At your school, follower counts have quietly become a way people rank each other. Kids with lots of followers are treated as more important; kids with few are treated as less. People check each other's numbers and judge. Someone asked how many you have and made a face at the answer. You've started thinking about it constantly — how to get more, who followed and unfollowed, why someone with fewer followers than you seems more popular in real life anyway. A number that's supposed to mean nothing has somehow become a scoreboard for who matters, and you can feel yourself starting to believe it. You're measuring yourself with a ruler someone else handed you.