Reno’s smile faltered. “You shouldn’t be smoking.” He dropped the cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, ruining Luka’s fantasy of keeping it forever. “Have a good night, be safe.”
And just like that, Reno left. The bus door closed behind him and Luka stared at it, his hand hovering as if he could still take the smashed cigarette back from Reno’s fingers. He let out a long breath, let reality sink back in, then left to find Maria.
Maria
Oh honey.
Luka groaned, pushing his roommate’s cat, Michael, away to pull his laptop out from under the bed. The clunker took a moment to boot up, and once it did, it took another moment for it to realize that Luka always paid the wifi bill on time and did indeed have internet. He refused to get a new laptop, however, giving up having a CD drive on the side was out of the question.
He pulled up Chrome and opened Twitter first, which was apparently where he was needed.
He had over five thousand notifications.
“What the fuck?”
His account only had a few hundred followers; he barely posted other than the occasional sketch, a selfie, or a photo of his clingy, fluffy maine coon cat. The notification count jumped another hundred and the laptop started to whirr as the fans kicked on. He could feel his palms sticking against the laptop as he started to sweat.
He clicked on the notifications tab and didn’t know what he was looking at, at first.
JAY
what the hell is this
bro Reno posted…
for YOU
Like, he's trying to find you?
fucking why? that makes no sense.
His computer sounded like it would explode at any moment but still he clicked onto Reno’s account. Reno had posted the photo at seven a.m. and in only three hours it’d gained two hundred and seventy something thousand likes. And, Luka’s bright pink hair was clearly visible in the crowd.
He’d been so close to the stage. He didn’t think about it at the time, just happy to be part of the experience. But now his face, hisgoddamn hair, stood out clearly from the hundreds of people in the audience. Oh, god, it was a terrible photo of him in contrast to the band in the front, looking beautiful as always as they grouped together, smiling.
He opened his text app to Jay again and scrolled up to look at the photo he’d sent. It was the same one as on Reno’s account.
JAY
this is a terrible photo of me
youre like a centimeter tall bro. i'm shocked you can be seen at all, shortass.
but, focus! Reno is asking for you!!
Luka clicked on the post and sure enough, there it was, Reno asking for him by name. Luka started to hyperventilate and Michael meowed at him before pushing his way onto Luka’s lap. Luka moved the laptop and snapped it closed, taking the noise of its fans with it, and put his phone face down on the bed. He lay back against the pillows, holding his cat to his chest. This couldn’t be real.
Of course Luka remembered smoking that cigarette out back of that shit hole venue ten years ago.
But he was afan.
Surely he was just a drop in the flood of hundreds of thousands, especially since Voltage had then grown a worldwideaudience with a cult-like following. VIP tickets went for nearly a thousand dollars, people haggled over photo cards of the members worth hundreds, the official accounts online for each band member pushed over one million followers on every platform and were growing all the time. Reno’s account had brokenfour million followerslast month.
Luka met someone special when he was fifteen and thought about it fondly from time to time. Reno had been nice, open, and as much as it sucked in the moment, Luka appreciated how fast Reno left when he found out how young Luka had been. So yeah, nice, open, respectful, bisexual man in a time and place where that was a much worse thing to be than it was now.
But that was Luka remembering Reno— there wasn’t a chance in hell that the memory flowed both ways. He’d been to their concerts between then and now, too. Why had he been spotted this time?
Wait, how did Reno even recognize him? They’d met ten years ago, and he looked a lot different now, other than the pink hair, which had been a staple since that night. People from his high school didn’t even recognize him when they bumped into him on the street.
