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But now I really can’t sleep. I’m like a phone plugged into its charger. Bright and buzzing, whirring with symbols and data.

So that’s highly fucking weird.

I don’t mean it’s weird in general. Insomnia’s a thing. I get that. Just look at Mark; he’s a modern-day princess and the

pea. Completely derailed by any deviation from the routine—light filtered through different blinds, changes in pillow density.

Even at home, he says it’s hit-or-miss. Probably why he conks out in cars, to be honest. And why he’s such a prickly little

pear half the time.

But I can’t seem to power down tonight. It’s like there’s a blinking red dot in the corner of my brain.

I swipe my phone off Jojo’s coffee table, and I guess my Instagram app learned how to open itself. Couldn’t have been me clicking

that square.

Walter’s grid. His event graphic post.

I scroll through the comments until I find mine.

Nothing weird. Not even close to weird. Trust me, I’m not trying to double down on the prom video.

Three words: see you tomorrow!

Still can’t decide how I feel about the exclamation point. I spent an embarrassing amount of time going back and forth in my head about it. And yes, I know I’m being unhinged. Not exactly beating the crush allegations, either. Fully aware, thanks.

He’s responded to some of the comments, but he hasn’t responded to mine. Didn’t even throw it a heart emoji. Not even a thumbs-up.

Which is fine . Because what we’re not going to do is be a parasocial monster about this.

He’s uploaded a new video—teased it on the grid and linked it in the bio. It’s prerecorded; he must have filmed it right after

his haircut last week, because his ears stick out in the thumbnail. You can always measure time with hair if you pay enough

attention. It doesn’t have to be some big, dramatic before and after.

Like mine was.

Mirrors keep catching me off-guard—but it’s not the haircut itself that throws me. It’s all the other stuff. Like how I can’t

stop noticing my freckles now. I think my eyes look bigger, too. Kind of strange, since it’s literally the same face I’ve

always had. But I was so used to my hair being the main event, the first thing you noticed about me.

The funny thing is, my hair’s not even particularly short now, and it’s still just as blond as ever. But the haircut seems

to have recalibrated my face. It’s like meeting my fraternal twin sister every time I look in the mirror.

Maybe that’s my plan if Walter recognizes me from the promposal video. Blame it on my imaginary long-haired twin. Her name

is Delia, and she’s very embarrassing. Very obsessed with Walter. We try not to let her leave the house.

But it’s irrelevant, really, because there’s just no way he saw it.

Walter Holland is a very busy YouTuber with a Wikipedia page and a blue check mark, and I’m wasting my brainspace on this.

The point is, none of it matters until I meet him tomorrow.

Everything else is just noise. It’s just Instagram.

And who knows—maybe we’ll click. Maybe we’ll vibe.

Maybe it’s fate.

Sometimes it doesn’t even make sense, the way I feel about Walter. Not quite a real crush. It’s like a pre-crush. A seed.

It’s just this weird gut feeling I have that Walter and I could be something .

If only we could talk, once, for real.

I guess I’ve always felt that I was meant to find his content. That there was some kind of cosmic reason I stumbled upon the

Drama Clash cover of “Kathy’s Song.” You can’t even chalk it up to the algorithm, really. That one didn’t even go viral.

But it got me. And then, two years later, he just happened to post his coming-out video—a video that just happened to contain

every single word I needed to hear.

It was shorter than his regular content. Unmonetized, too. Definitely nothing fancy.

I watched it three times through without pausing. It felt like my lungs had stopped working.

Every single thing he said was so—

Exactly right. Like he’d pressed the wrinkles out of my thoughts and sent them back to me, folded and ready to wear.

Like the part about trying to remember a feeling. How it starts to seem less and less real. How it starts to feel like a story.

And, sure, I’d gotten there. I’d cracked the sexuality code, for the most part. By the time Walter posted his video, I’d been

fully out for over a year. I didn’t announce it online or anything. I guess I didn’t really announce it at all, apart from

my friends—and, later, my family.

Really, it was fine. It was good. My parents did the whole forehead-kiss-thank-you-for-trusting-us thing. Whereas Audrey—who still regularly referred to Starburst as Star Wars — claimed she had gaydar and already knew.

What’s strange is that lots of people at school said that, too. Other queer people, especially. I could never wrap my head

around that. The way I signaled queerness somehow before I even spoke the language.

Honestly? I said I was queer before I fully believed it.

I’d never told anyone else that. I guess I didn’t think anyone would get it.

But Walter did.

Don’t get me wrong—I mostly believed it. Some days, I was practically sure of it.

But I couldn’t quite make the words fit me. Not the way they fit other people. Bisexual. Queer. Everyone else seemed to wear them like leggings.

Would saying it out loud make it feel true?

It was kind of like shopping for clothing online. You pay for your labels upfront and hope that they fit when they get there.

So I left a comment. And he replied to it.

September sixteenth, at 8:45 p.m. eastern time.

Sometimes I can’t believe that actually happened. Walter Holland sat down in his navy-blue bedroom that night and read a bunch

of words that came from my brain. Words I’d typed just a few hours earlier, in an adrenaline-fueled daze. My critically acclaimed,

award-winning contribution to the general canon of unhinged social media earnestness.

Never in a million years did I think he’d even see my comment, much less reply to it.

Okay, I guess a tiny part of me thought he might reply. Or I hoped he would. Even if it was just a one-in-a-million if-only.

But it was all so completely surreal. I remember thinking that even then. Walter Holland was a stranger. But I also knew every

single one of his facial expressions. I knew what his voice sounded like when he was getting a cold. I knew his middle name

was Joshua, his sister’s name was Annie, and that he had a cat named Vinny, to whom he was vaguely allergic.

And, yeah, I knew the lore around Hayden. But I wasn’t in it for the ship. I never have been. Not like other fans I know I know I know. I’m an asshole.

But I feel like there’s something between us, you know? Some kind of half-written, subjunctive tense future.