Jaylan hugged Cressie, who mopped starstruck tears from her cheeks with no shame, then took a seat in the nearest armchair as the professor type took the other, casually shuffling index cards in her palm.

Sixty minutes went by in a breath. The professor did not waste time getting into the topics Jaylan covered in her videos. Dating. Sex. Mental health. They touched everything, relating it back to Jaylan’s own tough background—an inner-city kid whose parents worked so much she barely saw them. She always had questions, and spent nearly every afternoon and evening at her local YMCA in the teen computer nook, researching any topic that came to mind, filling stacks of single-subject notebooks with her findings.

“I had so many notebooks, they formed teetering towers along one wall of my room. My big brother said I kept manifestos like a serial killer”—big laughs from the audience there—“but what I had was an external brain. I couldn’t keep all of my thoughts, and concerns, and worries up here.” She tapped her temple. “They would’ve driven me insane.”

The professor leaned into Jaylan, nodding. “Fascinating. You were very young when you started the habit of writing it all down.”

“Yes, maybe ten or eleven.”

“But”—the professor cocked her head, intrigued—“there came a point where your interests changed?”

Jaylan caught the pass handily. “Yes. When I began puberty, the topics I worried about changed. Before, I was concerned with music, and puppies, and science, and basketball. Almost overnight there was an urgent shift. I needed to know about the things my body was doing. Even though my mother made time to explain in the best way she knew how, it wasn’t adequate.”

“Why?”

“Because everything else I was hearing was wrong.”

Down my aisle, each and every one of the Purity Pledgers tipped forward, drawn toward Jaylan as if she were a low-powered magnet.

“Nothing was consistent,” Jaylan said. “The correct information was vague. The incorrect information was abundant. The confusion was maddening, and I spent all of my teen years in trial-and-error mode. Navigating a sexual awakening minefield in snowshoes, if you will. No one should have to go through that. When I got to college, on scholarship, I worked my butt off to get my first computer. When my parents saved up to give me a phone with a decent camera built in, I decided I’d trade in the notebooks for a video journal. My first entry was called ‘Dorm Sex,’ which was a facetious title because I was really talking about the pros and cons of coed versus same-sex dorms. A friend dared me to post it. Within a couple of days it had fifty thousand views with requests for more. Now, one point four million subscribers later, you all know the rest.”

They talked more about the struggles of being a brand, how she dealt with critics, and trolls. Too quickly, the discussion was over, and a couple of polo-shirted techs dragged mic stands to either side of the room. The professor said, “We’ll be opening the floor for Q and A.”