE SHOOT!”
“Oh, is it? Sorry,” I said innocently. “It is super delicious though! So they’re right about that.” I scooped up the final blob on the end of my straw and held it up. “I still have this bit.” But then it splatted on the kitchen table. “Whoops.”
Mum smiled through gritted teeth. “I’m sure I told you we needed that, honey! I don’t think you’ve been listening to a word I say recently!” It wasn’t true. I had been listening. It’s just that I’d done the exact opposite. “We’ll have to fill it up with regular yogurt,” Mum said, then scraped her finger around the inside of the pot and popped it in her mouth. “Ooh, it is good though, right?”
I flashed the tiniest smile I could do.
Mum started looking in the fridge for some replacement yogurt. I sighed and refreshed my screen. Below the pubic hair video, a girl from school had commented:
Not to be dramatic but I’d die.
Someone else had put:
Imagine if that was your mum tho.
And Tyler Davidson had tagged me and put about a million crying-with-laughter emojis.
Just then, Dad staggered in carrying a giant cactus. I could just see his head poking over the top. My dad is 198 cm tall. He used to play basketball for Denmark. Not as an actual job – Uncle Gareth says it was more like charity work. Every time we go anywhere, a stranger will say, “You’re tall!” Adults like stating the obvious when it comes to stuff like that. Dad always replies with the exact same thing, “No, I’m Lars!” It gets annoying. I inherited Dad’s blue eyes and white-blond hair. The height thing I’m not sure about yet. So far I’m pretty average. If I get white armpit hair the same as his I will die.
“I’m back!” Dad said. “Farmor is on the plane back to Copenhagen and I have collected Prickles here as requested.” He grinned, trying to avoid its spikes.
“Eva,” Dad called from behind the plant, “that doesn’t look like homework to me.” Dad must be the only person on the planet who thinks about homework while he’s getting impaled by a giant cactus.
Now I’m in Year Eight, I’m supposed to be trying harder at school. It’s not like I wasn’t trying last year exactly, it’s just that most of the time there were more interesting things happening outside the classroom window. Like starlings pecking at the grass on the football field. Wonky icicles along the guttering of the old science lab. Leaves being blown into patterns by the wind. Miss Wilson says noticing those little details is a gift, but she’s an art teacher. My other teachers call it a distraction. Dad doesn’t understand why I’m not a high achiever at school. Since he and Mum went to university and everything, I guess he figured having their genes combined would make me doubly smart. But it didn’t. It’s annoying because what I did get was his practically-invisible eyebrows and Mum’s outie belly button.
Mum smiled. “Oh, leave her, Lars. Eva’s been working this whole time. Farmor said she did brilliantly with her Danish over Christmas. She’s almost better than me.” Mum winked at me from across the room.
Dad laughed. It’s a running joke in my family that Mum’s Danish is so bad no one can understand what she’s saying. When we’re at Farmor’s, it’s a good excuse to ignore her.
Dad carefully placed the cactus next to the window and looked out at the frosty garden. “So,” he said, clapping his hands, “the light’s great! Are we ready to go?”
Mum looked at him like he’d made a bad joke. She took down the picture by the window that said, All you need is Love and Prosecco and replaced it with one saying, There is always a reason to smile! I thought about the pubic hair post being shared all over TikTok and thought, There is always a reason to face-plant a giant cactus! might be more accurate.