“Ask Harry. I hear he’ll be there.” Jasmine turns around and starts down the hallway for class.
“But his pictures aren’t as good as yours!” Janet calls after her.
“I need to get to class,” Jasmine says, a feeling of triumph coursing through her veins.
* * *
The handsaws are ridiculously loud, and the class takes turns heading up to the power tool area to do any cutting under Mr. Harrelson’s watchful eye.
“How’s it going?” Jasmine asks loudly.
“What?” Ash shakes her head, laughing and pointing at the saw.
“I said how’s it going?”
“It’s going!” Ash says.
Ryan is behind them in line, and he’s saying something to Jasmine that she can’t quite make out.
“What about a limo?” Jasmine asks.
Ryan repeats again, “I said, do you and Janet want in on the limo for Homecoming?”
The handsaw turns off, right while Ryan’s talking in an unnaturally loud voice, and it makes several people stop to stare.
“We’ve only got six so far and Priscilla says we need at least four more to make it so it’s not really expensive,” Ryan says imploringly, looking at Jasmine.
“Oh, you’re going to Homecoming with Janet,” Ash says, a little too casually.
“No, I’m not—Ryan, what?”
Ryan blinks. “Priscilla told me that Janet was taking you, I don’t know.” He backs up, looking between Ash’s cold stare and Jasmine’s confused one. “So um, let me know by Wednesday about the limo, okay?”
He slinks back to his seat.
Ash and Jasmine are left alone in line for the recently vacated handsaw. “You go,” Jasmine says, jerking her head forward.
“No, you take it. I’ll wait for the next one,” Ash says dully.
“I’m not going to Homecoming with Janet,” Jasmine says softly.
“He just said—”
“Janet probably told all her friends that, but she just asked me and I said no.” Jasmine sighs, running her hands through her hair.
Ash turns to look at her, raising her eyebrows. “Really?”
Jasmine takes a deep breath. She’s been holding on to her feelings for so long, afraid of what might happen, what might change, but if she doesn’t do it now she’ll never know. “I like you.”
“Oh,” Ash says, a pleased flush starting on her cheeks.
“I like your face and your hair and the way you laugh, and joking around with you during class and having lunch with you and hearing about your conspiracy theories, and I’ve never been brave enough to try skateboarding before, but you were really nice about it and I just—I like you, okay?” Jasmine is flustered, this is nowhere near the cool and fun and flirty vibe she wanted to throw off but she’s trying her best.
“I like you too. A lot,” Ash says, with a small smile.
“And I’d like to use the handsaw, and get an A in this class,” mutters Jimmy behind them.
Ash catches Jasmine’s eye, and they laugh, shuffling out of the way and back to their workbench. They try their best to do the assignment, but they just keep talking and laughing and every time Jasmine looks at Ash she can’t help but smile, and then Ash is smiling back at her, and they don’t make it back to the handsaw at all the whole period.
“And what do you call this?” Mr. Harrelson asks, scrutinizing the pieces of wood glued together to make—well, Jasmine’s not sure what it is.
“A curio display case,” Ash says smoothly.
“You didn’t cut any of the pieces at all,” he observes.
“It’s more of an art statement. The display case itself is meant to evoke feelings of doubt and existentialism,” Jasmine adds.
“All right,” Mr. Harrelson says. “I suppose it’s better that you’re taking this handsaw business slow, Ms. Chau.”
Jasmine chuckles. “Yes, I wouldn’t want to have to go to the nurse again.”
Ash elbows her playfully. “You know I’d go with you if you did.”
“Thanks,” Jasmine says with a smile.
Harrelson nods at them before moving on to the next bench for his critiques, shaking his head and muttering “Existentialism,” to himself.
Ash reaches for Jasmine’s hand, gently stroking the light scar at the base of her thumb. “What did I tell you? Cool scar.”
Jasmine laughs. “That’s probably gonna fade in like, a week.”
Ash hums to herself. “Who knows?”
Jasmine’s hand seems to tingle under Ash’s touch, every time her fingers graze across her skin sending sparks down her spine. “You know, I’m really glad I decided to take this class.”
“Me too.” Ash smiles at her. “It’s such a big school, I don’t know if we would have had the chance to get to know each other.”
Jasmine thinks of all the classes and all the buses and all the maybes in the world, and how this almost didn’t happen, how she almost didn’t ask because she was ready to accept the world as it is.
Jasmine leans in close, takes in the incandescent way Ash is smiling, her whole face radiating with joy, and interlaces their fingers together.
It turns out that she does have the strength for this after all.
* * *
FOLLOWER
by
Will Kostakis
It’s the second last day of the summer holidays and everyone’s had the same idea. The beach is packed. You can’t take two steps without tripping over a sunbather or a phone somebody’s stuffed inside a plastic cup to amplify their streaming playlist.
Not everyone had the exact same idea though. I brought two extra towels and laid them on either side of me. It looks as if I have two friends in the ocean, but really, I just wanted the option to sprawl.
