You never expect a song on the radio to be about you. The songs that pre-teen girls dance to in their bedroom, or scream at during a concert, or that a soccer mom plays in their van in an attempt to be cool, weren't about anyone in particular: nameless and faceless mystery girls who don't really exist. Love songs sell, and so the people writing boy band songs wrote plenty of them. Throw in a nice beat, a blend of pleasing voices, and empty lyrics and boom. Instant hit. 

To be fair, this isn't always the case. Sometimes people do write songs about people. They pour their heart out, but keep the subject ambiguous so every girl in the world can pretend that the song is about them. Wes writes songs about this girl that he's enamored with, except he never says who she is. It's not like she'll ever hear it; Brave Berlin isn't the kind of band that plays venues any bigger than a coffee shop. Wes tells me that, at some point, we'll be playing Madison Square Garden. 

For now, the biggest crowd that we have is the same twelve people that come to the Chai Me Café every Friday night. The owners feel so grateful that they can advertised live music that they pay us in free coffee, which was hit and miss though, honestly, it was usually a miss than a hit. 

Wes took sips of his coffee between tuning his guitar, alternating between pitchy twings and labored slurps. He used the lopsided stool that he always sat on as his temporary table, a light brown ring of coffee that rolled off of the mug forming on the seat. His body was encased in the plaid shirt that he bought from Walmart, the same one that he wore every week. This week, his hair was styled more elaborately messy than it had been ever. 

"Son of a," he muttered. With the excess fabric on his left sleeve, he wiped up the coffee ring. His guitar strap went over his head and the instrument fell across his body. Wes, the born rock star, finished up his coffee and put the mug on the ground by the leg of his stool.

I sat on my own stool, which rocked back and forth with my body weight, my ukulele resting on my lap. It had been tuned before I got here, because I hated twinging in front of the audience. Even the thought of their judgmental hipster eyes and even more judgmental hipster ears hearing how disgusting my ukulele sounded turned my ears into approximately the same temperature as the seventh circle of Hell. "Maybe you shouldn't put your coffee on your seat?" I suggested.

Wes glared at me, in a way that a father would glare at their child. "Shut up, okay? I'm nervous." He stared into the array of tables and chairs, where Jesus lookalikes and hipster Barbie dolls filed in, and took the seats that they always took. These people had heard us play six billion times, including that time where I started my period without knowing and ended up sitting in a pool of blood until it got super uncomfortable.

I leaned over and patted Wes on his arm, throwing him a small and toothy smile. "Wesley, we'll be fine. It's not like there's a scout in the audience." If this were a movie, there would be a scout in the audience, but life isn't a movie. We wouldn't be playing venues even close to the size of Coachella, or whatever, and we would stay out of the press. Together, Brave Berlin didn't talk, but watched everyone getting their drinks and cookies the size of their heads. I looked at him, watching his illuminated profile clench and unclench. He grinded his teeth.

He rolled his eyes at me. "Yeah, but we're recording this one." A microphone hung from the ceiling, and the end of the wire was a red blinking light. When I looked back down at Wes, he had a smug look on his face. His tight-lipped smile was triumphant. He loved to get his way.

Butterflies tested the boundaries of my stomach. Correction: Red Bull drinking, coked up butterflies tested the boundaries of my stomach, trying to force me to let them out somehow. Like, they wanted me to just cut open my abdomen so they could reek havoc on the poor patrons. My face was flushing. Even though we played the exact same set in the exact same way, the idea of actually recording it was nerve-wracking. 

The Bavarian coo-coo clock on the wall released its little wooden children, who chased each other around with steins and lederhosen. It was seven, finally, and the red light turned from blinking to solid. We were recording, and any mishap was going to go down in history as The Time Mira Harlow Fucked Up. That was actually a pretty long list, if you ask me. If you don't ask me, the list is only slightly longer than normal. My parents (and my psychotherapist) suggested with their calming voices and neutral, business-y smelling colognes and perfumes, that I was too hard on myself. They had to say that kind of crap, though, because that's the kind of thing that parents and psychotherapists just say so you aren't even more hard on yourself than you were before.

Wes pulled his guitar into playing position, and I took the hint and rested my uke on my lap in the same way. He counted us off by tapping on his guitar, and we launched into our set. 

