The first time, it rings out, but the second time, she answers.
I barely even say “Hi” before I’m subjected to her laughing down the phone at me for eight minutes straight, quoting the worst bits of my video back at me before bursting into giggles again.
“I mean,” she wheezes, “you actually said you wanted to marry her because of that time you both got the flu and she threw up on you.
Do you know how goddamn weird that is, Ethan?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Dude, the whole world knows what you meant. You love her even having been around her in that kind of state. It’s just a weird goddamn thing to say when you’re trying to propose, you know? Like, you really . . . you really thought . . . ”
She’s laughing too hard again for me to get a straight sentence out of her.
“Maisie,” I say, kneading my forehead with my knuckles, really glad I didn’t FaceTime her to have to see her laughing at me like this.
Somehow, the concept of hundreds of thousands of total strangers having seen the whole video is less painful than this. “Where is she?
She’s not answering her phone.”
Maisie takes a few gasping breaths, finally clearing her throat and telling me in a haughty voice, “She said she needed some time to think. She’s gone out.”
“Out? Out where? Practically everywhere is shut.”
“Just out. Look, Ethan, I’m sure you’ll hear from her later, okay?
It’ll be all right.”
“Yeah, I’ll believe that when you stop laughing at me.”
She just laughs at me all over again.
apartment #15 – isla
Chapter Thirty-two
While I’m having a rare lazy morning snuggling with Danny in bed, Maisie sends me the video before I see it for myself online somewhere. I recognize her sister’s boyfriend in the video.
Like Serena, he’s a neighbor I follow on Instagram and smile and say hello to when I pass him in the hallway, but we’re not especially close.
I’m not even really that close with Maisie’s sister, Charlotte, having only met her in person a couple of times.
I was vaguely aware that the boyfriend, Ethan, was a vlogger. I didn’t know he was kind of a successful one. And I definitely didn’t know he was going viral this morning until Maisie sent me the video.
I watch it avidly, cringeworthy as it is. Danny watches it with me too.
“That poor boy,” I murmur, as he sighs and stammers at the screen, frowning to himself as he tries to figure out how to word his sentence about why he loves Charlotte in spite of her flaws, without sounding like he’s insulting her. “He must be absolutely mortified.”
“I dunno,” Danny says. “Probably a publicity stunt.”
I scoff. “Please. Who would embarrass themselves this much for a few extra followers?”
Danny chuckles, nuzzling his nose against my cheek and saying, “What, you’re telling me you wouldn’t be totally charmed if you received a proposal video like this?”
“I absolutely would not,” I tell him. “The last thing I want is a public proposal.”
Discussing how you want to be proposed to is probably not the sort of thing you do when you’ve only been dating for a month, but what really strikes me as weird is that it doesn’t feel weird; and Danny obviously doesn’t think so, either, because he doesn’t try to change the subject.
“But how will you post about it on your Instagram?” he teases.
“Hopefully my future fiancé will know me well enough that he’ll set up a camera to film this very sweet, very intimate moment between just the two of us, so I can share it with people later on.”
Danny laughs. “So no marching band and skywriter in front of the Eiffel Tower. Got it.”
“Is that really what you’d want to do?” I ask him. My nose scrunches up before I can stop it.
But his lips curve into a smile against my skin and he kisses my cheek before saying, “No. I think you’re right. It should just be for the two of you. The wedding is when you share it with everybody else, but that proposal? That should be all about us. Or—or not—not, like—not us, like, like you and me, specifically, or—well, not not us, either, but . . . ”
Danny is solid and charming and confident, so it is unbearably endearing when he gets flustered like this. It happens so rarely.
Before this week, I’d only seen him like it once, and that was when he ran into an ex on one of our dates.
I laugh, nudging him with my shoulder. “It’s okay. You can stop now.”
Relieved, he lets out a long sigh and shuts up before he says something more embarrassing than Ethan in his Dear Charlotte video.
apartment #6 – ethan
Chapter Thirty-three
I turn off all my notifications, except for calls. When Charlotte’s ready to talk to me, she’ll call. Probably when she gets home and finds out I haven’t even taken the video down yet.
(I will, but right now I can’t even bring myself to open the page back up long enough to delete it.)
In the meantime, I bury myself in my old university hoodie, the hood up and the strings pulled tight around my face, lying face-down on the sofa and slowly dying of the mortification. What does it even matter if I take the video down now? There are tweets about it.
Snippets that have been reposted online. A damn BuzzFeed article.
Everyone we know will have circulated it and I dread the next event we go to with mutual friends who will all be talking about it, and none of them are ever going to let me live it down.
Oh man, and how unprofessional is it? It’s so obviously a mistake, so stupid. What if this costs me brand deals in the future? What if I end up having to go back to a nine-to-five, and this is the first thing they see when they google me? It’s a disaster.
This could ruin my life. Not to mention it’s most definitely ruined the proposal.
It was supposed to be perfect.
I was going to figure it all out, but now . . .
Oh, what’s even the point?
My life is over and I’m locked in the apartment. I decide I can cut myself some slack; it’s really not like there’s much I can do right now other than wallow. Later, I’ll pick myself up, delete the video, upload a new one explaining it was a mistake. I’ll talk to Charlotte when she’s ready, and hope she’s not so humiliated she forgives me quickly, and once we’ve talked it through, I’ll call my family back, or finally reply to their texts. And maybe, then, I’ll stay away from the internet for a little while.
But right now, I groan into the sofa cushions again, and embrace the tightness in my chest, the sweating palms, the overwhelming sense of mortification that squirms through my whole body, and indulge in a pity party for one.
It’s a while before I hear something outside. It sounds like someone yelling, and someone else shouting back at them to shut up.
I don’t pay it much attention, until I hear them shout, unmistakably, “Mad Man Maddox, get your cute butt out here!”
No.
No.
Oh my God.
apartment #17 – serena
Chapter Thirty-four