Bellicent “Bellee” McCleary had it all: a thriving career as one of the most followed and viewed social media influencers in the game (her “$3000 kitchen restock ASMR” videos were routinely among the most watched on the Beep-Boop platform the week they released and little of the alleged “$3000” that went toward restocking the spotless white kitchen, with its high-tech, gleaming appliances and countertops, which existed only as a soundstage belonging to her mother’s production company, actually cost “Bellee” not a dime, as nearly all the product was supplied to her team by companies practically dying to get into bed with her—in fact, the only real costs for producing her videos were in the oversized sweaters she ruined with stains from sloshing grape juice and dropped dollops of cottage cheese and such, due to the strictures of the “restock” genre, which required that the overlong sleeves of those baggy sweaters be worn over the hands, such that only the spiked acrylic nails she sported would be seen protruding from their cuffs); a successful marriage to Mills Bambry Jr., the grandson of Payton “Pop” Bambry, the legendary creator of the “Chester Dogdaddy” comic strip, and son of Mills Bambry Sr., who brought the beloved character to life in such films as Chester Dogdaddy: The Movie and Chester Dogdaddy the Movie Part Two: Workin’ K-9 to 5 (often stylized as “workin’ K-9 ‘2’ 5” on officially licensed merchandise); and a thriving podcast in which she and a couple of her best “gal pals,” Shaylene “Big Wifey” Jackson and Mallory “MommyBlogger” Fontanelle, gave their “real… off-the-cuff… unrehearsed” takes on current events, politics, entertainment, marriage and motherhood, and “just, y’know… life.”
Everything was just as swell as could be for Bellee, till one day, during a profile in Today Weekly (the cover story, “Bellee Shows Off Her Belly! Celebrated influencer bravely bears baby bump”), she put her foot in her mouth——figuratively, of course; literally, she would only do such a thing for the highest-paying of her PurelyStans “freaks” during her days as a highly successful “camgirl”——by dismissing the relatively small chorus of online voices criticizing her for being a “nepo baby” as “haters” and assuring the gently bemused and highly sympathetic interviewer——a glorified PR stooge, really——that not only had being the daughter of the eminent, powerful, beloved daytime talk show host and media mogul Maggie “Mags” McCleary not given her any kind of “leg up” in the business, but in fact it had, if anything, been a hurdle and actually forced her to work longer and harder to catch——no, scratch that, to make the break for herself that had resulted in her unparalleled success. To hear her tell it, her childhood and adolescence had been less the Life of Riley and more the stuff of Studs Lonigan.
The resulting kerfuffle was two-fold: for starters, no one was buying it——Bellee’s claims of a Horatio Alger-esque triumph over the long odds, that is; for the beleaguered publishers of “T.W.”, Moustache Publishing, these kinds of sales hadn’t been seen since their pre-Internet “glory days”——and Bellee’s insistence on tripling down on her claims of adversity only seemed to inflame a meager spark into a full-on social media conflagration of criticism. The think pieces wrote themselves. (In fact, in some of the less scrupulous publications, where flesh-and-blood editorial staffs had vanished, a few “investigations” into that delicious “tea” did write themselves, thanks to proprietary A.I.
But more worryingly for Bellee, word had reached her mother of the to-do surrounding the “T.W” piece, and she was, for lack of a less crass description, fucking pissed.
Maggie McCleary had begun her media career as a local “weather girl” at Anytown’s Channel 11, fresh out of high school back in the late-1980s, then made a lateral move into the realm of televised shopping as a model and then a show hostess on the popular channel At-Home Shopping Network——at that time, the number two channel of its kind but ultimately the “last man standing” when internet shopping kneecapped the TV home shopping business——where she quickly won the hearts and minds (and dollars) of her “shopping sisters” with her self-effacing Anytown charm and propensity for quirky colloquial exclamations like “Holy buckets!” and “cheese and crackers, that’s some bargain!” together with her All-American beauty and fabulous golden-brown tan. After partnering with a number of AHSN’s biggest-selling brands to create her own lines of jewelry, fashion, and beauty products——for which she had arranged highly favorable deals that proved lucrative very quickly——“Mags” was ready to pivot to penning a pair of cookbooks and then a memoir written in the same endearingly folksy, unpretentious voice that had made her such a cherished personality to ASHN shoppers.
She subsequently became the hostess of the massively successful morning talk show “Mornings with Maggie,” which in its first year was already a ratings juggernaut for International Broadcasting System (IBS) and helped the once-struggling network surpass the competition and reclaim the throne as America’s top television network, a seat it hadn’t occupied in nearly two decades.