It was he that so rudely interrupted our set by retching, and suddenly there was a steady stream of rusty, orange-brown vomit coming out of his mouth. The chunks splashed over his new Vans and the mug. Naturally, I yelped and got off of my stool so fast that the faux wooden seat fell on the ground, knocking its wobbling leg completely loose. My ankle twisted, and I just about face-planted on the edge of the stage.

Okay, I didn't actually face-plant; my hands saved me, sacrificing themselves to splinters from the loose wood. All in time for the bell above the door to ring, and for five guys to stalk in. Five attractive guys, who I'd never seen before, that were now witness to me laying on the stage, surrounded by tweezer-weilding coffee drinkers. This was a pretty basic summary of my love life: attractive man (or men) exist, and get within a close proximity of me, and it's me in an embarrassing situation. This embarrassing situation took the cake, but at least I wasn't a) covered in puke, or b) the source of the puke. 

· * * *

After my splinters were effectively taken care of, and I had crucifixion-like holes in my

hands, I noticed that the five guys hadn't left yet. They crowded around a small table right next to mine, staring into their coffees with eyes that had their own luggage. They talked in low, accented voices, which made me wonder if they were like, international drug kingpins or human traffickers. They didn't look at the stage, on which Wes was sitting and watching the owner clean up my poor bandmate's vomit, but they looked over at me a lot. Go away, I willed them. I have no interest in being trafficked or getting hooked on heroin. 

I turned my attention to my phone, hinting that I was busy or otherwise occupied and not available to reciprocate their interest in me. No texts, no missed calls, and one Facebook notification from an elderly relative that lived in Boca Raton and was ignorant as to how the internet actually worked. Brave Berlin was unremarkable, unspectacular, and blissfully out of the limelight. Even I, personally, was out of the limelight. That's how I wanted to stay.

But, because we can't always get what we want, one of the guys got up and asked me a simple question:

"Is this seat taken?"

I could've lied. I could've designated that other seat as Wes's, or as some imaginary boyfriend's. I could've also said 'yes,' and not given it anymore thought. He would've just stalked back to his tables to sit with his friends. Unfortunately, lying isn't my thing. And by "not my thing" I mean that it makes me physically ill to lie, and that even the whitest lie made me cry. Seriously. Once I told my parents that I got an A on a test when I got a B, and spent the next hour and a half sobbing in my room about it before I came clean.

I shook my head, and he scooted out the chair and sat down. He leaned forward with his hands clasped in front of him. He was cute enough, with brown hair that wasn't too long or too short, and eyes the size and color of almonds. He didn't have a baby face, but he also didn't have a gaunt and bony one either. He looked insanely familiar, but I couldn't place him. His name was on the tip of my tongue, but it wasn't coming out. 

"You here for the band?" he asked, glancing at the stage and then back to me. My eyes stayed focused on him, trying to put a name to his face. When he saw me looking at him, he smiled at me without teeth.

My lips formed a toothless smile back, and I picked my ukulele off of the vinyl floor and set it gently on the table. "I'm half the band," I told him sheepishly, which made his eyes open wide so I could see the whites of them. The look on his face, which was more apprehensive than anything, made me laugh.

My laughter made his apprehensive look morph into chuckles too. "Wow, oh my god. What happened up there?" He pointed to the stage, which was now clear except for Wes using a rag to clean off his guitar and muttering curses. "Something really bad, huh?"

"Wes told me that he was nervous because we were recording, and I basically took that as a 'Mira, don't screw up.' We're about to start our set and he throws up." Guffaws made my stomach seize and my eyes water, and it made it that much worse that my new friend was laughing in that silent way that suggested he wasn't breathing, but banging on the table. I took a couple deep breaths before presenting him with my palm. "Then, I tried to get up and because I'm me, I fell. And now I have Jesus hands." Really, overly tired me? Jesus jokes with a stranger? Holy shit, was he about to pull out a crucifix and exorcise me?

He held either end of my hand, examining my splinter punctures with his eyes kind of squinted. The fact that his hands were super soft and also touching my hands made my face hot, and I hope he didn't notice when he let go and I used this new graced hand to set my ukulele on the ground again. "So, Mira. I like your name; it's different."

I shrugged. "It's nothing special. It's just short for 'Miriam' which is probably the ugliest name known to man." I took a sip of my lemonade, which had been sitting more or less abandoned on the table in front of me, to the point where it was more water than lemon. 

