“Your pants are singing.” BobDan said, jolting Anders out of his self-pitying reverie. He looked up and found they were already within sight of the Winder marina, and sure enough, his pants were buzzing and chiming with all the missed texts and emails and notifications he had received while over on Frick Island. Usually it was two or three, max—maybe a message from Greta about an upcoming story or Kelsey with an inconsequential text or a link from Jess with yet another rescue dog that needed a forever home. But today, his phone kept buzzing, as if it were on the fritz. Frowning, he stuffed his hand in his pocket, withdrew his cell, and glanced at the screen to determine who had been trying to contact him.
But it wasn’t the paper. Or Kelsey. Or his coworker. Anders stared at the phone, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. And then, like a fuzzy television screen that all of a sudden comes into focus, Anders understood.
Holy Frank Sinatra.
Chapter 24
WHAT THE FRICK? Episode 10
1,752,034 Subscribers
2,643 Comments
Anders blinked at the number on the screen in front of him.
On the boat, once he realized all the messages were alerts from his Instagram—literally thousands of new likes, follows, and comments—he had clicked through to his podcast website and thought surely there was some mistake. A glitch of some kind. And now, staring at it on a bona fide computer screen in his apartment for the last ten minutes, he still thought it must be a glitch. He slowly shook his head, trying to make sense of it all. How could his audience possibly have grown—he couldn’t even do the math, but exponentially for sure—in two days?
His cell phone buzzed for what felt like the thousandth time in the past two hours, but when he glanced at the screen, he saw it was an actual call. His sister. His motions were slow, robotic from the shock he was wading through, and it took him longer than usual to answer.
“There you are!” Kelsey said, her voice high-pitched and animated. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for days! Did you see?”
“See what?” he asked, his mouth dry, his eyes still locked on his computer screen.
“The post! He tagged you in it!”
Anders’s brain felt foggy, a step behind. “What? Wh-Who?”
“Dwayne! Didn’t you get my message? It was so embarrassing. I forgot my lunch at home last week and Dad drove it over for me—and brought it onto the set. In front of everyone like I was in the fourth grade or something. And Dwayne just happened to be standing there, chatting with one of the grips—he’s so down-to-earth, it’s crazy. Anyway, Dad just walks up and introduces himself! Like it was no big deal! And then, because Dwayne’s so polite and cool, they got to chatting, and because Dad couldn’t help himself—I swear he has, like, Proud Father Tourette’s or something—he told him all about your podcast. I really thought we were both going to get kicked off set. Or that I would die of humiliation.”
Anders sat up straighter, his mind reeling. “Kelsey. What are you saying? Dad told who about my podcast?”
“Dwayne,” Kelsey said, drawing out the word as if English were not Anders’s first language. “Johnson?”
“The Rock?”
Kelsey let out a growl of exasperation. “Yes! And Dad showed him the link, and Dwayne actually listened to the first episode while he waited for his call time and loved it so much, he posted it to his Instagram and now you have all these followers! Isn’t it amazing?” She giggled happily. “Oh, and did you see? People have made T-shirts! Dad and I both bought one.”
T-shirts. Anders tried to repeat the word but found he had no breath in his lungs. He looked at his hands, as if they weren’t attached to his body, and saw that they were trembling. “I gotta go,” he said. Or he thought he said it, but no words actually came out, before he hung up the phone and then sat there, in the folding chair in the middle of his cheap apartment, in a catatonic state for hours, wondering what in the world he had done.
—
There were not just T-shirts, Anders learned the next day as he sat at his desk, still numb from the previous day’s events and weeding through search engine link after link. There were baseball caps and Koozies and car window decals and, on Etsy, a cross-stitch pillow, all with the now-iconic name of his podcast in big bold print (or in the case of the pillow, a frilly script font): what the frick?
And don’t get him started on the blogs—hundreds of them—filled with reviews and synopses and think pieces. Dear God—the think pieces! They were everywhere. On Medium, The Cut, Slate, analyzing how Anders’s podcast—his work—was important to the cultural dialogue of mental illness or was completely exploitative of and detrimental to people with mental illness or had nothing to do with mental illness and everything to do with the way American culture is unable to speak in any real way about grief and death.
Anders’s in-box overflowed with messages and emails, not just from listeners asking for—nay, demanding—another episode, but from journalists and bloggers from all over wanting to interview the man behind the overnight (literally) podcast sensation.
His mind swirled as he sifted through it all, trying to understand how people could not only listen to the entire podcast in such a matter of days, but then also pen critiques of it—and create merchandise!
“Anders?”
He turned and aimed his blurry eyes up, into Greta’s concerned ones. “I just got off the phone with corporate. They want to know if you’re the Anders Caldwell behind some podcast? Said it was about Frick Island.”
And that was when Anders froze. Not because he was worried about corporate or his job but because Greta had said
