THROUGH MY EYES

Chapter 6 — Private Broadcast

Chapter 6 — Private Broadcast

The first time the footage went beyond the room it was shot in, Rena felt the world tilt. It was a small clip at first — a minute, maybe two — shot on a phone by a friend who thought the angle was flattering. It showed her laughing in a way she had practiced in the mirror: open enough to be warm, closed enough to be private. The clip landed in a feed and then, like a rumor, it multiplied.

Tommina called her at dawn. His voice was a low thing that had learned to carry bad news without breaking. “It’s out,” he said. “Not the whole thing. But people are talking.”

Rena sat on the edge of the bed and watched the city through the blinds. Rain had started again, the kind that made colors run and names blur. She thought of the ledger in the mirror and the way a single line could change an account. Faces were currency; someone had spent a piece of hers.

They met the producer in a room that smelled of citrus and old contracts. He was younger than she expected and wore a shirt that suggested both taste and calculation. He watched her as if he were reading a script he had not yet finished.

“We can make this bigger,” he said. “We can make you a story people want to watch.”

Rena had learned to parse offers like contracts. The word story was a currency with many exchange rates. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Truth,” he said. “Not the scandal. The person.”

She thought of the clip and the way it had been cropped, the way the laugh had been looped until it read like a promise. The camera had a hunger that was not always satisfied by truth. It wanted shape, narrative, a beginning and an end. She had been taught to give it those things in measured doses.

The next weeks were a blur of sets and small triumphs. The boutique studio that signed her had a roster of faces and a taste for the cinematic. They taught her to hold a look for the length of a cut, to let a silence become a line. Her name began to appear in captions and in the mouths of people who had never met her. The city rearranged itself around the new currency.

But with visibility came new rules. Backstage was a geography of favors and debts. A producer’s smile could be a ledger entry. A director’s compliment could be a mortgage. She learned to read the unspoken codes: who to avoid, who to flatter, which doors opened with a certain kind of laugh. Tommina watched the calculus with a face that had learned to measure risk in cigarette burns.

“You’re changing,” he said one night as they walked home under a sky that had been scrubbed clean by rain. “Not just the world. You.”

Rena looked at him. “I’m learning to be what people will pay attention to.”

“And what will you pay attention to?” he asked.

She had no answer then. She only knew the ledger in the mirror and the way the scar on her thumb caught the light when she braided her hair. She knew the taste of the bakery downstairs and the way the city’s faces could be read like weather. She knew that the clip had been a small thing that had opened a door. She also knew that doors had hinges and hinges had rust.

When the first offer for a headline scene arrived — a set with a director who wanted to push boundaries — she felt the old ledger tilt. The scene promised exposure and a new kind of currency: notoriety that could be converted into money, into control. Tommina argued the numbers. The producer argued the optics. Rena weighed the scar on her thumb like a coin.

She said yes.

The camera loved her the way a hungry animal loves a scent. On set she learned to give the exact amount of herself that would read as truth on screen. She learned to make forgetting look like a gift. The clip that had once been private became a private broadcast: polished, framed, and sent out into the world with a title that suggested both intimacy and spectacle.

When it landed, the reaction was immediate. Fans wrote letters that read like confessions. Critics wrote pieces that tried to place her in a lineage she had not asked to join. The city’s faces shifted again; some smiled, some looked away. Rena watched the ledger in the mirror and felt the numbers change. She had bought a front row seat. She had not yet counted the cost.