Mystery Dude shook his head. "Oh, no. My name's Dylan, because my parents are unoriginal and decided to screw me over with one of the worst names in the English language." He laughed, then leaned back so he could get his coffee off of the table. Mystery Dude who was actually named Dylan lifted it up. "Cheers."

I touched my lemonade cup to his mug and we drank at the same time, and I felt the compulsion to smile with my straw in my mouth still. He smiled back at me, and suddenly all I wanted to do was kiss this stranger. This was how traffickers got victims, though, right? They make the girl want to kiss them and then they kidnap them and ship them off to some remote area of New Mexico or whatever. The voice of my over-protective mother took over my head, except a more nasal, Fran Dresher version of it.

We put our cups back down. "Did you come here for the band?" I asked, tilting my head a little to the side. He and his friends were new, and newbies always ended up being questioned by someone or another. Usually, it was Todd, but he had run out in the midst of the whole vomit fiasco. I couldn't imagine that Dylan was here to see Brave Berlin, but I was kind of hopeful that we were getting the exposure that Wes always said we had. 

Dylan made a sour face after drinking his coffee, and shook his head. "No. Our car actually broke down." He pointed with his thumb out the window, which my eyes followed outside. He was pointing at a big, camper-like bus outside. Okay, were they on a road trip? Who road trips through the streets of downtown Cincinnati?

Okay, definitely human traffickers. Shit.

I nodded and took a tentative sip of my lemonade. "I'm glad you made your appearance on one of the most embarrassing nights of my life." 

He smiled at me. It was a cliché smile, if smiles could even be cliché. I would say that it was a knowing smile or that his teeth like, bore deep into my heart or whatever, but there's a limit of how many clichés I can use. Dylan was just a familiar person in the sense that I felt like I grew up with him, and I liked that about him. "At least you only have holes in your hands and not vomit chunks on your guitar strings."

I laughed, a loud and staccato laugh. "Okay, true." Another sip of my lemonade, but there was such little left that it made that noise of a straw trying to suck up air. I stared at Wes for a little bit, watching him meticulously getting the stomach acid off of the thin wires. Everyone always thought that we were dating, like some Matt and Kim knock-off that would never be as good. Wes wanted to focus on Brave Berlin every time I'd tried to convince him that we could be together, and I had gotten over him by the time he decided that he wanted to put his arm around me at the homecoming bonfire. 

So yeah. Wes and I were a complex situation. Now he was in love with a girl named Eloise, despite not being able to explain where he knew her from to me and never getting to see her. He said that he'd invited her to come watch us play, but that our style music wasn't her thing. Wes didn't realize that I realized that she was fake, especially due to the fact that he met her around the time that his little sister had become infatuated with those movies about that spoiled blonde girl named Eloise. 

Dylan opened his mouth to speak, but closed it and then started again. His voice got quiet, like we were discussing a secret. God, here comes the human trafficking offer. Or the drugs. Or both. "I don't know if it's really your thing but," he took a ticket out of his pocket and slipped it across to me. "If you're into it, we're playing tomorrow night, downtown? I'll put your name on the list and you can come hang with us backstage?"

I nodded and flipped the ticket over. It was a ticket that you'd get at will call, official and cardstock. It had a barcode and everything. First row, right in the middle. This was some extreme shit. "Let me check my calendar really quick?"

He nodded. "Yeah, of course."

My phone revealed that tomorrow was that same elderly relative's birthday, but I knew that my mom had zero interest in flying down to Boca to give a great aunt a cheap card bought in the airport. Aside from the inevitable obligation to watch my little brother trip over a soccer ball on a YMCA field, I was free. Being without plans made my heart lift a little, and the corner of my lips went with it. "I'm free," I told him, wondering if my enthusiasm was super obvious.

Dylan grinned back, and scribbled on the back of a receipt. "Just text me when you get there, okay? I'll come and let you in." He passed it off to me and tapped it. One of the other guys said something, and Dylan stood up with the rest of them. They walked out, but he turned around to wave at me. God, he was so attractive. 

When they left and Melissa started to wipe off their empty table, I looked at the ticket closer. Wait. What did the band name say?

It said Post Script. That's why Dylan had looked so familiar to me. 

Shit.

I stumbled backstage, my ears ringing from the loud noises and pre-teen girls screaming like screeching noises would somehow seduce the entire band. Blisters were forming where the yellow canvas of my wedges rubbed against my skin. Concert tip number one: Never wear the shoes you wore once to your graduation. It feels like hell and an arthritic baby giraffe is one of the least attractive things you can look like. Almost falling in the lap of a guy sitting in your row isn't the most fun thing in the world either. 

