God, she was beautiful. My fingers dragged across the laptop screen wistfully, temporarily covering the face of my gorgeous goddess. My lovely Penny. Keyword: my. She didn't belong to those so called 'superfans' that followed her every vlog and interview and TV show. They completed those cute little quizzes on Buzzfeed and paraded around the world clamouring each one knows her better than the last. But they don't know her to the extent that I do. No, none of those fools could compare. I watched a Youtube video of her talking to a journalist about her upcoming movie. My blood simmered as I noticed her smile when speaking to him. That should be me, making her laugh. Not him.

I switched tabs deftly, my eyes flicking around me in the sombre library and my fingers tapping agitatedly against the keyboard. It was dim, with not many people around. But one could never be too careful; they, the outside world, wouldn't understand the special relationship I had with Penny. They, the souls that had never felt the touch of love upon their hearts, would have me taken away from my Penny. And I couldn't have that. She needed me, and I needed her.

My eyes drifted back down to my laptop, and I hunched further over the screen. On it, I watched from the corner of her room's camera as Penny threw herself onto her queen sized bed, sinking into the duvet. I imagined myself beside her, stroking her silky chocolate locks and twisting them between my tobacco stained fingers. But I had recently quit smoking, just for her. She once mentioned in an interview that she hated men that smoked. So I stopped.

I could almost detect the scent of her favourite perfume, Christian Dior's J'Adore Eau de Parfum. She wore it everywhere. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my seat, picturing my hand shifting down her hair, onto the smooth surface of her back and tracing circles. Penny would laugh, and that warmth from her skin would spread into my arm and throughout my whole body. Someday, someday, when I build up enough courage, I would find my way into her room and wait her for after shooting one of her vlogs, and how pleased she would be!

My daydream was rudely interrupted by the librarian poking my shoulder, trying to peer at my screen. My eyes snapped open and I slammed the laptop closed, my ears reddening. The librarian reminded me that sleeping in the library was forbidden and escorted me out, kicking me to the curb. I scowled, irritated, in her general direction as I stood in front of the establishment. I would come back next week anyway; the wifi was free here, and my landlord had recently cut off my internet access for not paying my rent on time.

And then, my Penny and I would meet again.

Penny lay still in the dark, phone face-down on the nightstand, pretending she hadn't heard her phone buzz. If she didn't look, it wasn't real. That was the logic she'd been running on for about four months now, and it was starting to wear thin.

She looked.

@PennyForYourThoughts: you looked tired in today's vlog. I could take care of you if you'd let me ;)

She screenshotted it, and added it to the folder, number ticking up to 214 entries.

Her manager, Dev, had started using the word escalating in October. Before that it had been concerning, and before that, an awkward laugh and something about the price of fame. Penny had watched him move through those words like stages of grief and wondered which one came next.

"Same account?" he asked, the following morning over coffee she wasn't drinking.

"New one. He gets banned, he makes another." She slid her phone across the granite counter without looking at it. "That's the third this week."

Dev picked it up, scrolled, set it down with a practiced, managerial neutrality. She appreciated it, mostly, but sometimes she wanted someone to confirm that this was, in fact, as frightening as it felt at 2:47 AM in a dark room.

"I'm calling the lawyer again today," he said.

"You said that Tuesday."

He had the decency to look guilty.

She'd stopped posting the name of her gym. She'd stopped doing the thing she used to do, filming from her bedroom window when the light was good in the mornings because he might spy her neighbour's car-plate through the window and track her down. She'd started taking different routes to places, even if a five minute walk turned into a forty minute detour just to get coffee. She noticed men in libraries. She noticed them in the line at the grocery store. She noticed the prickle of attention that flooded her spine when someone was watching the back of her head rather than whatever was in front of them.

She hated him for that, the way he had colonised the ordinary world.

She had made the mistake of reading his comments properly once, in the early days when he wrote about her like she was already his in present tense and utterly certain. He'd noticed when she'd changed her brand of mascara. He'd noticed when she'd seemed distracted in a video she'd filmed on a day her grandmother had been in hospital. He'd noticed, and written about it in the comments like he was confiding in her, like they were already sharing secrets.

You seemed sad today. I saw it even when you were smiling. That's how well I know you.

After she got that notification, she put her phone down and sit on the bathroom floor for a while.

She was doing a brand deal later today for some beauty brand she didn't care for, the kind that gave her friends in middle school eating disorders. She smiled and held up the little glass bottle anyways, smiling when the camera was on, because she genuinely loved her job and the ugly bits could be glossed over if she didn't think about them too hard. That was the price of fame she had agreed to pay.

She picked up her phone and added a note to the latest screenshot: 2.47am, new account, phrasing similar to Oct 14 message, because Dev's lawyer had told her documentation was everything, that a pattern was everything, that if it ever came to that, a pattern was what would matter.

214 entries. 215 now.

She closed the folder, opened the camera, smiled.