Suddenly, Cal’s New York internship is off the table - as is his FlashFame channel, since “Shooting Stars” has legal boilerplate that makes on-air Cal basically their property. Suddenly, they’ll be sharing a sanded-off and camera-ready version of their lives on the reality-TV “Shooting Stars” publicity show NASA is using to publicize the mission. Suddenly, the family is moving to Clear Lake, Texas. The one without a carefully planned video schedule and content calendar, the one who has a clear vision of his future, the one without anyone to turn to.īut this relatively comfortable balance between the private and the public - a high school student living with his parents in Brooklyn and eagerly awaiting an internship at BuzzFeed - is shattered when Cal’s father’s long-shot application to join the team of the impending Orpheus V mission to Mars is approved. I try, but I can’t even picture the real Cal. Cal the friend is always there to fix your problems. Cal the performer is always put together. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing keeping me stable is the shield I put up.

But in the odd nature of online celebrity, he’s still anonymous to the broader world.Īnd this veneer of control, the vibrational discrepancy between the online and offline persona that’s been well-known to stage performers for millennia and that’s been steeply intensified in the era of the Internet, is the looming preoccupation of Cal’s personal life:Ī shiver runs through my body as the truth breaks through. Cal Lewis Jr., the narrator of Phil Stamper’s utterly winning debut YA novel The Gravity of Us, is far more comfortable being a purveyor of news rather than a subject of it his ongoing video series of news uploads for the platform FlashFame have made him, as one character in the book semi-sarcastically comments, a viral superstar (and as Cal himself notes, he feels much less helpless in the face of the daily news cycle when he’s curating it himself, in however small a way).

Phil stamper the gravity of us