Friday Morning, and You’re on the Front Cover of the Stonewall Grey

You’re standing in line for breakfast, mentally reviewing your notes for the calculus quiz coming up when you hear a couple of girls giggling. You pay it no mind, until you hear your name mentioned by one of them, followed by the sound of a phone-camera going off.

You turn around, curious, but the girls only giggle more when you look at them, and then a second later they’ve disappeared into the crowd. You figure it’s nothing and continue to wait in line, eventually serving yourself a portion of eggs and toast. But as you’re in the middle of picking up a packet of peanut butter to spread on the toast, you notice out of the corner of your eye a girl staring at you. You look up at her and make eye contact, and she immediately looks away, busy checking her phone. Strange.

And then on your walk to the tables, you see heads turn to follow your path, far more than coincidence would suggest, to the point that when you sit down at an empty table, you check yourself in your phone camera to make sure that you look normal. You do.

It’s around then that Jack passes by your table.

“You son of a bitch,” he says, shooting you a deathly glare. “You slept with her, didn’t you?”

“Slept with who?” you ask, confused. “And is this related to all the looks I’ve been getting this morning?”

“You really don’t know,” Jack says flatly, as if disbelieving you.

You shake your head, wondering who exactly it is that Jack thinks you slept with, and how the whole school seems to know, too. Jack, for his part, is glaring at the tables around you. He snatches a newspaper off a table to the protest of the guy reading it, and then pushes it in your face.

Alex Knight: DJ wunderkind, chemistry whiz reads the headline on the front page, next to a flattering photo from last year of you playing a set at a festival. Then, you read the byline, Jeanne Myers, and it starts to make sense.

“Wow, I didn’t realise her profile of me was going to be this big,” you say.

Truth be told, you’d almost forgotten about her interview last week, but, skimming over the article, it looks like Jeanne wrote a pretty glowing piece about you.

“That was supposed to be me on the front page,” Jack mutters, snatching the newspaper back out of your hands and returning it to the poor guy who had it first.

“Guess she must just like me better,” you laugh, and Jack stomps off, leaving you to enjoy your breakfast in peace, save for the stares from your new fans.