turned her into one of the earliest viral moments of the emerging YouTube era. After Miles Crowe won the show, his appearance on Live with Laura led to one of the most famous memes on the internet.”
I had no doubt that when this aired, she’d be voicing over a clip of me at my snottiest and most red-faced in the old footage followed by flashing the Meme That Would Not Die.
“Gabrielle and Miles have since reunited, and by the looks of things, she’s very much his thing now.”
It was a hammer to my gut. I shot a panicked look at Miles. Why wasn’t he saying anything? But he wasn’t even looking at me, just watching Kyla with his same pleasant smile.
She turned to face us. “So how does it feel to be sitting here with your teenage crush?” Her voice was so friendly, but I had no words. They had drained out of me along with the blood that was now pooling in my stomach. Definitely none of it was staying in my brain, oxygenating, helping me figure out what to do.
Miles spoke up. “Ellie and I never met back then, so it’s been great getting to know her now.”
Getting to know her. Like we didn’t spend every spare moment together. Like he wasn’t the first person I saw when I got up in the morning and the last person I saw before one of us went home for the night. Like we hadn’t talked music for hours, sung together, traded lyrics and more kisses than I could count.
Why wasn’t he cutting off this line of questioning?
“Ellie has been essential to getting the Turnaround open,” he added. “She found us this property and connected us with so many skilled contractors and local businesses. She’s a major asset.”
A major asset.
All I felt like was a major ass.
Kyla turned back to the camera. “Let me do this outro.” She walked over so the lit neon sign spelling out the club’s name on the stage wall were over her shoulder. She’d made it clear this was going to be a short segment, and apparently she’d decided she had everything she needed. “Miles Crowe and his partner Jordan Goodman took the club name from a jazz term, but it’s a metaphor too. A place for artists to come and reinvent themselves. Hopefully a place that will give birth to the next New Orleans great. It’s sold out for the weekend with a slate of stars to welcome it to The Big Easy, but you can check their schedule for future dates.”
It only registered at the very edge of my consciousness. The loud roar of blood in my ears drowned almost everything out.
“Ellie,” Miles said, and I realized it probably wasn’t the first time he’d tried to get my attention.
I lurched from the booth without looking at him, grabbed my purse, and walked straight out the back exit to my car. Miles tapped on the window as I was buckling in.
“Ellie, talk to me.” His voice sounded like it was underwater through the noise-dampening features in the car.
I pushed the ignition instead, and the car purred to life.
“Ellie, come on.” He was louder now, more insistent, so I lowered the window halfway.
“How could you do that, Miles?”
“Do what?”
“Drag all of that up for her? Let her sit there and talk about it? She’s going to run that tomorrow, and everyone in my office, every client I work with right now, and probably every client for the foreseeable future, is going to know that’s me in that meme. It took me almost six years to live that joke down, and now people are going to throw that at me everywhere I go. ‘Don’t have a meltdown, Ellie.’ ‘Thanks for showing me this property, but it’s so not my thing,’ wink-wink. They’ll think they’re being funny, but every time it happens, they’ll be forcing me to live for a few seconds as the worst version of myself.”
“I know it sucked, but it won’t be as bad as you think. It’ll be annoying for a few days, but people will forget again. Play it off, roll your eyes, say, ‘So glad I grew up,’ and people will let it go.”
“Let it go,” I repeated, my voice flat.
“Yeah. You kind of have to.”
“What about the fact that everyone is going to think that I’m working with you because I was madly in love with you back then? They’re not going to take me seriously as a professional.”