I don’t get enough credit for using my genius only for personal gain and not all-out evil.
I have no intention of giving up my territory, at least, not until I think I recognize the guy tripping over sunbathers and phones in plastic cups. From afar, he looks like moderately famous internet celebrity and bisexual legend @LondonFromBrooklyn. I haven’t decided whether it is him or just wishful thinking, when the guy stops close to me, really close to me. Like, the side of his foot is grazing one of my territory-preserving towels. He scans the area. He’s wearing a pair of pineapple-print boardshorts. He has a tripod over one shoulder.
I reach for my phone, wipe the sunscreen grease off the screen, and pull up @LondonFromBrooklyn’s profile. I compare the guy in the latest pic with the guy in the pineapple-print board shorts in front of me. Same curly hair. Same unnecessarily ripped physique.
It’s him.
“Are you...?” The words are barely audible. I clear my throat and try again with fifty per cent more masc. “Are you looking for a spot?”
He turns away from the ocean and beams down at me. “Yeah.” London’s accent is every bit as amazing as his video posts have led me to believe.
I peel back the towel between us with an urgency the situation dictates. “You can hang here,” I say, committing to the ridiculous-sounding deep voice.
“Your friends won’t mind?”
I’d forgotten about my fake friends in the ocean. “Oh, they’ll be a while. They’re not very good swimmers. They’ve probably been pulled out by a rip or something.”
That makes him laugh. He tells me he won’t be long. He just needs somewhere to take a photo.
He plonks down the tripod and fixes a camera to it. He aims the lens towards the ocean—the tumbling, frothing waves breaking against the shore.
“You’re London, right?” I ask.
“I am.” He doesn’t turn away from his camera. “Have you heard of me?”
“A little.” The understatement of the year.
When I first signed up for WeGlo, I kept it a
secret. The app took over my school, but Mum skimmed the user agreement and was adamant I wouldn’t download it before I turned thirteen. I wasn’t going to miss out though, so I downloaded it...several hundred times.
Every time I wanted to see my friends’ posts. I deleted it the moment I was done. That way, Mum never knew I had it. After I turned thirteen, it took me a solid few weeks to stop accidentally deleting the app out of habit.
At first, I was only on it to know what my friends were up to. Then I started following famous people. That was cool. Then I visited profiles I wasn’t following. I was very careful never to accidentally follow them. I would stay up late scrolling through their feeds.
They were guys on the beach, guys playing video games. I was beginning to wrap my head around this maybe-being-gay thing and I had this app that tethered me to all these guys... Gymnast guys, nerdy guys, other-side-of-the-world guys.
I told myself I wanted to look like them—a lie. I wanted to kiss them. Especially the shirtless ones. I started to risk liking the occasional post, hoping they would see my pics and like me back. Some did. Ego boost. The first time I followed a random shirtless guy from Spain, my heart was beating out of my chest. I was worried what someone might think if they noticed.
Now I don’t care. I’m gay. It’s in my profile bio.
Jason. 18. Sydney AU. Gay.
Stalk my following list, you’ll see lots of random shirtless guys. London’s one of them, but that’s not how he pitches himself:
London/19/BKLYN/Influencer/Travel Lover/
Travelling Lover
He’s an influencer. Groan. A travelling lover. Double groan. He’s one of those people with brands and aesthetics. His is about love. Falling in it. Embracing it. He’s WeGlo-famous for travelling the world, sharing snaps kissing people he meets along the way. He calls them his scattered soul mates. Every week, a different kiss, a different soul mate. He pitches it as romance. Sponsored by Grinners Breath Mints. It’s good for a laugh.
I’ll forgive a lot when a guy’s shirtless, and London’s shirtless a lot.
I’m sure some people think he’s sincere though. He has more followers than seconds I’ve been alive. Well, not really. But he has a ton of followers.
He’s squatted by the camera, adjusting its settings. They’d kill for an opportunity to be this close to him, to see him in action.
He springs up. “Do you mind watching this for me?” he asks.
“Sure.”
He needs to fetch his scattered soul mate, someone he met yesterday and “fell in love” with. They’re probably waiting in a shady spot on the edge of beach.
When he springs up, he doesn’t walk anywhere with purpose. It’s more of a wander. He’s stepping over sunbathers and phones in plastic cups, his head snapping from side to side. He’s searching. I sit up a little. I always thought his profile was a little cynical, but this is next-level. He’s looking for a random person to kiss him on camera, so he can call it love.
He’s talking to some dude whose skin glistens in the sun. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but I mutter the sales pitch under my breath.
“Hey, I don’t know you, but wanna play tonsil tennis for WeGlo? I’ll get $0.01 per 100 likes from a breath mint company and you’ll get to feel famous for a fleeting moment.”
The dude with the glistening skin shakes his head.
“Aw? That doesn’t appeal? What a shock.”
London steps over more sunbathers, more phones in plastic cups. He ends up chatting to this girl. She looks about my age. He must’ve tweaked the sales pitch, because she seems far more into the idea. He leads her over.