Despite her ostensibly unaffected everyday charm and good humor, though, there were occasional mutters of something less wholesome beneath the tanned, glistening surface sheen of “Mags”——there was the time a disgruntled staffer had surreptitiously recorded the icon berating an unfortunate personal assistant who’d brought her the wrong dressing for her lunch salad and leaked Maggie’s resultant, expletive-filled tirade to the tabloids, causing her culminating, full-throated cry of “You thought I wanted fuckin’ BUTTERMILK RANCH on top of fucking FETA, you disgusting pig? You stupid bitch! Suck my ass when it’s bleeding!” to go viral, if not positively pandemic. In fact, as it happened, a source close to “The McMistress of Media” claimed the impossibly vulgar “suck my ass…” exhortation was a favorite of Maggie’s.
A bit farther off the well-beaten path of mainstream celebrity gossip, in the craggy footpaths and tangled brush of boards like 6Net, G8Way, and the like, obscure servers on mIRC and DisCoarse, one could hear rumblings of Maggie McCleary having once fractured the skull of a hairstylist who didn’t give her curly strawberry-blonde locks the proper volume with a thrown ceramic ashtray… murmurs of her hoarding Papa John’s garlic butter cups for the purpose of slathering her skin in it to facilitate the tanning process… even the faintest whisperings of her involvement in a psychedelics-based sex magick cult with ties to the Man with the Gold Car.
But as far as “Mags” was concerned, she was Anytown’s——hell, America’s!——sweetheart, their favorite mommy, their go-to source for homespun wisdom and shelter from the ugly reality of life in this piece of garbage, pus- and bile-encrusted world of piss and shit (her terms, not mine——my dad works for McCleary Corp). And thus, she had to put the proper spin on her daughter’s absurd claims of some hard-scrabble, soup-sandwich youth——she could absolutely not be seen as having let her daughter want for anything, even if doing so torpedoed Bellee’s comparatively nascent media career.
“I hear you, Mags, I do, but I’m not sure how the, uh… cards are gonna fall or, you know, whatever, if you try to, um, smear Bellee——”
“Her name is Bellicent, you worm!” Maggie barked into her phone, strangling the air before her as she lay in the early afternoon sun, glazed with a thick coating of pungent garlic butter.
“Uh-huh, right, yes, of course,” stammered Dirk Pedrehnker, her “point-man” at McQuincey, another folksy-sounding organization, this one charged with “strategizing how to best synergize the outward-facing facets with back-of-the-house components of many of the twenty-first century’s most excitingly dynamic brands in the public, political, entertainment/media, and business spheres.”
Pedrehnker, it was rumored by some in the know at “McQ,” hadn't been the same since a near-fatal cocaine “mishap” (said to have involved injecting the drug into his urethra during a sex- and booze-filled weekend trip to Ibiza earlier in the summer), but many of the firm’s biggest clients were “standing by their man” despite any misgivings they may have had about his curiously now-mostly monosyllabic vocabulary, and so as long as the checks were still clearing, McQuincey brass saw no harm in mum being the word (even while privately joking that, where Dirk was concerned these days, it was more likely that “um” was the word!). “What were, uh… oh, oh… oopsy… Jan? I, um… I made a, um…”
Dirk’s personal assistant, Jan, well-acquainted by now with the “new paradigm” in which she existed at her job, sprang into action with some extra-absorbent paper towels for her boss’s latest “oopsy” and a hasty “Maggie, Dirk’s sorry, but he’ll need to circle back to this mid-week, okay?”, leaving the pissed off “Mags” on her own with the problem of her daughter’s rags-to-riches rise and all it said, or didn’t say, about her parenting skills.
Had these still been the carefree days when home shopping was at its zenith——in hindsight (which was now always 20/10 or better, thanks to the cornea-searing laser-eye surgery “Mags” had endured after someone in her Z (formerly Chirp) feed had remarked that her bifocals made her look like a “hot teacher”) the best days of her life——she might’ve thereafter dozed off with the aid of a blender full of banana daiquiri and a phenobarbital, but as these were very much not those halcyon dates of yore, she instead reacted with horror as the constant source of stress she held in her orange palm notified her that “baby bump bearing beauty Bellee and beau Bambry announce ‘Chester Dogdaddy’ cinematic universe deal at PikNFlix,” leading her to find a brand new intonation in which to utter “suck my ass when it’s bleeding”: disbelieving, angry bemusement.