[PI] The last post I had made tagged the public beach a bus ride away from my alma mater.

After months of trying to make my work go viral, and make it as a freelancer, it was clear that success was not in my immediate future. Maybe ten likes. No reblogs. Barely a comment from a distant relative I’ve not seen in years, saying how cute my work is, and then asking if I can draw her cat.

How demotivating.

I wish I could have said I saw it coming. I wish I could have said I’d listened to my mother, and had a backup plan if being an artist didn’t work out. I wish I could have said that I could keep going and get by. But I didn’t say any of those things.

So I took a picture, trying to find something to say, something to post, something that would spark…well, anything. And the picture was perfect. The waves were inching up the sand, soaking the small, eroded crystals, filling the divots in the beach left by my feet as I walked along.

And that’s when the thought struck me.

As I watched my own footprints disappear under the murky saltwater, the idea of disappearing myself swelled with appeal. A viral story in the making.

Life continued somewhat normally. I paid my bills, made my art, and continued. But in secret, I put my plans into action; slowly withdrawing cash, packing minimal essentials, and got ready to leave it all behind. No one questioned me, not my family, or my roommates, or my former peers.

Eventually the time came. Going back to the beach where it all started, a bag in hand, I caught the bus, glancing at the camera as I boarded.

The next part happened quickly. The bag was left on the beach, next to my shoes, phone, wallet, and ID still inside. I left behind $13, taking the stack of bigger bills. I grabbed the biggest pair of sunglasses I owned, and left. I took a taxi, paid in cash, got on a train, and didn’t look back.

I don’t know who to credit more for what happened next; the lifeguard on duty or my roommate.

From what I could piece together, the lifeguard on the beach that day had found my bag, everything still inside and left it in the lost and found bin. My roommate reported me missing after three days. The cops put out a BOLO that evening. The lifeguard’s manager went through the bag after cleaning out the bin at the end of the week, and recognized the name from the report on the news. The cops ruled it a suicide. And the comments started coming in.

Former classmates retweeted my artwork, saying things like “RIP. She will be missed.” or sharing fond memories. I’ll admit, some of them touched me. I hadn’t realized some of them thought of me that way. And then a former professor shared a compilation of my work on social media, going on a tirade about suicide rates and mental health awareness.

The local news covered the story, and then my fun truly began. I left an anonymous tip with the news station.

“I swear, I saw this girl at the beach that day. She got in a taxi, and it looked like she was running from someone.”

Naturally, an overzealous intern followed up, and I laid the groundwork that would cement my story not as a tragic suicide, but that of a curious missing persons case.

The national news covered the updated story, and someone bought a print of an original painting I’d done. Than someone else. My website got more and more traffic as people searched my name, and engagement on my social media sites peaked. This dragged on for weeks, and with every new article, with every new piece of information that dropped, money rolled in, and the attention I had been waiting for was finally directed at me.

I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad. Not when my plan had worked so well. Not when I had gotten what I wanted. As for the people in my life…well, they could mourn the person I was. I didn’t want to be her anymore anyways. I wanted to use her.

And then I emailed my old roommate, from a throwaway email account, under the guise of being a collector, interested in accessing more work than what was available on my website. And my roommate took the bait. Now short the supplemental income that would have been my contribution to the household, and strapped for cash, she sold me my own work, from finished pieces to half-done sketchbooks. And I sold it all for higher and higher, practically generating my own value.

Finally, I’d had enough, ready to start a new life, as a new person, with no worries, no responsibilities, and as an added bonus, no college debt from the fancy art school I’d paid a fortune for for nothing.

And then the body washed up. Waking up to a notification one morning that my own corpse had been discovered was certainly an unusual experience I have no pleasure in describing, but apparently, a Jane Doe had been discovered not far from the train station the taxi had dropped me off at with no shoes, no belongings. Having been dead a while, the police coroner had been all too happy to label her as myself, and just like that, the mystery was over. I had been found, but I had not been found out.

Only this lead to a much bigger problem. I knew for sure that the Jane Doe in question wasn’t me. So…who was she?