My Parents Adopted My Crush
You ever watch one of those videos on YouTube where it starts off happy go lucky and then turns into a dark screamer video that makes you spill your pop and jump out of your chair?
That's what this felt like, only I couldn't just click the x and exit the video.
Let me start from the beginning, perhaps the first day I clicked onto YouTube. I was 12 years old and so was she. Miranda posted videos of herself singing original songs in her well lit bedroom, with a guitar that was almost too big for her, and I fell in love. I watched every single one of her videos, from the moment she first posted to the day she hit 1 million subscribers. I left comments on all her videos, under my YouTube username "Shapeshifter14" .
I wasn't really a shapeshifter, and 14 was my lucky number. I day dreamed about explaining that to Miranda when we met. In my head, we met at parties, on the street, or at a YouTube fan event. She would recognize me from my profile picture, and we would fall in love and everything would be perfect.
Real life didn't work that way, of course, and I was never one of those creepy kids who pretended she was my girlfriend or anything.
One day, when I was 17, I noticed she hadn't posted a video for over 2 weeks. That wasn't like her. She normally posted 3 times a week, like clockwork. When I scanned the internet and her other fan pages, I was stunned to see that her parents had died in a car crash, and Miranda had gone to live with her aunt. There wasn’t a lot of news of where she was, or how she was doing, and I think the lack of news made it worse. I spent every waking moment thinking about her. I imagined what I would say to her if I saw her, or what I would write if I got her email address.
I thought that I had it all planned out, until the day I saw her walking down the hallway of my school.
Instead of saying one of the ten thousand things I had thought about, I slammed my locker door in shock, right onto my fingers. I didn’t even have time to call myself an idiot, because it hurt so much that I instantly cried.
Miranda was walking by me at the time, and she turned her head to me in shock.
“Are you alright?” she asked, as any decent human being would.
“I am shapeshifter,” was what came out of my idiot brain. She stared at me for a moment.
“You’re a shapeshifter?” she asked and took a tiny step back.
“No, no,” I brought my probably crushed beyond repair fingers to my side. “I’m Shapeshifter14! You’re Miranda! You’re here. What are you doing here? Oh my God, I think my fingers are going to fall off.”
She probably should have ran away, but instead, she smiled.
“Oh,” she said. “You comment on my videos.”
“YES!” I almost melted into the floor in a puddle of goo. She knew who I was! “YES! And you vanished and…”
“Yeah…” she looked away. “A few things happened in my life.”
“I’m so sorry!” I said. “I read all about it. I read that you went to live with your aunt, but I didn’t know where….I…”
“It’s OK,” I didn’t know whether she was truly OK, or just putting on a mask but it didn’t matter. “I probably won’t be here long. But school is important, so…”
“Why won’t you be here long?” I asked.
“I…” She paused. “I don’t know. My aunt is...someone who is busy a lot. Kids aren’t really her thing. She never wanted them.”
“But I bet you’re awesome to live with!” I blurted out. Oh my God, I’m such an idiot, I might as well slam my whole face into the locker.
She still didn’t run away. She actually smiled.
“Thanks,” she said. “What is your real name?”
It was like a dream come true. We chatted until the bell rang for class, and then I stood there, dumbstruck, after she left. The rest of the day, I felt like I was walking on a cloud. I didn’t really have any friends, but here I was, talking to Miranda!
When I went home and told my parents what had happened, they raised an eyebrow.
“Is this...real?” my mother asked me. I looked at her in shock.
“Of course it’s real!” I said. “Miranda is really going to my school! I guess her aunt lives here.”
“So...it’s not just a fan fiction story you wrote?” she asked and I gaped at her.
“No!” I cried. “She’s real!”
My mom sipped her coffee, as if she was used to dealing with her lunatic child. She probably was. Sometimes, her looks annoyed me, but today, I didn’t care.
“Can she come for supper?” I asked. My Mom paused.
“Tonight?” I asked.
“No, not tonight, but sometime,” I said. “She’s in a new town, her parents died, she doesn’t sound like she’s happy with her aunt and she doesn’t know anybody…I could ask her when she’s free?”