Viral Clone

“What harm could come out of it? Just do it.” My roommate  said. We were recording ourselves doing funny dances and funny snippets of movies and TV shows to pass the time in quarantine. We had been goofing around being bored for a few days now, and today she bursted into my room and started to convince me to post them online, and not going to lie, it was working. “Comeone, it’s not like we’re ugly enough to get made fun of, and you, you look like Emma Watson’s clone! Gorgeous darling!” I let out a laugh, “Okay okay, fine, which one first?” we scrolled through the videos on my phone. “Oooh that one! Hermione Granger impression, that could be a great start!” I watched the video again one last time before it would be let out to the rest of the world. It was the part of the Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone where Hermione returns to Hogwarts talking about Nicholas Flamel, when she says “I checked it out to do a bit of light reading..” I laughed at it while my roomie spoke up again. “Now now Honey, don’t be selfish now, upload it!” I rolled my eyes at her and uploaded it. “Magnifique! Ready to be famous?” “yea yea whatever, I'm going to go for a quick run, I don’t want to be coped up inside any longer. Do call if someone wants to interview me though.” I gave her a sly wink as I got my headphones and keys. “Toodles!” I yelled at her one last time as I left the house. I turned my music up and jogged around the buildings nearby, waving at the people and saying “Hi”. Everyone was usually friendly to everyone around this area, so it wasn’t anything out of the normal. 

I was just about done with my jog when I got a call from one of my friends. “Girl what did you do?? You just got like a hundred more followers on Instagram!” I was confused. “What do you mean? I'm out on a run.” “People are making fan pages about you!” I started to head home, knowing I had to figure out what was going on. “Hello? People are calling you Emma Watson’s twin girl!” Then it hit me. “Oh my god. I posted some silly video doing a Hermione impression before I left for my run.” before she could say anything, I got another call from my Roommate. “Hold up, i’ll call you back later.” I hung up and answered. “Hey girl, got anything to tell me?” I sounded excited and she returned my tone. “You really did get famous!” I walked into my building and hurried to the elevator. “I’m almost home but fill me in. What happened?” “Okay so. I went online to like your video like two minutes after you left and send it to our friends for fun, but I didn’t end up doing that. So I liked the video and then I refreshed the page and it had like 100 likes and a bunch of comments and it hadn’t even been posted for like 10 minutes!” My eyes widened as I walked out of the elevator. “I’m outside the door, what else happened?” I unlocked the door and hung up, but her voice kept going. “So like I was shocked, and I refreshed the page again, and a lot more likes and stuff, so I went to your profile and added a little bio, which you can change if you don’t like it, and added your public Instagram and like everything just kept blowing up like crazy!” If I wasn’t hyper before, I sure was now. “Post another video!” she said. I pulled out my phone and picked another Emma Watson impression from “The Bling Ring” just to see how quickly my first one had gone viral. It had already reached half a million likes and I was too shocked to say anything. 

A couple hours later I reached just over a thousand more followers on instagram, and everyone was asking me if I was Emma Watson under an alias. I was freaking out, I posted a silly video in the name of quarantine boredom and now all of a sudden I was famous. I had never seen anyone get famous this fast.  

A few days had passed, and my account was only growing. I was going on less frequent walks, more people were starting to recognize me. I got messages from friends that wanted to get closer, family that was worried about how fame would change me. I even got a message from a celebrity news reporting station who asked me to video chat to be on their show next weekend. I had said yes, and I was really excited, they wanted me to talk about my quick rise to fame and resemblance to the actress. I had no idea how it would work, I was basically a nobody before, one tight group of friends and that was about it.  Everyone knew me, well, an outside layer of me, but nobody else really knew the real me. I was starting to have less and less mixed feelings about it. Although there were many things about fame I didn’t like, I guess there were things I was growing to like, plus, I was getting more and more confident as I thought about it. I had been pretty alone the past few days, I wasn’t talking to anyone, wondering how I wanted to react, I mean, it was already decided for me, people knew who I was, but a part of me still felt like I had control in I took it, or the possibility I could shut it down and lead an ordinary life. Something like Five Minutes of Fame. I laughed. I looked back at my phone and saw all the dms from fans I was getting, maybe this was something I could get use to, I mean, nobody ever really knows when their about to get famous.