Face-Slapping15 min read
The Orange Sea: How I Sent Mateo Courtney to the Sun
ButterPicks15 views
I checked the leaderboard at 11:55 and the world stilled around the little clock in the corner of my phone.
"Eleven fifty-five," Kaylee said behind me, chewing a piece of toast. "Breathe, Isa. Breathe."
"I am breathing," I answered, but my voice sounded thin. "Just—just don't jinx it."
The first two pages blinked past and I kept tapping refresh like a reflex. The show had nine debut spots and the ranking felt like a cliff edge.
"Where is he?" I whispered to the screen like it might hear me.
"Isabel, calm down. If Mateo's not on the first page it's fine. He can climb." Kaylee's optimism had a warm, habitual buzz. She was forever the one to make posters and force me to eat breakfast.
I flicked to the third page.
"Thirteen," I read aloud and everything let go.
"No." Kaylee's hand flew to her mouth. "That's impossible."
I hit the back button and hit it again, determined to find a different truth.
"It's a bug," I told her, because I had to say something. "It has to be a bug."
"Mateo Courtney is thirteen?" someone in our group chat typed: "No way!" The messages flowed like a river of disbelief.
"We'll file a complaint," Kaylee said. "Get the other fans. We won't let them get away with this."
"Okay," I said. I wanted to be the loudest at the online rallies, the root of a wave of people who would rip the bug out by its circuits.
We planned, we argued, we fanned. We sent messages, screenshots, phone calls. Kaylee smoked the screen of her phone with frantic typing. My heart kept swinging between cold and hot, the way a fever does.
"You're doing too much," Kaylee told me when she could. "You need to eat."
"Not hungry," I lied. "I can't stop thinking about him."
Mateo Courtney—thin as the sunbeam he seemed to be onstage—was a kid who made me feel old and fierce at once. He had a shy smile that hid two dimples like little secret moons. He sang like he believed in light.
I watched everything of his I could find. The early rehearsal videos, the clip where he danced in an old studio in a black sleeveless shirt, the one hand turning a guitar's tuning peg like it was a ritual. He wasn't brand packaging. He was honest.
We were supposed to be at the island for finals a week later. Kaylee was relentless. She carried two giant paper bags into my kitchen the morning of the broadcast, and I couldn't help being grateful because she always had my back.
"You're not going to let them bury him, are you?" she asked, grinning.
"I—" I swallowed. "No. I won't."
We arrived at the island like pilgrims. The venue had been turned into a candy coast of banners and banners. Other fan groups had built monuments—blue for the top trainees, lemon-yellow for another big name. Ours was modest: early sketches of orange, a small cutout I had made with a water-color sun.
"Warm-sun orange," Kaylee called it, and it stuck.
When Mateo walked on stage, I felt my ribs tighten. He carried himself with fragile pride. He sang the one song he had written for his fans; he played the guitar as if he trusted every string.
"Thank you," he said after the song, and his eyes found the crowd as if he were searching for one particular person.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't stop the noise in my chest. When the ranking finished and his name came up as "thirteenth," I cried for him. I cried for the injustice and for the truth I had believed no one could steal.
"He's going to be okay," Kaylee said, trying to make a plan with the fierce calm of the leader she was. "We'll rally. We'll do everything."
I couldn't sleep that night. I scrolled and scrolled, and at some point the world went gray and I fell into a hard, angry sleep. The next thing I knew I woke in my own room four months earlier.
"Kaylee!" I tried the phone. She answered like she always did, sleepy and bright.
"Morning, Isa. What—did you have a dream about a ranking again?" she teased.
I sat up, the new date glaring at me on my computer: early March. "What if I can do it differently?"
She laughed. "You mean time travel? Okay, Doctor Who."
"I'm serious. I woke up four months before the show. I remember everything."
"Isabel, go to sleep." Kaylee's tone softened. "Or this is the early onset of fandom delusion."
But the quiet in me that had been loud last night pulsed clear: a second chance. The little rusted gears in my chest began to move.
"Then we do it right from the start," I said, and my voice turned into a plan.
"I knew it," Kaylee said. "You didn't come back for your own sanity. You came back for Mateo Courtney."
"Warm-sun orange," I murmured.
