“You don’t know,” Dylan said, understanding dawning on his face. “Oh, dang, Gab. You didn’t tell him?”
“Tell me what?” Now Miles sounded frustrated.
“Go away, Dylan.” I added a glare for good measure.
“Go get something from the kitchen,” Miss Mary ordered him, trying to help.
“Like what?”
“Find something,” she said between gritted teeth. “Anything.”
“What’s going on here?” Miles asked.
“Come with me, my man,” Dylan said, beckoning to Miles. Miss Mary tried to grab Dylan’s shirt and snatch him back, but he danced out of reach.
“It’s okay,” I said, resigned, and she hesitated, looking toward me. “Let him go.”
“You coming?” Dylan called to Miles, heading away from the kitchen toward the hall leading to the restrooms instead.
Miles shot me a look that asked if he should.
“Go ahead.” I felt a slight nausea, but what Dylan was about to show Miles had always been inevitable.
Miles climbed out of the booth and followed Dylan around the corner. The second they disappeared from sight, I headed for the front door.
“You good?” Miss Mary called after me.
I waved behind me, not wanting her to see the humiliated tears waiting to fall. “Add it to my tab, Miss Mary. I’ll drop a tip by for Kendra before she cashes out.”
I sped outside and around to the back stairs, took them two at a time to my apartment, shoved my face in a sofa pillow, and screamed.
Freaking Dylan.
My brother was not a mean guy. But it hadn’t been easy coming up a grade behind me in school as the brother of one of the most popular memes in internet history. He’d been annoyed with my Miles Crowe obsession through the whole Starstruck season, bemused when I lived in a state of hysteria for the week before his hometown show, and flatly irritated when I’d had a week of being viral for my meltdown. There had been no playbook for what to do when the average person suddenly became famous overnight for doing something that didn’t deserve fame.
It had been disruptive, especially for Dylan. The whole situation had turned him sour for a few years. Publicly, he defended me. Privately, he resented me for having made such an idiot of myself.
I got it. I did.
But there was no excuse for him to drag Miles down that hallway. I knew exactly what he’d brought him to see: Miss Mary had lined it with pictures of her family working in the café over the years, and she had a picture of me manning the hostess stand. I was fifteen, still in my frizzy hair/glasses/braces/acne phase.
I imagined Dylan pointing to the girl in that picture and saying, “That’s Elle,” and Miles’s face as recognition sunk in.
I rolled onto my back and clutched the pillow to my chest, staring at the ceiling. The tears that had threatened downstairs hadn’t fallen, but a dark and ugly feeling sat in my chest. Shame, maybe. I’d worked so hard to outgrow those awkward years, but it was impossible to put it behind me when that meme wouldn’t die.
I’d even deactivated my Facebook account a couple of years ago because I was so sick of seeing the meme used in comment threads. Now I mostly used social media for business reasons and kept a locked-down Instagram for my friends.
It still wasn’t enough to keep that meme from haunting me, but it had quieted the ghost in the last few years.
What would Miles think when he made the connection? He owed me the biggest apology in the world, but I hadn’t wanted it if it meant him realizing it was me he owed it to.
Chapter Nine
I surfaced from sleep to a sound it took me a moment to place.
My doorbell? No one had rung it in the two years I’d been living here.
I blinked in the morning sunlight a few times and waited. A few seconds later, I heard it again, muffled but loud enough to wake me up.
“Go away.” But whoever it was wouldn’t be able to hear me. I struggled upright and groped along my nightstand until I found my glasses and checked my phone. It was after nine, but it wasn’t like I had to show up at the office if I didn’t want to.
I’d washed away the embarrassment of yesterday with a cool shower, thrown my wet hair into the bun half-slipping down my head now, and fallen asleep watching The Bachelor.
The doorbell rang again.
“Coming!” I shouted, mostly because I was annoyed. It wasn’t