Anonymous

I’ve only been kissed one time in my life, and that was by Rotten Roger. Rotten Roger got his name because, no matter what he tried, his breath always smelled like a skunk crawled into his throat and died.

Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy kissing Rotten Roger much.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have even done it. But I was fifteen, never been kissed, and we were playing Spin the Bottle at my friend’s house after a bonfire. Everyone else was playing along, and I didn’t want to be the one to ruin all the fun. Plus, it didn’t hurt that my friend whispered to me that she’d given me twenty bucks if I did it.

Thankfully, the kiss had been short and sweet (to use a popular expression; the kiss was NOT sweet at all), no open-mouths or tongues involved. It was still pretty awful, though. I was pretty sure that the smell of his breath singed my nose hairs.

Yet, somehow, I could fake that I had experience with guys. At least, I could fake it well enough to write six One Direction stories that were based entirely around different love stories. Even though I didn’t have the slightest idea of how real romance worked, I just pretended I did, and I must have hit home close enough that people could relate and enjoyed reading what I wrote.

At dinner, Maria was mopey, just pushing around the corn on her plate without comment.

“You okay?” I questioned, nodding in her direction, as I popped a piece of chicken into my mouth.

“Fine,” she muttered indignantly. She opened her mouth and let out a prolonged, depressed sigh.

“Yeah, you’re about as fine as someone who’s just found out they have the plague,” I expressed.

Daddy snickered, but when Maria shot him an irritated look, he coughed a couple of times to cover it up. “Sorry. Piece of corn caught in my throat,” he explained.

She rolled her eyes, clearly not buying it. “I don’t even know why you care. You guys don’t typically pay attention to me, anyway.”

It took all the willpower I had to keep from laughing in her face. “We don’t pay attention to you?” I gasped. “Are you kidding?”

“Now, girls,” Mum tried to intervene, but I ignored her.

“You’re the one who holes herself up in the basement, playing strangers on the Xbox, only emerging to go to sleep or eat. We try to find stuff out about your life, but you just shut us down.”

Mum slapped a hand on the table, her accent thicker than I’d ever heard it as she shouted, “That’s enough. No fighting at my dinner table.”

Maria shoved away from the scene, her chair making an unpleasant scraping sound against the tile, before storming back down into her girl-cave.

Mum brought her eyes back to her food, eating silently, as if nothing had ever happened. Daddy followed suit, not even shooting me an angry glare for upsetting my mother.

But I could still feel the angry adrenaline racing through my veins. I kept replaying the scene in my head, getting irritated at Maria for her warped sense of reality and at myself for losing my cool.

Once I finished my food, I disappeared into my room, settling down in my chair and dragging my computer up onto my lap.

I let out a sigh of relief when I saw that I had comments waiting for me, two on the new Louis story that was quickly starting to become my favorite story, partially because of all the positive feedback that it was getting.

I was just about to click on the link when my eyes drifted down to the bottom of the list of notifications. TakeMeHome commented on your profile.

I grinned as I pressed on the VIEW button, and it only got wider as I read the words she’d written back.

Without much thought, I clicked on the link to her profile and wrote back a speedy response:

Don’t worry, love, I’ll definitely be updating soon. Probably later today, even. :D God, you’re such a sweetheart. I love you already.

So what’s going on? You’re twenty? Do you go to college, do you work, or…? Not to sound like a creep, obviously. Hahahahaha.

After posting the comment, I went back to answer the total of five comments that had been scattered among the other stories that I’d updated within the past twenty-four hours.

Once I finished those, I clicked on the message I’d gotten from Some-Are-The-Beat.

OH MY GOD. YOUR NEWEST CHAPTER FOR THE WORDS TO SAY WAS PERFECT. Can I just say that Emma, like, IS me? It’s so weird. But it’s perfect.

I let out a small, breathy laugh as I replied to her, thanking her for her positive feedback and saying how important it was to me that she could relate to the character. Especially since I based certain parts of her personality off Some-Are-The-Beat, simply because I loved her so much.

It was strange, and a lot of people didn’t get it, but a lot of the people that I talked to on the site genuinely were my friends. Elena thought I was crazy when I said stuff like that, and she claimed that everyone I talked to was probably a fifty-year-old man crouched behind the computer in his mother’s basement, trying to entice me to give him information on my exact whereabouts.

But that just wasn’t how it was in the real world. If someone said that they were someone, from my experience on the writing website, that was who they were. They had multiple pictures and communicated like the individual. They wrote, too, and that writing often very much reflected the age they claimed to be. It just wasn’t the case that people lied about who they were on my writing site.

Not that Elena’s mind changed when I communicated these facts to her. “Just wait,” she claimed. “You’re going to get close to someone on the internet, and you’re going to let it slip where you live, and they’re going to show up and knock on your door. And it won’t be an adorable nineteen-year-old girl with shiny dark hair and green eyes, like all her pictures showed. It’s going to be some obese, balding guy with a gummy smile. And then he’ll kidnap you, and I’ll have to start a foundation about internet safety in your honor.”

I shook my head at the memory and snickered. Elena always had been dramatic, the one that tended to look at the dark side of things instead of the light. While I always searched for the goodness in people, even if it was really hidden, she just pinpointed the bad and let it mar her judgment.

After refreshing the page a few times, getting no new notifications, I closed out of the window and opened the word-processing website, bringing forth the document for the Louis story, prepared to write like the wind. I was determined to update every single on of my stories that night, no matter what.

I re-read the previous chapter and sat back for a second, clearing my head to allow some ideas to pop up.

Once they did, I smiled and started to write as quickly as I could, the words fighting and tripping over one another to translate from my thoughts into black and white type in front of my eyes.

If my writing kept up like it started, then I would definitely be able to update all the stories that night, no problem. And maybe I’d have time for an episode of Degrassi before bed.