It's Really Happening

Life, amazingly, went on. Abby and Josh made up and she became more resolute on getting plans made (with his input on important things, of course.) She, Tiffany, and I drove up to wine country for the weekend to scope out a site for the ceremony. In all actuality it was perfect: the weather would be beautiful in October, and flowers would still be everywhere.

We spent the rest of the weekend being swank and drinking a ton of wine. To be fair, it doesn’t take a lot to get Tiffany and Abby drunk and I was allergic to red wine, so we weren’t too terrible. But a date was also set and a definite guest list was begun.

Tiffany… Well, actually I wasn’t quite sure what Couch was up to. Once every two weeks or do, she’d just disappear for a few days and then show up again. I never asked where she went, but my best guess was running away to LA to exhaust Rian.

Whatever made them happy.

As for me, I was busy. as. hell. My classes started actually assigning work that took time—mainly reading—and I had to pick up more hours at the restaurant due to cutbacks, not to mention I was working with two different bands in the studio. Most of the time, I simply went to sleep when I got home, sometimes not even bothering to change before passing out on the bed.

And then midterms came around, and I completely lost my mind. Studying instead of eating will do that to you, apparently. But more than drive me insane, I think it was worse on Tiffany and Abby, because they had to deal with my weirdness.

I had been watching the words crawling across the page, climbing over other words and generally fucking with the natural order, for about twenty minutes before Tiffany snatched the book out of my hand. “Go get your computer and cruise the internet!” she ordered, pointing.

“But my test is tomorrow!” I whined, reaching for the book. She held it over her head, and it didn’t even occur to me to stand up and grab it back. It’s not like Couch was Shaquille O’Neal.

“You need a break!” Abby declared, bringing me my laptop. “And stop muttering about juice.”

“I love juice!”

“Eris!” they yelled simultaneously.

I slumped back in the papa san chair and flipped open my computer. “You guys suck.” But letting my brain relax was a good thing, especially since I hadn’t checked my email in three days and one of my friends thought I’d died. I also caught up on webcomics and people I followed on YouTube; in true addict fashion, Twitter was the only thing I’d kept up on in my descent into lunacy.

When I ran out of things to do, I went onto Fuelled By Gossip on LiveJournal. Don’t ask me why; most of the posts were ridiculous and inane. But some of the speculation about Zack and his love life made me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe.

There was every idea possible (if not plausible) and nobody had any proof. He was single! No, he was dating Paris Hilton’s friend! No, he was dating a supermodel! No, he was gay for Alex!

“Right band, wrong instrument,” Abby laughed when I read it aloud.

From there I filtered through some posts about the rest of the band, but mostly they ran along the lines of “oh em gee Jack is so hotttt!” and “I totallyyyyy hooked up with Alex ;)”. So I switched to gossip about Every Avenue; some of their hijinks that they didn’t tell us sometimes ended up there.

After a few minutes, something caught my eye and made me pause. A thread entitled “Is Josh married?!” I clicked it and began reading. The first post was from a girl who actually had a picture of Josh mid-set, with a very obvious ring on a certain finger.

I’d almost died laughing when Abby told me Josh bought himself an engagement ring too. His exact words were “You’ve got a shiny! I want a shiny too!” That aside, his reason was genuinely a good one: he thought he should start telling girls to back off since he was 100% completely and officially off the market.

He’d obviously gotten shit from the guys. I think his retort that got them to shut up was “At least I have a girlfriend!”

There were more girls who agreed, that they’d asked Josh about it, and he’d said yes, I’m getting married. There were a lot of congratulations, some ‘I bet she’s a bitch’es, even more questions as to where he’s been hiding this chick for so long, and one post nearing the end that caused a turning point in the discussion.

“Hey, Abby?” I called, staring hard at the screen.

“Yeah?” she called back from the kitchen, where she was making macaroni & cheese.

“Did you go on Fuelled By Gossip and tell a forum that you’re marrying Josh?”

Tiffany turned away from the TV and frowned at me. After a few seconds, Abby appeared in the doorway. “Uh. No. Why?” I got up, beckoning them over to the couch, where we all sat down. The poster rambled on about how they’ve had to keep it a big secret to them both safe but now it’s okay! because they’re so in love and so happy!

I eyed Abby from the corner of my vision, trying to figure something out from her blank expression. “Bitch, please!” she exclaimed, reaching for the keyboard.

I held the computer out of her reach. “You do not want to reply to this,” I warned seriously. “Trust me. It won’t be pretty.” I might’ve gotten into a spat once over the internet with a chick who’d been claiming to have banged Zack after a show. I knew she was a fucking liar because 1. I trust Zack, and 2. I had been at the show she was talking about.

Tiffany took the computer and set it on her lap. “I wanna read more!” she decided. “Who is this who-er?” Dexter had followed them over when they’d rushed over, and was getting more excited as he did. He stood at attention at our feet, growling and almost shaking with agitation.

We continued reading the thread, all the jealous comments and mild disbelief. Curious, we clicked on the impostor’s profile: friends-only with a picture of her and Josh.

“Oh fuck no, she did not!” Tiffany said at the screen. Dex barked in agreement.

“Are you kidding me?” I snapped incredulously, receiving another chorus of barks in response.

“Yes, Dexter, good boy,” Abby said, scratching his head. “You bark at that crazy bitch!”

“That’s such a fucking fan picture! Everyone has one of those pictures! I have one of those pictures!”

Abby laughed, which was good because she looked like she wanted to reach into the internet and strangle everyone. “So do I! Waaaay too many of them.”

