Begone.

The story of how Clare Monson came to be – probably came down to a small audition room on Madison Avenue. Before her name became public property, before she would almost forget it, lending it, hearing it on everyone else's lips. With millions of people around, yet not a soul close. But she was famous, so she "asked for it," she "deserved it." She deserved the death threats and the humiliation, the cries and assaults, and she was requested, almost obliged, to smile. Because Clare Monson was perfectly fine. She always was. And how couldn't she be? With all that money? Why couldn't she truly feel perfectly fine? Maybe it was because she did deserve it. Because she was a fraud. And deep down, she would always know. Maybe money wasn't happiness, or maybe she just didn't have enough money to buy herself happiness. That's why people would call her greedy. And deep down, she feared that they might have been right.

She never liked the attention much; she had people of all kinds sniffing in all aspects of her life, and she couldn't like the curious less. She had things to keep in place, a balance, an image, an illusion of a life she never truly experienced. Pictures on her socials that never quite felt like memories she really owned. They felt borrowed. Copied, stolen. Impressions of the life of someone else, someone she so desperately wanted everyone else to think she was.

It all came down to that cramped room when the knot in her stomach turned for the countless audition. Just a white lie. A name popped into her head. Marcus Sinclair. An acclaimed producer, also, the epitome of all she longed for -- fame, money, glory. Happiness as she thought of it back then. Also…recently deceased, a tragic suicide, resulting in the classic tale of the rich but lonely, an old story, brought up once again. So, it only made sense, back then, that if the public ever came to know that Mr. Sinclair actually had a friend, and he was not in fact that lonely, it would be food for the masses. Even though her brain didn't have such a clear line of thought back then, her greedy, unsurprisingly selfish subconscious did, when she muttered that phrase, the sentence that would've changed her life, and the same that would've ended it. Her life 'sentence'.

"I knew Marcus Sinclair pretty well, actually. We used to hang out quite a bit. We were great friends. He always said I had real talent and that he'd do anything to help me succeed."

Don't be quick to judge now. She knew that was wrong. She never even thought of the scale of that small, white lie. She thought of it as something necessary, something she didn’t like, but she felt like had to do, it was worth her future, her fame. A butterfly effect.

She could've never thought that Elena Santiago, perched behind the reception desk at the Madison Avenue studio, couldn't resist sharing Clare Monson's fabricated tale with her fellow casting assistants during their lunch break the next day. Neither could she think that at the same time, Maxwell Jacobs, nervously pacing the hallway outside the audition room, eagerly texted his best friend, a certain Sarah Reynolds, with the scoop he'd unwittingly stumbled upon. A friend who at the time she read the message sat in a small coffee shop across town, her fingers flew across her keyboard as she transformed a tantalizing tip from a well-connected source into a headline-grabbing article for her entertainment website: “Scandalous Stars”. 

And how could she ever imagine that just outside the studio's gates, Javier Cruz, a determined paparazzo, snapped photo after photo of Clare Monson, spurred into action by a single tweet that promised a potentially lucrative scoop. It took just around a week for the lie to spread like wildfire across the city. Then it was a slow burn to reach the world. Sophie Lee, a junior reporter hungry for her big break, feverishly pieced together the puzzle of Clare Monson's alleged friendship with the tragically deceased producer, her fingers tapping out emails to sources old and new as she chased the story that could make her career. Never bothering to fact-check a thing, luckily for Clare or not.

And so she soon got skyrocketed to the highest ranks of society, the most hated people of America: Hollywood, The Press, and liars. As her fame grew, so did the scrutiny, and she couldn't make any misstep, she couldn't fall for any of those questions, but most tragically, she couldn't tell a soul. She was alone -- and she was therefore bound to fall at some point, to trip on herself. She didn't have much time to craft a perfect lie, but she now had plenty to keep a mediocre one up. To feed it.

The mansion she now lived in had more locks than most, because locks were for secrets, and Clare had more than most of those too. There was a certain weight about having all you could’ve ever dreamt of, while knowing all of that is constantly on the verge of collapse. The press was sniffing around every corner, hungry for every last drop of dirt they could pick up from her, the next piece of Clare Monson’s crumbling façade. Clare would wake up in cold sweats, her mind racing with the fear of getting exposed -- she never felt bad for her wrongdoing in and on itself, just and always for the thought of being caught red-handed. She became paranoid, seeing shadows where there were none, and hearing whispers that didn't exist. Her life was a gilded cage, and she held the key. Kept herself hostage.

Clare’s nights were haunted by the lie she birthed. Each morning, she looked in the mirror, searching for the girl she once was. She saw only the mask of Clare Monson, the fraud. She began playing the role of Clare Monson. Method acting, even when she was alone.

Friends, or those that resembled some, began to drift away. Her phone calls went unanswered, and invitations dried up. The parties went unattended and the screams of the public for answers drowned her last lucid thoughts. The glitz and glamour she had so desperately sought after turned out to be a trap, maybe she just needed some gratitude. "Have you tried journaling, yet? Meditation?". She screamed, instead. Trying to cover up the sound of her racing heart and of her just as racing thoughts. She was getting behind, and the press was getting closer.

How to get away with emotional fraud. Simple. Three steps.

Number 1: get your story straight.

Number 2: Make it believable.

Number 3: Make others pity you.

Number three was perhaps the most important, pity was the key to success. She'd need to crave some.

In the morning, she would be mourning. Trying to hold onto everything she knew she would soon enough lose. She dipped her feelings in alcohol, if she even had any left. When someone would beg for the truth, she would run and get into her car, just to drown at their plea.

"Evasive" the papers would soon start to call her "A good person? Possibly not" others would quote on their first page.

The New Yorker would claim: "The Fraudulent fame of Clare Monson is an insult to life itself." in an article where she would be defined "a self-absorbed, narcissistic piece of human" and they could have said worse.

So it really came as no surprise when -- one day she just couldn't keep it up anymore. She jumped, seeing herself as the innocent victim of a media spiral. A storm she could, in no way, be responsible for.

Clare Monson died, having done little good for the world during her life; quite the opposite, she left having done mostly harm. Her last thoughts were as selfish as her whole life had been. She didn't spare a thought for the people she exploited to get where she was, nor for the people that made the mistake of giving her even an ounce of love -- and that she carelessly hurt along the way. Her mind went to a single place instead before taking her last breath: "What will they say about me now? What will they think? Maybe, now dead, they'll remember me somehow, better?" And it didn't come as a surprise, after all, pity is the key to success.