Last month I broke things off with Jessica in what I thought had been a pretty amicable breakup. The next day, word around school was that she dumped me when she found out I was gay. Calls of "faggot" rang out in the halls when I walked through them –they were only rumours, as far as they knew, and to think they'd never seen a gay kid before. I cut out early, during break. I texted Jessica before deleting her number, promising myself I wouldn't answer if she replied. Up yours, too, Jess.
I had to admit, the rumours were pretty believable, and not entirely untrue. I wasn't gay, though; if anyone (anyone I could trust) asked me, I'd probably tell them that I was bicurious. And I'd of course expect them to exile me just like everyone else in the school had.
Word was still buzzing around behind my back and sometimes blatantly in my face, but I couldn't care. As much as I wanted to say something back, to defend myself, I could not bring myself to care enough to do so. I'd just hold my head as high as I could manage, elbowing through a sea of cunts as they bombarded me with any homophobic slang their first-year vocabularies could come up with.
Maybe I would've cared more about what my peers thought of me if I didn't have a life beyond those cement walls. Well, I still didn't have a life, per se… Unless you count stalking my favorite YouTube people online, people who didn't so much as know I existed –in that case, yes, I had a very full life, full of riding a thin line between friendly and slightly crazy.
There were the usual ones, the more popular channels that a bunch of my friends and I watched together before they decided they didn't really want to be my friends anymore. Then there were some more that were kind of my own little secret, I guess: a secret that I shared with thousands of other people, maybe, but I didn't let that ruin my little fantasy. I sort of had this weird idea that I would be best friends with some of these people, if we met mutually for a change.
And, as cheesy as it sounds, that's kind of how everything started.
I trudged home and threw my backpack against a door, I don't know which. Mum was in the living room, ready to ask me about my day at school if I didn't make it to my bedroom first. I rushed upstairs, hoping one of the channels I subscribed to had uploaded something to take away from this usual miserable day.
No such luck, and I closed my laptop again, falling back onto my bed. I had some drawings up on the ceiling; they weren't very good, and they were all crinkled as I had to tear them down before I had anyone over, not like that happened much anymore. They were, honestly, fan art, and mediocre at best.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Someone must've gotten the wrong number. I pulled it out to check: no, it was Nick inviting me to go to the football match tonight. Nick and I had been friends since primary school, and he seemed to feel an obligation to keep that going. He felt sorry for me, but kept hanging out with the pricks who'd ostracized me out of fear I might want their junk. No, thank you. I told him I'd rather drink my own piss –yes, I regretted how rude it had been, but it got the point across when I was in a sour mood.
I rolled over and found nothing to do even when the world was right side up again. I clambered awkwardly off my bed and crawled back to my desk to get my computer. Might as well spend the night like every night, stalking internet personalities via social media websites: it was a favorite pastime of mine.
I read through a bunch of tweets, but didn't reply to any. I really probably wasn't as much of a stalker with a lot of these people as I let on, except for this one guy… but no, Phil hadn't tweeted yet today, which was odd.
Oh yeah, about Phil: AmazingPhil was probably my absolute favorite YouTube channel, and so (naturally) he was the one who over the last two years I decided I was going to become best friends with him. That meant that I had to pretty much comment on every video and tweet him every day just trying to get him to notice me, to the point where it was probably really fucking creepy. But of all the people I watched online, he was the one I felt like I had a sort of personal connection with. It was all just a fantasy, but I was completely platonically infatuated.
My phone buzzed again, and I was debating between biting Nick's head off or apologizing for being such a dick. I had assumed it was Nick, anyway, but no: someone had direct messaged me on Twitter.
I checked exactly who would want to be messaging me at all, and I was floored when I saw who it was.
AmazingPhil: hi dan