"Perfect name." She cheered like we had already won.
I had been a photographer for years. I knew how light gave truth, and I knew how to build an image that could become a person. If the machine had hidden Mateo, I would show more of him until the world had no choice. I would create the image he deserved and orchestrate it like an army of small lights.
The first week back, I restructured my life. I declined shoots and told editors I'd be less available. I revived an old secondary account and cleaned it, then renamed it "SunAgain," a small station for Mateo. My small studio folder filled quickly: dance clips, rehearsal stills, and the old rock routine video I had found of him—sharper, harder, more electric than anyone guessed.
Kaylee gave me a nickname I liked: "Station Mom." She laughed when I posted my first picture of Mateo with an orange-friendly watermark. "You look ridiculous with that camera," she said.
"Someone's got to look ridiculous," I replied.
"Someone has to make him shine," she answered.
We went to the island when the first recording began, but this time we were prepared. I brought two cameras, one big lens, and patience. We walked the perimeters as a small squad of some desperately loyal fans and two friends who had suddenly become co-conspirators.
"Don't get arrested," Kaylee told me, half joking. "And don't faint."
"Okay." I tucked her reassurance into my back pocket.
At the practice dorms, the line of boys flowed like a river of potential. Mateo arrived, unspectacular and radiant. I took photos. I caught the little sideways smile and the way he tucked his hair behind his ear. I felt the truth of him in my chest and saved it to a memory card.
"Who are you?" a man asked nearby. He had the worn authority of an office that leases power. He was not important then, but he would be later. "You're filming here."
"I'm a photographer," I said. "A freelance. I have work to show the show."
"Keep to the rules," he warned. "Don't interfere."
I nodded. I did everything right. I became the station who built a face.
The first broadcast landed like a pebble in a bowl. Mateo's performance was edited into fragments. They called him an "industry royalty"—a plant—and the comments drowned him with suspicion. My video clips started to move in secret, and then someone with more weight than me noticed.
"Who posted the long take?" a professor in Moscow-style black text asked on Weibo. The message bore weight. His name carried a credential I could not buy. He wrote small, kind things: "Talent here. Strong core, needs polishing."
That man was Aurelie Seidel—a mentor in the show faithful in the real world. She did not belong to the company that tried to bury Mateo. Her influence was a compass, and when she spoke, the world leaned.
The tide turned because someone with a name that opened doors talked. I paid for a few eyes, too—some small buys for trending tags and a few well-placed reposts. We were scrappy, and that mattered. The conversation moved.
"You're doing a lot," Kaylee said. "Are you okay?"
"I'm obsessed," I said. "I'm selfish with him. I want him not to be swallowed."
"You're his guardian angel in a trench coat." Kaylee kissed my cheek and left me to my plans.
The weeks became a mesh of small victories. Mateo's fans grew. We named ourselves the Saplings—trees in the sun—and painted our lights orange. We made orange headbands that flashed his name. We wrote messages that felt like letters to a future that would care. I edited pictures until they glowed. I stitched together the long, uncut videos I had shot and released them under tags that made the algorithm blink.
"You're making a star," Kaylee told me once while we printed a hundred orange ribbons in the living room. "Do you realize that?"
"I only know how to do this much," I said. "I have my camera, my stubbornness, and you. That's dangerous."
"It is," she agreed, grinning. "Dangerous and wonderful."
Somewhere, the company that had tried to dim Mateo's light rubbed its hands. A rival contestant, Knox Montgomery, had been lifted in the rankings in the same episode that made Mateo fall. Knox was polished, his smile bought with money the public could see if they looked—the golden sponsor, the big producer favors, the flash of a network tie.
"Knox is a product," some people wrote. "Mateo is not."
"Products break while stars burn," a stranger in a comment said.
But products have defenders. Pedro Buchanan, an executive at a large sponsor company, had money and a personality that wheeled like a fortress. When his name rose in the rumor mill, people like us learned to shout louder.
Time pulled forward. The live shows began. Mateo's group had to fight to be seen, and he fought with every clean note and honest smile. When editors clipped his high points, I released my uncut takes. When the show buried him, I made a highlight stitched so well that viewers could not pretend they hadn't seen him.
