Finding love as an asexual teenager is hard enough. Being an anonymous internet celebrity? Even harder, but it's fun as long as it stays anonymous. Eve didn't expect her Twitter account to blow up, and now that 'DukeCockroach' has millions of follow...
So my 'dates' with Gilbert weren't very... spectacular. They weren't romantic. They certainly weren't candle-lit dinners. But neither of us expected them to be, and that was fine. We were perfectly content to simply be spending time together. That's all we needed. Gilbert smoked weed while I fucked around on Twitter. It was perfect.
"Listen to this," I said, holding my phone up to read. "Somebody said 'you're just pretending you made this meme because you want to be relevant'."
"Which meme?"
"The one with the sausage."
He snorted. "Oh, that one. As if you need to pretend you made that, of all memes. Couldn't they have picked a better one?"
"Excuse you? All my memes are pure gold."
"Okay, sure," he chuckled. "Are you gonna reply?"
I shrugged. "Depends. Do I wanna give them attention and watch them face the wrath of my thirty million followers? Or do I just ignore them to prove that I don't need memes and giving into drama to stay relevant?"
"Well... the latter is probably the best option, but that first one sounds like a lot more fun."
"The first one it is," I said, typing out a reply.
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Gilbert leaned over to glance at my screen and hummed approvingly when he saw my followers retweeting and replying to my Tweet. I didn't even have to defend my own honor these days. All I needed to do was make a joke out of it and everyone would start backing me up by throwing facts around and digging up screenshots from the seventeenth century. It was great.
"Have you ever had like a really big account reply to you?"
"Yeah, I've interacted with YouTubers and stuff."
"Like who?"
I opened my DMs and showed him the conversations I'd had and he gasped when I clicked on the name of a gamer who'd once asked me if I wanted to make a video with him. "Oh my God, why didn't you do it?!"
"Um. Because I'm anonymous, remember?"
"Yeah, but you could have done it like... I don't know, via Skype or something. With one of those voice changers."
"Okay, first of all, fuck Skype."
"What's wrong with Skype?"
I proceeded to tell him exactly what was wrong with Skype and eventually, we came to the conclusion that I could have done the collaboration with the YouTuber if I had used an app like Skype. Fair enough. But then Gilbert said, "Maybe you can message him about it once you've gone public."
"Yeah... I could..."
"You're still gonna do it, right?"
I shifted around on his couch as I tried to think of what to reply and then just laid my head on the back to sigh up at the ceiling. "I'm not sure. I want to, but it might not be such a good idea."
