"Hey tiktok, August here! It's day... I don't even know anymore of quarantine. Well, I know we're in April... uhm, anyway, it's about four in the morning on— shit, it's Friday already? Right, so I couldn't sleep and I wrote this little riff and— crap, my phone just killed itself—"

August let out a frustrated huff as she picked up her phone from the ground and made sure the screen was still intact. Thankfully, there was no damage. She smiled awkwardly at the camera that was still recording and ended the video, saving it in her drafts.

She leaned her phone against her small lamp and started a new recording then, diving right into the small verse of a song she had written just a few minutes ago without any pleasantries. Maybe then her phone would stay up for long enough on her nightstand before deciding to face-plant for the hundredth time in the past ten minutes.

Thankfully, she managed to get through the entire verse without any disruptions. With a little excited and sleepy grin, she ended the recording and added whatever she wanted to say in the text box before finally posting the video. It probably wasn't going to reach a large audience at this hour in the middle of the night, or more like, very early in the morning, but she didn't really care. She was just entertaining herself while locked up in her parents' home during this pandemic. She honestly had nothing better to do.

With a little yawn and a stretch, she padded over toward the guitar stand and hung the instrument gently before returning to bed and slipping under the covers. Her dog, Phoebe, instantly jumped up on the mattress and curled at her feet. August smiled at the curly haired ball of fluff and gave her fur a few ruffles before turning the lights off and finally deciding it was best she got some shut-eye.

Naturally, August didn't wake up until the sun had been up for hours and hours. It was her older sister Zoë who had woken her up by barging into her bedroom sometime around noon, looking frantic and excited beyond belief.

"Get up! AUGUST!"

August groaned, burying herself deeper into her mattress and pillows. She was way too tired. "Get out," she whined, slapping her hand feebly across the air. She didn't even reach her sister.

"YOU WENT VIRAL!" Zoë exclaimed instead, a little giggle in disbelief erupting from her.

"What?" August grumbled, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands when she realising her sister was not going to leave her alone.

Zoë had grown impatient. She flopped down next to August and pulled out her phone. August had to blink several times to be able to see through the bright lights as Zoë scrolled through her device, and still, she had to squint to make out any visible shapes. It didn't help that she was practically legally blind. (Okay, it wasn't that bad, but she still needed her glasses to make it through the day without any headaches).

Finally, Zoë shoved her phone right in August's face and she had to recoil a bit to see the whole screen. With her eyes still narrowed, August could see her tiktok page open from her sister's account. The first thing she saw was her follower count. It had jumped from a mere ten thousand or so to forty thousand while she had been fast asleep, dreaming that she was a dog and Phoebe was her best friend.

"What the—" she muttered, pushing herself into an upright position. She fumbled for her glasses on the nightstand and put them on, hoping this was just her bad vision playing a trick on her. But nope.

There it was. Her account name:

🌿🍃

With her profile picture (which was just a cartoon drawing of a frog).

And that was her username underneath it.

And the follower count had indeed tripled and more.

Well, shit.

"How the fuck did that happen?"August exclaimed incredulously. This had to be some kind of joke, right?

"Your post from last night," Zoë explained. "It went viral!"

"How...?" She was trying to wrap her mind around it. It was impossible to comprehend what was going on. "Dude, I wrote a dumb song at four in the morning and posted it two seconds later. I'm pretty sure no one liked it that much."

But even as she cynically put herself down, the numbers on the post did not lie. The views on her video had reached a whopping nine hundred thousand.

The most views she had ever received before had been a thousand or two.

This was insane.

Her heart was hammering heavily in her chest.

Fucking hell, was she still dreaming?

"Shut up, it was a really good song!" Zoë rolled her eyes snatching her phone back. And without looking up at August, she added, "which is exactly why Taylor Swift duetted it."

"WHO— WHAT?"

August was up on her feet by that point, causing her dog to jump in fear at her sudden movement. She grabbed her phone from her nightstand, her eyes instantly widening at the amount of notifications she was getting. About a hundred of them were from her best friend Niko who was spamming her about the fact that she had gone viral. But when she opened her tiktok app, the number of likes and comments she saw was insane. She would never be able to read all of the comments.

Absolutely insane.

The first thing she did was turn off the notifications on the app. Her finger accidentally swiped to the For You page instead of her own page, but it didn't matter. Her video was right there, the first one that appeared. Except, it was a duet and the person singing along was blonde, blue-eyed, and definitely, absolutely, a hundred percent famous.

Taylor Swift had seen her video. Taylor Swift had listened to the song and thought, oh, I could sing along to this. Taylor Swift harmonised to the video of her singing at four a.m. about her love for her dog.

She couldn't wrap her mind around this.

When she clicked on the singer's account, her eyes widened even more if it were possible when she saw that she had followed August! She wasn't even following Taylor Swift. She didn't even know Taylor Swift had a tiktok account.

Okay... frankly, even if she had known she might not have followed the artist in the first place but that was besides the point.

Taylor Swift had followed August.

Sure enough though, when she checked the account, her video which Taylor had duetted was only the second on the account, the first being some kind of promotional one posted months ago.

God... she was still dreaming, wasn't she?

"This... this is just a sick and twisted prank, right?" She asked her sister who was still grinning in disbelief.

"It's real, Auggie," Zoë laughed, finally getting off her bed. "You made it."

"It's just one video," August mumbled, running her hand over her face to rub the sleep away.

"Yeah, but it still got a lot of attention."

That, it did.