A security guard with wrinkles (but no laugh lines) was taking care of letting people backstage. Some of the girls sitting around me stood in front of me in line, clutching their posters in one hand and new model iPhones in the other. One by one, they were turned away by the yellow-shirted, laugh line-less woman.

"Name?" she asked, looking from her list to me. Her lips, covered in an uneven layer of rosy lipstick, scowled. The tone of her voice made my stomach churn. God, why wasn't Dylan texting me back.

"Um," I stammered, checking my phone. The security guard, whose name tag read RITA, raised her eyebrows at me. "Mira. Mira Harlow? Dylan told me to come back here?" My voice was suddenly an octave higher, and every sentence came out as a question. Rita obviously thought I was just some ditzy blonde. 

She shook her head without looking on the list. "You aren't on there." 

I peered over her clipboard, trying to find my name, but she clutched it to her chest. My head felt like it was being attacked by seven jackhammers, and sweat started to bead on my forehead. Why was this happening to me? Seriously, why me? Dylan hadn't even texted back, and he had read the message. Love you too. 

Suddenly, a familiar voice. "Hey!" 

This familiar voice caused a bunch of girls behind me to jump up and down in a way that I'd only see crazy fan girls do in TV shows or crappy Disney Channel movies. iPhone cameras snapped with the sound of an old camera, because this was a moment that was going to get them through like, eighth grade. It also caused my stomach to feel clear again and my head to transport itself from New York City to a beach. 

Dylan put his arm around Rita the way a guy puts his arm around his mom. "This lovely lady is with me." She released her clipboard to let him see it, and he scanned it with a finger on the paper and his brow furrowed. "Yep, there she is. Mira." His eyes looked up to me, sparkling in the dim light. "Come on, I want you to meet the rest of everybody."

"Thank you," I said to Rita in the voice I reserved for the people who I wanted to kill, but had to kill with kindness instead. She rolled her eyes and stepped away so I could leave with Dylan. When he put his hand on the small of my back, ushering me further backstage, the phone clicks continued. 

Being the nice guy that he was (at least by the accounts of mega fans on the internet. I did my research), Dylan turned around and waved to the throng of disappointed fans. "I'm really glad that you came. I would've been out here sooner, but Andrew was insistent that we have a PR briefing." He rolled his eyes, as if being an international pop sensation was the most annoying profession in the entire world. I internally rolled my eyes, because I worked at a department store that was frequented by the most obnoxious old ladies in existence. 

"You guys were great." It wasn't a lie. I'd mainly only heard Post Script playing on the radio when nothing else was on and outside of stores in the mall, and they sounded pretty damn close to the recorded versions playing live. That was the true measure of band greatness: if they sounded good in concert. "And none of you threw up or fell down, so that's a plus."

Dylan laughed as he opened the door to a huge lounge. It wasn't really a dressing room so much as a hang out, which hadn't really been customized. It was full of black leather furniture, including the comfiest looking couch I'd ever seen in my life. There was a gray shag rug in the middle of the room, with a long and simplistically modern coffee table on top of it, covered in water bottles and half-eaten pastries. The walls were red and purple and painted boringly to accent the random prints hanging on them: peaceful zebras, the Cincinnati skyline, and a picture of John Stamos. 

Four other guys sat on the furniture. They were all the same breed of thin and just over average height, all with hair in varying shades of brown. They were still dressed in the unspectacular (but somehow super hot) clothes that they'd worn when they performed. They didn't acknowledge the people coming in, their eyes fixated on their phones. 

"You can sit down," he whispered in my ear. Electric tingles went up my spine, making me stand up straighter and walk with swishing hips over to the couch. I sunk down on the cushion closest the door, and he sat down in a recliner on the other side of the coffee table. Dylan opened his legs so he could rest his elbows on them, and slouched down a little.

The guy who was sitting on the opposite end of the couch looked over at me, then back to his phone, and then back at me. His hair was a little longer than average, and he had eyes that were the same celery stalk green as mine. His face, all angles and points, was a little bit feminine, but not overtly so. He was attractive in all of the ways that Dylan wasn't: unfamiliar, angular, almost elfin. 