"You're magic," Kaylee said when the fan base swelled to thousands. "You're impossible."
"I'm just a photographer," I said. "I frame what exists."
"Some frames start wars," she said. "Keep framing."
Then the story split in two directions.
One lane kept pushing Mateo and the longtime men's chorus of fans. Another lane revealed a network of arrangements bleeding into the show: votes moved, sponsors traded favors, and Knox's climbs seemed suspiciously timed to press releases. Rumors became patterns.
I remember the night I decided we needed exposure, not speculation.
"Kaylee, we have proof," I told her. "We have the timeline of transfers, the social buys, the idea that a company can buy a ranking—and an invoice I think traces to Pedro Buchanan's firm."
"That's a heavy claim," Kaylee whispered. "What do you want to do?"
"Public," I said.
Kaylee stared. "Public like...?"
"Like a press stream. Live. We call out the sponsors. We pin the evidence to the stage like a banner. We let them answer where the money went."
"Whoa," she said, and then, immediate and full, "Okay. Plan it."
I contacted a few independent journalists and a small, stubborn online outlet that loved the smell of a scandal. We recorded conversations and emails. The invoices were messy but they had fingerprints leading to a suite in a tower owned by Pedro Buchanan's firm.
"Do you think it's dangerous?" Kaylee asked.
"Everything with a public company is dangerous," I said. "But secrets prefer the dark."
We chose a night when a charity show would put many of them together—sponsors, executives, a roster of public faces. The venue hummed with clean light. The cameras were already there for the charity. We would piggyback the story.
"You're sure about this?" Kaylee asked again.
"Yes," I said. "We will ask one question on a public mic: 'Who paid for the votes that pushed Knox Montgomery in the top ten?' And then we'll play the fragment of audio with the invoice."
I slept very poorly. I shouldn't have, but I did. The next evening, we walked into the charity hall with a small team and a large plan.
Pedro Buchanan was there like a headline: grey suit cut like armor and a smile that insisted on being taken at face value.
"Miss Henderson," he said when he saw us, his voice perfumed with decades of boardrooms. "I was told you run a fan site."
"Partly," I said. "Mostly I take photographs."
"Lovely." He turned with the practiced air of someone whose reputation was a currency. "We appreciate your support."
"Pedro," Kaylee whispered into my ear. "He's cooling like a predator."
"Stay calm," I said, and my hands were steady.
We waited until the event had a lull—music between sets, a lull where speeches cluster like birds. I raised my hand and a small camera crew already connected to the outside fed our feed to a thousand places.
"Excuse me," I said into a microphone. "I'd like to ask the sponsors a simple question."
Heads turned. People smiled like polite owls. Pedro smiled in a public way, pleasant and small.
"Miss Henderson?" he said. "This is a charity evening—what question could not wait until tomorrow?"
"Why did your firm send funds, directed through third-party accounts, to boost Knox Montgomery's votes during the 'New Star' selection?" I said. The feed was live. My voice did not tremble.
A cluster of murmurs rose. Knox, nearby, looked suddenly very human. The silence grew like the moment before rain.
Pedro tilted his head. "I don't know what you mean."
"There's an invoice," I said. "There's a trail. We have traceable bank movements that lead to your subsidiary. We also have messages in which a producer at the show asks for 'strategic placement assistance.' Will you deny it publicly now?"
Pedro's smile flickered. He had a moment where a man's face divides into the mask and the man behind it. He laughed, a precise laugh.
"Who authorized this broadcast?" he demanded. "You have no right."
"I have the right to ask where a fair competition turned into bookkeeping," I answered. My voice cut across the hall like a bell.
Knox Montgomery stepped forward, jaw tight. "This is ridiculous," he said. "I earned everything."
"Did you?" I asked. "Or did someone pay for the path?"
Knox waved his hand. "You're spreading falsehoods in a charitable event."
A reporter near me taped my hand. Kaylee's fingers were ice but her face was focused.
"Pedro," the reporter said into the mic, "can you confirm or deny funds passing through your account to the show's campaign during the voting window?"
Pedro's hand tightened on a glass of water. The journalists in the room tuned their ears. The audience leaned forward.
