Boy meets girl, girl falls in love, blah-blah-blah.
Let me be clear with you from the beginning. This is not that kind of story.
My name is Cait, and I live in the great city of New York. Okay, so maybe I've only lived here for a week and a half...
Holy shit. I remembered her taking photos last night, but I didn't think Val had uploaded any of them to Instagram. Even if she did, I certainly didn't expect to see over two thousand likes on the photo in five freaking hours. There were hundreds of comments, hundreds, and I couldn't even begin to comprehend what that would mean for me.
Val tagged each of us in the photo, and when I clicked through our Instagram profiles I discovered that all of us had managed to gain at least two hundred followers overnight. Groaning at the realization, I clicked back to my own profile only to discover that I was wrong. I had not gained two hundred followers overnight.
I gained two thousand.
I went through Instagram and soon discovered that Andrew had followed me sometime between last night and this morning as well. Val's photos only added to this, especially considering the sheer number she uploaded, and - aside from a slew of horrible selfies and the collage with Andrew and his friends - there was a candid shot of Andrew leaning in to plant a kiss on my cheek. His friends had joined us bearing gifts of fresh margaritas and chips and guac, and we'd spent the whole night laughing and talking. There were so many of us squeezed into a tiny table that Andrew had moved next to me, and - while we didn't talk to each other for the rest of the night - there was no denying the tension between us.
And it wasn't the bad kind of tension.
Val kept taking candid photos of everyone at the table, and at some point she told me to smile for the camera. Little did I know, Andrew had winked at her - giving her a devilish grin - and leaned in to peck me on the cheek. I flushed bright red, glaring at him while failing to restrain my smile, and Val had apparently captured the moment and shared it for the internet to see.
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And see it they did. More than three thousand people had liked the photo, and the comments were far less friendly than the ones on the collage. Half of the people just wanted to know who I was, if I was Andrew's new girlfriend or a co-star of his upcoming film, while the rest took it upon themselves to critique every aspect of my appearance. I was called an attention whore, a slut, a bitch...and those were the nicer ones. Every three comments was another girl saying how jealous she was of me, while a few added comments like, "She's not even that pretty."
I stared at the screen of my phone in horror, scrolling through comments that I knew I shouldn't read or take personally, but somehow I couldn't look away. It was like my eyes were glued to the screen as I raked myself over the coals that people who didn't even know me decided to light under my feet.
It was absolutely horrific. How could so many people - without rhyme or reason - take it upon themselves to comment on my appearance in a photo with Andrew? Some were mad, legitimately angry, that he was pictured with me! It didn't make any sense.
The notifications continued to roll in, and I read every single one of the comments on Val's photos. Many of the people who followed me decided to go through old photos of me as well, and they were asking questions about Andrew, about who I was, about where I got my clothes. Some of them were judging my appearance and my body in my old photos, calling me fat and ugly, saying that Andrew "deserves better."