"Who's this?" he asked Dylan, looking between his bandmate and I. There was a smile on his face that played into his bemused voice, which was also everything that Dylan's voice wasn't. It was about the same tone, just a different sort of accent. 

Not going to lie, I wanted to hear him talk more. His double take and wondering who I was made me suddenly hyperaware of everything: the frizziness and possible greasiness of my hair, how my makeup had settled on my face, if my twenty-four-hour deodorant (which I had applied like, ten minutes ago) was wearing off and making me smell like straight up BO. The attention I had garnered also made my ears a hellish temperature, but I couldn't pull back my hair. Seeing that he made me blush via my ears would be a sign of weakness on my end, right?

"This is Mira," Dylan said. At one point my name sounded magical with his voice, but was now being thrown around with indifference. Ouch. "Mira, this is Jack." He nodded towards his bandmate.

Jack held out his hand to me, which was big on his skinny arm. "Mira," he repeated, and his voice made it sound miraculous. It also just so happened to make my nether-regions want to hear him say it over and over again, but that was probably not going to happen in the near future. "It's nice to meet you. Wait." After we shook hands, he pointed at me with his tongue peeking out a little from his lips. "You were at that café last night, weren't you?"

I held up my hand. The Neosporin had more or less closed the hole in it, but there was still a pinpoint of red. "Guilty." He didn't hold my hand the way that Dylan had, which was super disappointing, but he did scoot closer to me so I could smell his cologne, which was either freshly applied or just really strong. 

He examined my hand without touching it, his eyes squinting. "Looks like I caught you red-handed, huh?" My mouth released a donkey-like laugh, which made me want to die. Seriously, brain? I'm this close to an attractive male person and you decide to make me sound like Eeyore on speed? Jack smiled, though, which was good, and looked at Dylan. "See? Someone enjoys my jokes."

Dylan rolled his eyes and took a swig of water. "Right. You're a regular comedian, Jacky." This earned him a pillow to the face. Water sprayed out of his nose and he erupted into coughing fits that were only rivaled by my laughter fits. "Hey! We agreed to not throw things at a person when they're drinking. It's the eleventh commandment."

"Actually, the eleventh amendment is not talking shit about other Republicans," I chimed in. Oh Lord, Harlow. Could you be anymore of a masochist? My lips automatically folded together, and the boys didn't say anything. They sure knew how to make a girl feel worse about herself. Then again, I was spouting Ronald Regan quotes to be accepted. If I was on the outside looking in, I would probably not want that person to feel good about themselves at all.

This didn't seem to deter Jack from putting his arm on the back of the couch behind me. It wasn't him making a move overtly, but I still had him on a technicality. Ha. Take that, people who try to set me up with their Harvard-bound lawyer son! I leaned back and noticed that my hair accidentally touched his arm, which made his thin lips turn up at the corners. Dylan became as engrossed in his phone as his bandmates. The room was silent in a way that was both uncomfortable but also the most peaceful thing in the world, until Jack looked at me again.

"What did my much less tactful partner in crime do to convince you to talk to him?" he asked, his eyes crinkling on the sides. 

My eyes widened and my mind went completely blank. Of course I didn't want to say that he gave me a free concert ticket, because then I'd look like a gold digger. I couldn't tell Jack that Dylan had just talked to me in an act of convincing me to come, because then I would sound super desperate. There was no winning answer here, so I shrugged. "He slayed the dragon that was guarding the tower that my asshole parents have been keeping me in for the past eighteen years. I felt like I owed the guy." 

He laughed, which made his eyes crinkle more. "No one told me we were blackmailing pretty girls now. Christ, Dylan, why didn't I get the memo?" 

Whoa. Whoa. Wait. Hold the phone. I was a pretty girl in the eyes of a boy who could also be accurately described as pretty. The butterflies in my stomach that had penchants for energy drinks and crack came back in full swing. Adrenaline raced through my veins, and I felt nauseous and light-headed, in the best possible way. He had called me pretty.

"I guess you missed the email about saving the princesses," I suggested in a deadpan voice that betrayed my inner feelings of holy shit-ness. 

Looking at me again, Jack said, "I guess when you're late to the party, the best princess gets taken." 