Pedro's PR man opened his mouth to spin. A phone buzzed. Behind them, one of Pedro's assistants was nervy enough to whisper in his ear.
"Excuse me," Pedro said, and the arrogance that had always carried him cracked. He took a breath. "There were transfers," he said.
The room shifted like tectonic plates. Murmurset became loud.
"Who authorized them?" someone shouted.
Pedro looked as if he were being watched by an old law. "I authorized experimental marketing strategies," he said finally. His words were thin in the large wooden room. "We believed it would boost engagement for a sponsored content piece."
"How did you hide it?" I asked. "Through third-party invoices?"
Pedro's smile died. "We routed the transfers through independent accounts," he said. "It was poor judgment."
"You mean fraud," Knox's voice rang. He had gone white. "This—this implies my votes were bought."
"Did you know?" I asked him quietly. "Did anyone tell you?"
Knox looked around like a child who had been pulled into an adult gambling house. "I—" He opened his mouth and closed it. "No. No, I had no idea."
This was the key. The story had been a web, with some knots knotted by Pedro but still hiding hands. If players like Knox were innocent, they were still harmed by the motion of money. The audience's temperature rose.
A string of reporters huddled, and a live camera that had been pointed at the stage turned its lens to the table where Pedro sat. A phrase trended in minutes: #BoughtVotes.
"Pedro Buchanan," a journalist said slowly, "can you give us the records for the payments and the names of the associates who handled the transfers? Are you offering to step down from tonight's charity board until an investigation?"
Pedro's mouth tried to form a defense that evaporated in his own throat. A man who built walls by numbers could not build a wall in front of his own ledger in a room full of cameras.
"I will cooperate," Pedro said. "But this has been taken out of context. We will—"
"You will what?" I asked. "Admit to a breach and give us the names? Or will you let a small star be trampled while your legal team crafts statements?"
The audience started to hiss. "Shame!" someone called. "Shame on you!"
Knox's face reminded me of a child who had been promised a sky and found a ledger instead. He looked at Pedro with betrayal and confusion.
"How can you stand here and say you didn't know?" Kaylee hissed beside me in a voice barely above a whisper.
"People who orchestrate things don't always tell the performers," Pedro replied. He had a sort of animal look now; the guard of money had been ruffled and the animal was pinned.
The reaction broke into a blade—tweets, a thousand small accusations and questions. We had given the microphones to the right people. The room, full of philanthropic faces, had suddenly discovered itself duped into performing with a liar.
Pedro's response crumbled further when an accountant—young, nervous, and obviously part of his inner circle—came forward with trembling hands and produced a ledger of transfers. He spoke a name: a subcontractor who had routed funds into the show's voting apparatus.
"It's true," he said. "I reconciled the accounts. I—"
The hall was a storm. People shouted, cameras rolled, someone fainted in the back. The charity hosts tried to salvage the evening by loudly proclaiming their independence, but the hour had moved. The sponsors would now have to explain publicly what had been done in a back office.
Knox stood there and felt the heat of the world slip away from him. "This is not my doing," he shouted to no one in particular. "This is wrong for me too."
A few were cruel: they said the company had made him a pawn. Others said he should have known. It didn't matter. The contract of truth had been ripped.
Pedro's face collapsed, and for a terrible, thin second he looked like a man who would run. He had trusted money to do his lying for him, and now the live cameras had unspooled his false empire.
"You're fired," the charity director barked in the swirl of microphones—less by legal means than by moral choice. "You have no place here tonight."
The room applauded like judges at a finale.
Pedro walked out under a storm of cameraphone flashes. He tried to speak to a reporter, but the words were a sieve. A legal person whispered in his ear and he bowed his head like a man whose script had been snatched.
Knox staggered outside with his manager and a few supporters. Someone outside the hall held up a sign reading, "Real talent over bought charts." Some of Knox's former fans flung him their fury with venom that ate through his practiced smile. He tried to say something coherent. "I didn't know," he repeated.
The punishment unfolded in public and in slow motion. Pedro's reputation was shredded in a night, and his business cards smelled like the game that had been played without consent. The charity withdrew its sponsorship from his firm. The network that had hosted the show announced an internal investigation. The producers who had turned their eyes away were called in to answer to press and lawyers. The momentum of the scandal rolled out like a train.
