21 Questions | Matt Sturniolo

03.

Matt had just been chilling in his room when he heard his phone. His brothers – triplets actually – and he were spending the evening alone on their own as they had spent the whole day together filming for their YouTube channel. It had only been two years and a half since they started making content but they were already quite popular on social media. As Matt thought it was either Chris or Nick asking him to drive them somewhere – Matt was the only one among them with a driver's licence, he took his phone, mentally preparing himself to get dressed and leave the comfort of his bed.

With an obvious surprise on his face, Matt unlocked his phone and saw that it was actually an unknown number that had texted him.

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Heyy stranger, wanna play 21 questions? :)

Matt was confused because he wasn't used to receiving actual texts from random people, except for an occasional wrong number which he would never respond to. As he thought about how he didn't have anything to do at the moment, why not play.

And so, as Matt replied to the stranger, he learnt that the girl on the other side of a screen was almost the female version of his brother Nick: she loved autumn and had a nose ring – ok it's not much but this was enough to compare the two. The conversation was nicely flowing between the two teenagers until Matt ended up being called by his youngest brother as Chris was in need of McDonald's at ten o'clock. Therefore, he had to quickly find a way to leave the girl he was talking to on his phone and took the opportunity of discovering that she was a cat person to funnily exit the discussion, hoping not to appear rude to her – well he was a bit, mystery girl and her best friend had judged him a lot.

~~~

    During the next couple of days, Matt actually forgot about the girl who had texted him on a random evening. To be fair, his brothers and he had been busy filming – they had come back from tour last month and settled back into their usual routine. This was the reason why Matt hadn't responded to the girl. Of course, he wasn't feeling guilty as they weren't even friends – yet – but when he saw on the Messages application that he had unread texts from her, Matt remembered that he actually had a good time talking to the mysterious girl; and the fact that his day was sort of over – over in the sense that Chris already ate and thus wouldn't be interrupting Matt again – pushed the middle triplet to get back to know the cat person who he had suddenly abandoned. Now opening their conversation, Matt finally read the last messages from a few days ago.

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I'm not apologising tbh
Bc i love my cat with my whole heart
He's the best
I hope you were joking bc our convo was fun
Anyways, bye then-

Hi stranger, our convo from yesterday was really nice so I hope you might still wanna play even tho  I'm a cat person and you're a dog person but yk what they say: opposites attract :)

Matt had not expected her to re-engage the conversation the day following their first one but he hoped that it was not too late to come back to her.

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Good evening stranger, ig I'm a bit late to the party
Been a few busy days lately but if you're still down it could be fun to continue our game
(dw ab the cat thing, it was maybe too much from me)

While Matt was waiting for the girl to reply – how long it would take, he had no idea as she could be living on the other side of the world and currently sleeping, he tried to make an effort of thinking about a couple of questions he could ask. Matt wanted to keep things engaging, even though they were just getting to know each other. In any case, it was either Saturday or Sunday for his chatmate so he would probably get an answer before the week-end was over.