August spent the rest of the afternoon busying herself to keep her mind off the fact that her video had gone viral.

But see, in the middle of a pandemic, there wasn't much she could have done to keep herself entertained. She had lunch, worked out in the garden for half an hour, showered, and sat in front of the television in the basement, catching up on her anime and eating ice cream (which was counterproductive to the working out, but she couldn't really help herself).

Halfway through the fifth or maybe hundredth episode (she wasn't really paying attention to the number anymore), August found herself zoning out. She paused the show on captain Levi's face and got up to stretch her limbs. While taking her dirty dishes up to the sink in the kitchen, August pulled out her phone and couldn't help but check her notifications.

She had several messages from her college friends congratulating her. And Niko was still spamming her. His latest message:

YOU BETTER NOT STILL BE IN BED BITCH I KNOW IT'S 4 P.M. AND YOU SLEPT AT THE CRACK OF DAWN BUT YOU NEED TO WAKE THE FUCK UP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GOD IF I WEREN'T ACROSS THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW YOU WOULD NOT BE SO HAPPY

AND BTW YOUR SISTER IS USELESS. I ASKED HER TO WAKE YOU UP HOURS AGO WTF

August couldn't help but smirk in amusement. She pressed on the call button and held the phone to her ear as it started ringing.

Niko answered on the third ring.

"WELL GOOD MORNING TO YOU," he screamed into the receiver.

August grimaced, moving her phone a little before returning it to her ear. "Good morning, babe," August chirped with a little grin. She went to fridge and grabbed a cold bottle of soda before returning to the basement and flopping down on the couch.

"You've been awake this whole time, haven't you?" Niko deadpanned and August grimaced again.

"Yeah... Sorry, it's just been an overwhelming afternoon," she apologised, letting out a heavy sigh.

It was really hard, trying to contain her excited squeals.

"Yeah, no shit!" Niko exclaimed, the excitement in his voice clear as day. "What the actual fuck, August? You're famous!"

He let out a laugh in disbelief and August chuckled softly in return. "Not famous. Just had one viral video—"

"TAYLOR SWIFT SAW YOUR VIDEO AND SANG TO IT, JAMES, YOU CAN STOP BEING SO MODEST!"

"Dude, you're gonna blow out my eardrum," August complained, rubbing her ear with her index finger.

Niko huffed. "August! Fricken! Taylor! Swift!"

August let out a heavy laugh. "I know you dragged me to her concert a few years ago, but you're not still that obsessed with her, are you...?"

"Just because I haven't talked about the woman in a while because she hasn't released anything new doesn't mean my love for her has died," he told her and August giggled again. He really was obsessed. She could still recall his mental breakdown over the singer's last album, Lover. "In fact, this is the first I've heard her sing in like a year and it's thanks to you, so excuse me if I'm having a hard time breathing right now!"

August couldn't contain herself anymore. She was full on laughing now, falling in fits. "Alright, I'll tell her you said hi when I dm her tonight."

"I— what?"

August smirked to herself, twirling a curl between her fingers when she realised this was going to send Niko into a spiral. "She followed me."

"What? And you haven't dm'ed her yet?"

"No, dude, that just sounds desperate," she chuckled, placing her phone on the coffee table and putting the call on speaker as she tied her hair up in a bun.

"You are desperate," he responded seriously. "Desperate to get your best friend tickets to her next tour whenever that might be."

"Probably in a hundred years, at this rate," August muttered, already tired of the fricken lockdown.

"You can't know that, and we need to be optimistic here. It's Taylor Swift we're talking about here!"

"I forgot how annoying your obsession with the woman was," August teased him, picking her phone back up but keeping the call on speaker as she decided to scroll through her twitter account at the same time.

"And I don't understand how you're not obsessed with her when she's this iconic," Niko grumbled. He was always so disappointed in himself for not being able to convert August into the ultimate swiftie.

"Look, I respect her as a fellow musician—"

"You're a musician, she's a fricken goddess," Niko interjected and August couldn't help but roll her eyes at him even though he couldn't see her.

"But, her music's just never spoken to me, you know?" She continued, which was true. She did like the artist and enjoyed the occasional banger but as a whole, she just couldn't relate to her music the way she did with other musicians. "Wait, the video made it onto twitter?"

"And instagram," Niko told her with a small chuckle. "I told you. You're viral."

"Yeah... dude, this is so weird!"

"Tell me about it!" Niko exclaimed. "My best friend's famous!"

"I feel like screaming," August told him and Niko laughed.

"Go ahead."

"Nah, mom would kill me."

Niko laughed some more. She heard some shuffling on his end of the call and then he said, "Listen, I'm gonna have to hang up now and help out my nonna with some stuff. But keep me updated on this, alright?"

"Yes, mom," she muttered, rolling her eyes. "Say hi to your grandma for me!"

After hanging up, August went upstairs to prepare something to eat.

It wasn't until after dinner that she sat back down in bed and pulled out her phone. Her finger hesitated over the app icon but eventually she decided to open tiktok and check out her video. It had reached even more views in the short hours since she had last seen it. Jesus.

August decided to finally respond to the famous singer's post and leaving a comment that read:

She regretted it after sending it but kept it anyway. Maybe Taylor Swift would find it funny.

She followed her back and then decided to go through her comments, replying to some and liking others. They were mostly all positive which brought a big smile to her face.

This was certainly unbelievable. By midnight, she was already working on her tiny music recording app on her laptop, trying to write a new song.