We lapsed into silence, Dexter still growling quietly, half reading the rest of the replies and half stuck wondering what to do next. When we reached the bottom of the page, I took my laptop back and typed an anonymous comment.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Bitches be crazy.

“You’re really good at making inflammatory comments, huh?” Abby laughed as I posted it. I beamed widely and nodded. Take that, you lying ho!

Abby continued perusing the internet without us while I decided to put on White Collar. I was behind an episode or two, and trickery and wiliness wrapped in a coating of Neal Caffery would make me relax a bit.

“Oh my god, are you fucking serious?” she groaned halfway into the episode.

“Yeah, Neal deserves better than Kate,” I replied, not taking my eyes off the screen. Dexter, leaning his head on my leg, turned over and whined, demanding I rub his belly.

Tiffany laughed; maybe she’d been paying attention, but I hadn’t. “No, not that,” Abby retorted. “The bitch did it again.” I swung my head around, frowning. “Willow just sent me an email with a link to ap dot net.”

“AbsolutePunk doesn’t do gossip,” Couch said, confused.

“No, but they did a little article about Josh getting engaged, and she fucking did the same thing.”

“Did His Tallness have anything to say about it?” I asked, raising an eyebrow sceptically.

“When asked to comment,” Tiffany read aloud, “Josh said, ‘I’m only good at making decisions about booze, but I've never been happier!’”

We all laughed. “Oh, it’s true,” Abby sighed, laughing again. After that, it was decided that we would leave the internet drama for the moment—until Abby could talk to Josh in person—and return, instead, to mind-numbing television.

“Oh, Matt Bomer,” Abby said with dreamy wistfulness near the end of another episode. “Why are you so amazing?”

“You know he’s gay, right?” I asked, smiling.

She shushed me loudly, hold her finger to her lips. “Maybe in real life but he’s not right now!”

“Real life is overrated,” Tiffany laughed.

“I don’t think any of us would know real life if it danced around the apartment in a loincloth.”

“Hot!”

“No Tarzaning in my apartment, Tiffany. This is a pants-required zone.”

“I hate pants!” she yelled, outraged. “Down with pants!”

Despite all our discussion of what we’d have to done to the girl who was claiming to be Josh’s fiancée—legally fraud, I will point out—and my distraction by that pesky thing called school, we didn’t have to wait long to see what Josh thought. With Every Avenue on tour, he came to us within a few days.

The day of the show—sadly Abby only got a few hours with Josh before he had to go to the next venue—she and Couch discussed what to say, how to explain it, to Josh while they got ready. I, knowing that things never turned out how you planned them, stayed out of it and sat on my bed with my laptop and Dexter.

Since looking at the picture of the fraud and Josh (and re-studying it several times) and some pictures of Abby and Josh that she had, I got a strange curiosity. I logged onto MySpace, barely remembering my password, and went to Josh’s pictures on his page.

Most of them were either tagged by fans or ones of him being weird. There were a lot of those. But I sifted through them all to find the thing I was looking for: Josh didn’t have any pictures of Abby with captions like “my girlfriend” or even “I love this girl”; in fact, he barely had any pictures of her at all.

There were two. In the first, they both had their hair in front of their faces with sunglasses over it, completely unrecognisable. Classic Cousin It, and classic weird Abby and Josh. The second was obviously a semi-candid: Abby was laughing, eyes shut and looking delighted, and Josh had a huge goofy grin aimed at the camera. Underneath, the only caption was a smiley face.

“What’re you smiling about?” Tiffany asked, drawing my attention away from the screen. She’d finished getting dressed and Abby was straightening her hair. I shrugged and shut the lid of my computer. “Come get hot with us!”

“Why? We’re not seeing my boytoy.”

“We’re not seeing her boytoy either,” Abby said, sort of confused.

“Well, no,” I admitted, scooting to the edge of the bed and hopping off to look for my shoes, “But it’s her prerogative to sell it like a hooker.”

“Hey!” Tiffany protested, aiming a kick at my shin. I jumped, but ending up falling face-first into the bed. “At least I’m a classy hooker. You need to hooker it up more often.”

I rolled over onto my back and watched them upside down. “I ‘hooker it up,’ as you say, more often than you think I do.”

“A v-neck and a push-up bra don’t count, Eris.”

“...Dammit.”

We drove to the venue a few hours before doors and waited around for a while, not really standing in line. The guys were late, which wasn’t terribly unusual. But we had planned to show up early and get Taco Bell with them, and none of them would miss that.

When the van pulled up to the curb, the door was flung open without the engine turning off. That got the attention of most of the people around, especially the kids sitting in line. Josh hopped out, grinning widely, and practically tackled Abby with a hug and a kiss before pulling her back towards the van.

She laughed. “Where are you kidnapping me to?!”

“Motherfuckin’ Taco Bell!” Dave yelled from the back seat. Well, at least they weren’t letting him drive.

“Why don’t you just park?” I asked. “There’s a KFC/Taco Bell like a block away.”

Apparently that was close enough for their lazy asses to walk. With Couch on my back, I compared new tattoos with Jimmie as we headed over. Somehow I’d gotten two new ones in the time I hadn’t seen him.

“Soooo, I guess you’re more famous than you thought,” Abby announced, mostly to Josh but loud enough that all of us in front of them.

“Huh?” Josh asked, arm wrapped around her shoulder.

“Someone’s impersonating me on LJ!”

The rest of the guys laughed, but Josh had a thinky face on for a few seconds before grinning. “…Sure it wasn’t you?”