You know when you're roasting a marshmallow, and everything has to be calculated? Like, you have to keep your marshmallow at the perfect distance from the smoldering embers, and you have to keep it at that distance for the perfect amount of time. If you don't keep it in for long enough, the graham cracker breaks when you try to force the s'more together. If you keep it in for too long, it catches on fire and you have to spend the next ten minutes blowing the flame out, only to have the marshmallow portion of your delicious dessert sandwich tasting disgusting. Meanwhile, you have to keep your balance and you can't move because you're risking your entire s'more. At the same time the fire is heating your cheeks, too, and they feel sunburnt, but it's such a beautiful warmth that you don't want it to go away.

That's how I felt right at that moment, with a hot British guy calling me pretty and talking about saving princesses. Normally, being a damsel in distress would cause me to go on a feminist tirade about how I was an independent woman and women weren't fragile creatures who needed a man to save them when something went wrong. We were joking, though, and we both knew that. Plus, I could probably beat the life out of this adorable twig, due to the fact that my mom forced martial arts on me for three and a half awkward, pimply years. 

I shook my head, with a sarcastically condescending smile on my face. "Sorry. Can't keep the best princess waiting too long. I've got deadlines." 

Jack put a hand to his chest and scoffed, faking offense. "I was under the impression that the best princess would account for the time that her knight in shining armor would spend stuck in traffic."

"Yeah, I heard it's always backed up on Ye Olde Freeway." 

My knight in white tee-shirt let his arm droop a little so it got a little closer to my shoulders. Electricity surged up my spine, tickling each plate in my vertebrae. The side of his face got closer to mine, until his lips were about level with my chin. Oh, God. Did I have a double chin? I tilted in up just in case. Angles were my worst enemy, because the degree of the angle always corresponded with how many chins I gained. Nobody in their right mind wanting their lips to be near someone with a double chin, much less a quintuple one.

His phone, a model that I wasn't sure had even been released yet, slid out of his pocket. When he handed it to me, the "new contact" screen up, his hand touched mine. It was rough in the way that boy's hands get, where it didn't feel like sandpaper but he didn't moisturize every hour on the hour. It was also warm and completely not proportional to the rest of him. A vision flashed before my eyes of those hands touching me on the small of my back and around my waist and tucked in the back pocket of my jeans.

"Next time Ye Olde Freeway has an accident, I'll text you." He nodded to his phone, a mischievous glint in his eye. "I don't want you to meet your evidently very important princess deadlines."

When I woke up, with a cottony mouth and a pounding in my head, the first thing I did was check my phone. That wasn't completely abnormal, and neither was the fact that I only had like, two texts. What wasn't normal was that I had about nine thousand Instagram notifications, all from people that I was pretty sure didn't follow me in the first place. Holy shit, what in the world happened? Did I accidentally get into a fight in my Nyquil-induced stupor? Did a company's page feature one of the pictures I tagged them in?

I rolled over, my hair flopping onto my pillow. My stomach was jumping rope when I unlocked my phone, waiting for its not updated software to load. There were tons of comments, likes and new followers. Tons as in literally ninety-four notifications total. With shaky hands, I clicked on the "tagged photos" section of my profile, smoothing out the air bubbles of my screen protector. 

Oh. There was it was. The picture that Jack had gotten another bandmate to take of us.

Us, on the couch. I had a plain, wooden ukulele on my lap, looking down at its body. My fingers were a blur, switching in between chords like playing the wrong one would make the wires shock me. My hair was falling over my shoulder and getting into my face, and my mouth was a tight string. It was my concentration face, which was probably the worst face that I make that he could've posted. 

Jack sat next to me, with the curve of a guitar hugging his thigh. His fingers weren't placed on frets, and his other hand resting on the strings. Hair framed his face, but he wasn't watching what he was doing (probably because he wasn't actually doing anything). He was watching me, and smiling like I was the best thing he'd ever seen in his life. It was a smile that gave me that roasting marshmallows feeling again, but the amount of likes put that heat in my chest.

Let me precede this by saying that I do not know one hundred thousand people, let alone more. I don't know their names or their instrumental preferences or what weird thing their mouth does when they concentrate. I mean, I'm sure that I will pass that many people in the course of a lifetime, but for now, I didn't know anything about one hundred thousand people. 

One hundred thousand people now knew my name and my instrumental preference and the weird thing my mouth did when I concentrated. All because of my knight in white tee-shirt. 

· * * * 

By the time that I found the motivation to get out of bed (and change my Instagram

account to private), it seemed as though everyone in the entire universe had seen that one black and white snapshot. This everyone included my mother, who kept her lips sealed when she scuttled around me in the kitchen, wiping every clean surface in the house, her brow furrowed. Shit. She was stressed out.

