Wish You Were Her(19)

“This is too serious,” Simon said, laughing. “Right! Come on, Skye, I need your expertise. What else do you know about her?”

“She has four-and-a-half million Instagram followers, but she—”

Jonah spat out the water he had just sipped and started to gasp for air. When he regained his composure, he stared at the two of them in horror. “That’s, like, almost all of Scotland!”

“Can I finish?” snapped Skye. “God! Anyway, yes, four-and-a-half million, but she hardly posts and when she does it’s always weird, arty stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Lots of bookish content, to be honest.”

“Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing,” Simon said, affronted.

Jonah blinked. “Who does she read?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Skye said, fishing out her phone and opening the app in question. She didn’t need to type Allegra’s full username, as it came up as her most recent search. “Like … that.”

Jonah snatched the phone before Simon could. It was a black and white picture of Allegra sitting on what looked like a hotel room bed in an oversized baseball shirt. It had been posted over a month before, and she was sitting with a stack of books and a plate of fries. The caption said, “Feminists and French fries.”

The pile contained Toni Morrison, Curtis Sittenfeld, Nora Ephron and Tamora Pierce.

Jonah’s gaze was locked onto the picture and his thumb gently brushed her face on the screen.

“Don’t like it!” shrieked Skye, snatching back her phone before Jonah could accidentally double-tap the photo. “God, Jonah, don’t you know how to lurk?”

“Jonah was never an Instagram guy, even when he was on social media,” Simon informed her. “And I doubt Allegra notices every account who likes her pictures, not with that many people watching her every move.”

While the two of them huddled together to cyberstalk Allegra, Jonah slipped away. He googled Paisley Shine as he left the arcade, scowling down at a picture of the pretentious-looking frontman.

“Dick,” he said gruffly, taking a sudden dislike to a man he didn’t know.

He went home. It had been a massive change in routine, watching Allegra glide into their festival meetings with her water and her smile and her almost ethereal aura.

He entered the stairwell that led up to his home. It was the flat above Vivi’s Cupcakes and his mother, the famous Vivi herself, usually left the front door unlocked.

“Home,” Jonah called to her as he entered. “Do you need me to grab you anything from town before I take my shoes off?”

“Nope,” his mother’s airy voice called from the living room. “Take them off and have a sit.”

He joined her on their large, squishy sofa. “What’re we watching?”

“A terrible reality dating show that makes any faith I had in the existence of true love shrivel up and die.”

“Well, that’s why I read novels.”

He could feel his mother watching him. “Jonah?”

“Yes?” he replied, his eyes fixed to the television screen but taking in none of the content. He knew what that anticipatory note in her voice meant.

“Did you meet her? What’s she like? Oh, God, I went on a YouTube binge and saw every interview she’s ever done. She’s gorgeous. So humble and sweet. But just so stunning, I can’t get over it.”

“Yeah, well.” Jonah felt exposed around his mother and less able to mask. “Hair and makeup, I guess.”

“Nope! I watched her do one of those ‘get ready with me’ videos for Vogue and she is beautiful without makeup. I’m so excited to meet her, I hope she comes into the shop. So, what was she like?”

“She was fine,” said Jonah. “She was … I don’t know.”

He wanted to tell his mother that she was normal. Just a girl from out of town who was enjoying Lake Pristine and the book festival for a summer. He wanted to tell her that she was dull or mousy or not even that pretty in person.

His ego wanted to say she was rude and unpleasant.

But he couldn’t say any of those things because they weren’t true.

“I didn’t see much of her,” was all he managed to get out.

His mother muted the television and patted the palm of his hand, as the two of them sat side by side. “Ah, Jonah. I hope you’re not letting her make you nervous. Because when you get nervous, you get mean.”

“I wasn’t mean,” Jonah said, feeling defensiveness rising up inside of him. “If anything, she was mean.”

“Oh, really?” she asked, delighted and intrigued.

“Well. No, she wasn’t. Skye was mean and Simon was stupid and Allegra walked out.”

“I like her already.”



* * *



“I’m just curious!”

“Trust me,” Allegra told Kerrie as she started making the three of them soda floats in her father’s tiny kitchen, “you don’t want to see them. It’s like staring into Pandora’s box.”

“I get, like, one direct message a day,” Kerrie insisted. “I have 427 followers. I want to see what it looks like if you have millions.”

Grace laughed a little hesitantly and Allegra forced herself to join in. “No, honestly, it’s a mess. I can’t go in there anymore.”