Page 10 of So Not My Thing
“Y’all messing with me?”
Chloe shook her head. I murdered some peppers, seeds flying.
Jerome dug his phone out of his pocket and tapped it a few times, looking from the screen to me. “This is you?” He turned the screen toward me, as if that picture hadn’t been burned into my brain for twelve years.
Chloe swatted his hand down. “It’s her.”
“Bruh.” He looked at me with wide eyes.
It was such a perfect way to sum up the situation that I had to laugh. “Yeah. Bruh.”
“I don’t think I ever met a walking meme.” He studied me like he’d never seen me before. “How did that even happen?”
“How did I have a childhood crush turned against me and ruin my life for years?” I hated that I still felt a flicker of the shame that had drowned me the day Miles had gone onLive with Laura.
“Well, yeah.” He ducked his head like he realized how much deeper his question went than he meant it to go. “You don’t have to answer that.” He went back to scrubbing the floor like he was trying to dig through it with the mop.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said it so snotty.”
“Want me to tell the story?” Chloe asked.
“Might as well.” I moved on to slicing up a mushroom and tried to make my brain go somewhere besides the kitchen while Chloe served up the worst disaster of my life for Jerome’s consumption.
“I met Elle halfway through college, and by then, she’d already done her Cinderella makeover, so people didn’t realize who she was the minute they saw her. But one night when I texted her the meme because I didn’t know it was her, she busted out crying and told me the story.”
“Thanks,” I said, my tone as dry as a pork rub. “That makes me sound way less pathetic.”
“To be fair, I probably would have too,” Chloe said. “So Elle here was born Gabrielle Jones and used to go by Gabi.”
“Yeah, that’s what Dylan still calls her sometimes,” Jerome said.
“Right. So you’ve heard our Ellie singing when she’s cleaning up back here and she thinks no one’s listening?”
He grinned. “That I have.”
My cheeks heated. “Get on with the story.”
“Our Gabi-now-Ellie had quite a set of pipes. She was in high school show choir as afreshman.Nobody makes show choir as a freshman.”
“You ought to sing louder,” Miss Mary said. “I’ve been missing it.”
I waved like I was dispersing her words. I didn’t sing in public anymore.
“Anyway,” Chloe continued. “She saw Miles there and fell madly in love, and—”
“Stop.” I sighed and threw the veggies into the hot skillet. “We had a regional show choir competition. Miles Crowe was there. He was a junior, and he had a solo. My very dumb fourteen-year-old self was immediately heart-eyes for him. Like, imagine the most unironic use of that emoji, and that was me. Which would have been fine. I probably would have dreamed of seeing him again the next year then gotten over it. But then he went onStarstruck, and the top four finalists do hometown performances. And suddenly, the normal celebrity crush some teen girls get went into overdrive because this one seemed sopossible. Like, he lived in the next town over, my cousin knew his best friend, and I was so sure I would meet him for real.”
“It’s all she talked about for two months straight when she found out he was on,” Miss Mary said.
“I was ridiculous,” I agreed. “But I got tickets to his hometown performance at the fairgrounds. My cousin even got us passes so we could be down at the front of the crowd. The producers love having teenage girls in the front. Watch any of the dance or singing competitions on TV. You’ll see.”
“I believe you,” Jerome said.
“Anyway, when it was Miles Crowe’s turn, they cut to him live, and he was so good.” I sounded like I was admitting that against my will. But he was. I couldn’t deny that. “So I...”
“Had the meltdown,” Chloe finished.
“Yeah. Full snot-nosed, ugly-cry, fangirl meltdown during his performance. The camera panned to me three or four times. Some producer in a booth was loving it.”
