Page 68 of The Masks We Wear
Lucy’s phone rings from upstairs and I remember I discarded mine somewhere in the entryway when we were unloading our luggage back into the house. “Shit,” I mutter.
“What’s wrong?” He asks, confused.
“I forgot my phone in the foyer. I promised I’d call Selene when we landed and I didn’t, she’s probably blown up my phone with worried texts,” I unlace our fingers, kissing him on the cheek before hurrying to the foyer to retrieve my phone. I find it on the entryway table, just as I remembered and grab it, walking back to the kitchen as I press the home button to turn it on.
I have a billion notifications. News apps are going crazy, social media notifications are going crazy, my emails are blown up, and my messages and calls, astronomical. I freeze in my tracks, stopping in the entrance to the kitchen as my face falls. I read through some of the notifications and stop breathing. “Oh my God,” I whisper to myself.
Seeing the worry and distress on my face, Harvey rushes over to me, “What’s wrong?”
“Aria is all over the fucking news,” I panic as I read through my texts. The group chat between Aria, Selene, Ivory, and I has two-hundred notifications alone. I open a news app and read the latest tabloid, highlighting Aria’s biggest and worst scandal she’s ever had in her career.
Harvey relaxes only slightly at the fact that I’m not in trouble or the subject of my own distress, “For what?”
I flip my phone so he can read my screen. The headline of the article reads,Satan’s Angels Guitarist Sex Tape Leakedand right below the title is a picture of Aria and some guy whose face I can’t make out, completely naked, save for the censor bars covering their naughty bits. It’s clearly Aria, though.
“Shit,” Harvey reads the title and falters.
Lucy chooses the worst time to reappear, “I just went on TikTok and saw Aria kissing some guy but it looked like they were naked,” she sounds amused, confused, and in disbelief.
I look over my shoulder at Lucy and then back at Harvey, panic clear on my face. “Fuck,” I worry, distressed.
Harvey talks to me but I don’t hear him, too busy rereading the headline in my head.
Aria just got caught making a sex tape and whether it was voluntary or not is something I have yet to figure out but right now, my mind is roving over every possible way we can fix this. Problem is, I’m coming up dry because it’s already all over the news and the video itself is circulating around the internet. “Aria is so fucked.”
The End