"Good morning to you, too," I said, shoveling a spoonful of Lucky Charms into my mouth. She scrubbed at invisible dust on the brown granite countertops, huffing like the Big Bad Wolf. Her fingers were ghostly on the trigger of the Pledge, and I realized that this is who my mother was: an aggressive, over-stressed perfectionist.

Not so subtly, she moved a stack of business school magazines next to my bowl. They all advertised a glossy version of undergrad life that involved sharply-dressed young adults smiling as they walked between red brick buildings. I flipped one open, revealing similar sharply-dressed young adult supported a sports team whose mascot was a vaguely racist Native American. Further pages brought super generic and stilted student testimonies, and then a list of fees, circled in red pen.

Nice, Mom.

Ugh. They were on this shit again.

I moved to the next catalog on the stack, which had a bright orange Post-It stuck to the front. "DAD'S ALMA MATER" was scrawled on it, complete with an unconvincing smiley face. Like, the mouth invited me in, but the eyes said, "kill me." When you peeled back the Post-It, a guy my age in a shirt and tie smiled back at you with his arms crossed. He looked like a puppet with a strange guy's hand up his butt. 

Mom stopped cleaning and wiped the sweat off of her brow like she was in a commercial for paper towels. I half expected a cartoony mascot to come tell her to switch to Brawny or whatever. She set the Pledge down on the counter right next to the damp old rag that she used to clean everything with. "Yes, please look at those." She nodded to the stack.

I slurped up the remaining milk in my bowl and put it in the sink. Mom tried to kill me via facial expression, because she had just cleaned that, come on Miriam, don't you have respect for anything? "I will take them up to my room." I promised her, with no intent on actually looking at them, much less applying.

My birth giver raised her eyebrows at me, and they almost touched her widow's peak. "Do princesses not have to go to business school?" she asked. Of course she'd seen the picture. Of course she read the caption. And of course she knew that I knew what she was talking about, because my face was the temperature and color of Satan himself. 

Technically, though I wouldn't tell my mom because she's my mom and that would be disrespectful, no one had to go to business school. My father hadn't (except we wouldn't be in this fake nice house if he decided to be an art major) needed to go. He chose to major in business at a Good School where people who were Going Places went. And though we shared a passion for infomercials with F-list actors, history documentaries about the Nuremburg Trials, and making fun of the elderly, I wasn't Dad. 

"Mom. Seriously."

Mom shook her head, increasing the intensity of the lazar beams shooting out of her eyes. "Instead of going to concerts and getting VD from guys who probably just want a good publicity stunt, how about you work on getting into college?" Ouch. I don't know what was the most insulting: a) that she thought that I was just having unprotected sex with every pop star in my midst, b) that she was seriously implicating that Jack had some nasty venereal disease that he didn't tell me about, or c) that she really thought that Jack only wanted me because it would be a good publicity stunt.

I mean, it made sense. And Dylan did say that there was a meeting between the band and their PR person right before I got taken backstage. My bottom lip folded itself into the top one and I chewed it. Maybe she was right and Jack hadn't wanted me in the first place, or that he just wanted social media attention. Maybe he flirted with me because he could and wanted to make himself feel better. Maybe he did something like that after every show.

No. That wasn't the adorable twig that I knew and fell in like with. Or was it?

My eyes rolled so hard that I was scared that the force would detach them from my body. "Okay, you don't know about any of that. Plus, I'm still a virgin." Her turn to roll her eyes, because Mom was insistent in thinking that I was a slut. "I also don't want to go to college. Not this year at least. Especially not business school." My arms extended like Frankenstein's monster, because the thought of business school was horrifying. 

"I just don't see why you're so against even looking at the brochures." 

I went around to the other side of the counter and kissed her on the cheek. She shook her head, sweaty hair whipping me in the face. "Because I know what I want and it's not this."

Except, I didn't know what I wanted. Mom gave me a knowing look, because she can tell when I'm lying by the way my eyes roll up and to the side. When I was little, she used to tell me that she knew everything. Her mind was a lie detector equipped with all seeing eyes. Nothing about her ever quit, and that was the most annoying thing about her. The second most annoying thing was that she usually got her way.

The third was that she knew everything and, if she didn't know it right away, she figured it out shortly after.