“So walk me through what happened. You’re just working at the Burger Barn like usual, right? Then someone took your picture.”
“Right. I didn’t even know it had happened.”
“And when did you realize something weird was going on?”
“I can’t have my phone with me when I’m working. Because of the grease,” I said, turning toward the audience and smiling ruefully. They giggled. Point. “But a lot of girls started showing up about halfway through my shift. And they were all saying, ‘I’d like fries with that.’ Which of course just sounded strange to me. Like they didn’t know which word in a sentence to emphasize.” The audience roared.
“And that was the hashtag on the photo.”
“Right.”
“So your shift ends . . .” Laura raised her eyebrows, urging me to go on. It was so easy to talk to her. Like we were teammates passing back and forth.
“Because we’d run out of food.” Laughter. “So I check my phone, and I see that I have, like, over ten thousand new followers.”
“How many did you have before your shift?”
“Two hundred eighty-nine.”
Giggles.
“Wow. That must have been really strange for you.”
“It definitely still is.”
“You have a few more followers now, I take it.”
“Uh, yeah. Like, a few hundred thousand? And I still don’t have anything interesting to say.” The audience laughed again.
“That is just fascinating, Kyle. But there’s another side to this story, right?”
I tried to keep my smile on, but I was confused. I couldn’t see the play she was trying to make.
“Because the girl who took the photo wasn’t a stranger, was she?”
“No, not a stranger. I mean, we don’t know each other well.”
“But she goes to your high school?”
“Yeah. We’re in Creative Writing together. She’s really good. Her stories are always way more interesting than what other people come up with.” Would Emma think that was too much? Or would she be jealous? But Rachel was good. She couldn’t be upset about me telling the world she was good, could she? I started to feel less sure of myself. Like I’d forgotten my lines in a play.
“She sounds like a fascinating young woman. We’re going to take a break now, but when we come back, we’ll have more with Kyle Bonham, the young man who’s taking over the internet one triple-stacker with cheese at a time.”
The audience clapped loudly, and the stage lights dimmed. A producer I hadn’t seen before ran up to hand Laura a water bottle. Laura accepted it with a slightly tired smile. The producer was older than the one who had shown me around, and less put together. Her look: oversized oxford only half tucked into her pants, mousy-brown hair mostly falling out of the off-center, sloppy bun on the crown of her head, hand tapping nervously against her thigh. She looked like someone who ran things.
“Kyle, I wanted to talk to you before we start taping the next segment,” the producer said, smiling widely at me. “I was chatting with your mom backstage and she came up with a great idea. I’m very excited about it. It could be a really fantastic way for you to keep your story fresh.”
“Okay,” I said tentatively.
“You were planning on going to your school’s homecoming dance, right?”
Laura looked at me expectantly. Without the cameras on, she was a different person. More attentive. Her stare was actually kinda intense.
“Sure. Yes.”
“Have you asked anyone yet?”
Emma insisted I ask her officially to every dance, even if we hadn’t broken up recently. Which we had. Were we still? Lately she’d been hot and cold, then warmish but noncommittal.
“No, not officially.”
The woman smiled with half her mouth. Her dark-brown eyes glittered with excitement.
“Perfect. Let me tell you what we came up with—and I have to say, I think this could be a huge hit with our fans—then you can tell me if you’re on board, okay?”
For some reason, even though the producer and Laura were both smiling, my heart started racing. What did they want? If Mom came up with it, that meant I should say yes, right? She kept saying I had to make more opportunities out of this, turn this into an application Princeton couldn’t turn down.
Somehow that made me even more nervous.
“Okay,” I said, trying to return the producer’s smile. “What were you thinking?”
chapter nineteen
RACHEL
FRIDAY, 7:08 A.M.
A car horn honked from the driveway. Even from the upstairs bathroom it sounded annoyed. Beep! Be-be-be-beeeeep!
“Jesus Christ, Mo, I’m coming,” I muttered to my reflection. It was taking me longer than expected to get my eyeliner right, maybe because I almost never wore eyeliner. Still, over the last couple of days it had somehow started to feel more necessary, like another line of defense. Yesterday hadn’t been so hard. Maybe I was just too tired after this week to manage even the most basic of motor skills on a Friday morning.