“Eve, this is...” London’s brow creases. He’s realised he never asked my name.
“Jason,” I say.
“Hi.”
London directs Eve to kneel in front of the camera. He checks the framing of the shot and sets the timer and then crawls over to join her.
This is really happening right in front of me.
There’s some umming and ahhing about their pose. He trials a hand on her waist and reconsiders. She wraps an arm around his shoulder. He tenses so his muscles bulge.
As the timer nears its end, they lean into each other and kiss. I mean, they really go at it. I hear the smacking of tongues and everything. The camera takes a series of shots in rapid succession and then they immediately pull apart. There’s an awkward laugh to diffuse the tension. He crawls over to the tripod and squints down at the camera’s display to check the quality of the image.
I’m in awe. It’s one thing to believe his profile is fake and cynical, but it’s another seeing how fake and cynical it actually is. I’m impressed. My trick with the towels seems pedestrian compared to the evil-genius levels on display.
I must be staring because Eve gives me a little wave. “Are you two friends?” she asks.
“He’s a follower,” London answers for me.
Eve’s beaming. “Like me. There are heaps of us,” she says. “We’re the population of a small nation.” I can tell by the way she says it...that was the appeal of kissing someone she’s known a whole five seconds. The audience. The likes. “Isn’t his stuff so romantic?” she asks.
“Yeah, that’s why I follow him. The romance.”
I can see London biting back a smirk. After Eve says her goodbyes and retreats to her towel, I ask him if that’s what all his shoots are like.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he says.
I recall the captions, the long stories of how he meets his latest soul mate. “But what about the captions?”
“Oh, they’re made up. The sponsored content deal is for a pic and fifty words.”
“You don’t feel weird about it?”
He laughs. “No one thinks it’s real.”
“Eve thought it was romantic.”
“And then she kissed me and wandered off. Deep down, no one genuinely believes I fall in love with a different person every week. It’s content. It’s clicks. Everyone knows it’s fake.”
I laugh.
“They do, right?” he says.
“I’m not sure.”
He shrugs. “Well, I’m done for the day. Thanks for letting me use your friend’s spot.”
“Oh, they don’t exist. I plonk two towels down for extra room.”
He opens his mouth to speak and says nothing. “While everyone’s tripping over everyone looking for a space to lie down?”
I nod.
He seems impressed. “That’s cold.”
“And I do it for free. No breath mints are sponsoring me.”
He laughs. All right, that’s a few times I’ve made him laugh. It’s enough to make me think he might enjoy hanging out, like I should be bold and suggest he stick around longer.
“So, you’re not even cold for cash?”
“If you feel bad about it, you can take the spot,” I say. “I have a towel you can use. And you said it yourself, you’re done for the day.”
“I have to edit the pic and upload it.”
“That’ll take five seconds. How often is it that you get to hang with a follower?”
I know the answer is, “Pretty often.” But he humours me, says it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I lay the towel back over the spot he used to take the photo and he hops down.
We get to talking, both on our fronts, staring out at the sea. I steal occasional glances. I like to think he steals occasional glances back.
London Alvírez is—in news that is surprising to no one—from Brooklyn. He took a year off between high school and college to see the world. It’s been eighteen months.
“That’s more than a year,” I say with a laugh.
“Mom’s annoyed, but I figure, my posts are still getting likes and I’m still getting paid, why not see more of the world while I can?”
I can�
��t fault the logic. Part of me wants to ask how somebody goes about getting a sponsorship deal for photos and how much money he makes, but before I can, he has a question for me.
“Can you explain something to me?”
“Sure.”
“The guy I went over to, before Eve, I explained my profile and asked if he wanted to be on it and he asked me if I was taking the piss.”
“Sounds about right.”
“I get that he didn’t want to kiss me for WeGlo, but I don’t understand what he was asking.”
His face is all confused lines, and it hits me he probably thought the dude was accusing him of stealing his urine.
I say, “It means to make a joke out of someone, test someone or something’s limits, or to do something without really considering the consequences.”
“Right.”
“Piss is our go-to word for everything.”
“In America, you can be pissed as in angry, and you can piss something away, but I’ve never heard of someone taking it before.”
“We can also be on the piss.”
The confused lines are back. “I can’t even guess.”
“It means to be drunk.”
“Right. That’s confusing. I thought Australians just said mate a lot.”
“That’s a misconception. Very few people can pull it off without it sounding aggressive.”
He pushes up off the towel a little. “Mate,” he tries.
It’s not a bad first effort. “Okay, now I can ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
“I know your profile is super cynical, but do you believe in romance? Proper love?”
“Oh, you’re going straight for the heavy stuff. My question was about vernacular.”
“It’s not my fault you wasted your question.”
“Well, @LondonFromBrooklyn was voted one of the year’s top romantic profiles,” he says.
“You fake intimacy with strangers every week and you promo breath mints or slap a discount code for the sneakers you’re wearing in the caption,” I say. “That isn’t romance.”
“It’s not fake, it’s...brief.”
Out Now Page 7