"Justice," a woman shouted from the crowd. "Finally."
Pedro's voice sank. "This will hurt many people," he said weakly, as if that could be a defense.
"It already has," Kaylee told him, loud enough for more than Pedro to hear. "And money doesn't grow talents."
In the days that followed, documents and emails leaked. Producers pleaded guilty to ethical lapses. The network suspended certain staff. Knox's sponsors dropped him like a hot coal; some apologized to their consumer base in statements that smelled of legal counsel. Pedro's company issued a statement promising reforms, though the apology read like a contract's fine print.
I watched the unraveling from my studio, where the orange lights on the headbands looked obscene and beautiful together. People who had learned to sing behind the curtain were being called out into the daylight. It felt like a harvest season for truth.
"Did we set this off?" Kaylee asked me one night, eyes tired as a cat's, and I thought of the microphone, the ledger, the accountant who put his hand out.
"You set a light," I said. "The light finds what it touches."
We had, in small ways, saved Mateo. He had been seen. The public's gaze had been cleaned of a molasses of lies. But the story wasn't a moral film. People were messy. Some suffered. Others cheered. I had gained friends and enemies.
Mateo continued to sing, purer because now he had to. He learned to lean on the crowd we had built for him. He started writing more, letting songs be the work of an honest heart instead of a manufactured product.
"Isabel," Mateo said to me once backstage, voice small. "Why did you do all this?"
I had been fixing a light—my hands forever a little iconic with struggle.
"Because someone had to," I said. "Because you deserved a chance where no bookkeepers could decide what you were."
He smiled like the world had given him a simpler gift. "Thank you. For everything."
Weeks later, at a public ceremony for music education where the show tried to fix its image, they invited public submitters to speak. I was asked to say a few words about why fans matter. I could have made it about campaigns and photos, but I told them what had been hammered into my chest.
"Fans are not just noise," I said into the microphone. "We are attention and care. We notice things. We hold up mirrors. We are the little lights that make a sea."
"That's right," Kaylee said offstage, shouting like a boat horn.
The show that had almost swallowed Mateo learned to be more cautious. New rules were written for voting, transparency required, and the producers who confessed faced consequences. Pedro's firm weathered the blow and reshuffled executives. Knox tried to rebuild; he apologized and turned to honest work, but the public's trust is a fragile currency.
As for my life, it became a tether of small victories and everyday chores. I still woke before dawn to take photos that would make people feel steady. I still edited until my eyes laughed in pixels.
Months later, the final show came. The nine debut spots slid across the board like a slow film.
"Okay," Kaylee said, fingers interlinked with mine in the crowd. "No matter what, we did our best."
"Yes," I said.
When Mateo's name rose into the top nine, the auditorium exploded like an orange star. People cried. I cried.
Mateo found the camera and looked straight at me. He held his hand to his heart. He mouthed, "Thank you."
After it was over, we built an orange sea in the rain, thousands of phones up like lanterns hunched close together. We were Saplings. Our lights were small and brave.
Walking back to the quiet house that had once held my lonely plans, I opened my camera bag and found the old paper I had glued into my notebook months ago. It was a simple sketch: an orange headband and the words "Warm-sun orange—Saplings." I had kept it like a talisman.
"Isabel?" Kaylee called from the porch. "You coming in?"
"I'll be right there," I answered, and my voice sounded steadier than I felt.
On the last page of that night, I wrote one small line for myself and for the people who had become a community because we chose to care about one kid with dimples.
"We made an orange sea tonight," I wrote. "I will remember how the light caught his smile."
The lamp on my desk hummed softly. Outside, the distant hum of celebration settled into the night. Mateo had found his debut; a bad man had been called out in public; a young contestant trained in honesty and craft; and the island wore our lights like an answering sun.
I shut the notebook and smiled like the slow closing of a camera shutter. The world had changed in a way that did not require epicisms—only steady, dogged attention and a thousand small acts that turned into a public truth.
"One more photo?" Kaylee asked, already holding up her phone.
"One more," I said.
We raised our lights, snapped the photograph, and watched the orange glow flood the frame like a tide finally given permission to break.
The End
— Thank you for reading —