01: no big deal.

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When my best friend Ashley came around at exactly 7pm on a Monday evening, clad still in her Spongebob pyjama pants with one sock on one foot and only one shoe on the other, I knew I had done something wrong.

I saw her before I heard her, a flash of red and blue and black zooming down the street to stomp up the gravel path of my driveway. She had an obsession with hair dye, causing her head to become more colourful than a flashing neon nightclub sign at times. On the evening of question, she looked like a character straight out of a picture book.

She started off by pounding on my door, her knuckles rasping against the wood as I tried to justify myself for being so lazy. I was sat on the couch, deeply involved in an adorable fanfiction regarding 'single-dad Luke' when she began to rattle the doorknob; impatient, excited, and probably borderline pissed at me for taking so long.

Her frantic knocking turned into even louder shouts, hands cupped around her mouth as her voice echoed throughout the entirey of the quiet neighbourhood. I knew that I had exactly thirty seconds to unlock the front door unless I wanted her to smash a random window open; in the haste of her excitement, no proven hesitation, she'd do it. Because that was just the sort of person Ashley Fitzgerald was.

My footsteps onto the patio were slow. As she barged into my house, hers were the complete opposite; creating a surprisingly loud sound for semi-socked feet.

"Have you not been reading the group chat?" was the first thing she said to me, completely exasperated as she shook her oversized coat off. I looked at it, not surprised in the slightest to see that it wasn't even hers. She probably grabbed and wore the closest thing to her own front door before sprinting out of it, but that only made me even more paranoid as I knew she must have been desperate. "We've been trying to contact you for the past two hours!"

"I don't read the chat, you know that," I told her, clearing the sofa so that we both had a place to sit. "What's wrong?"

"What's wrong? What's wrong is that you're awful at texting me back," she said, ignoring my initial question. "Where have you been?"

"I just left my phone for a bit, that's all. What's the big deal?" I asked, uninterested. In my mind, I was wasting precious time, time that could have been spent watching re-runs of Friends and reading a bounty of 5SOS Fanfiction on my laptop. Basically, a typical Monday (and everyday) evening.

The 'big deal', it turns out, was going to change my life forever. The 'big deal' left me with my mouth wide open, eyes enlarged in complete shock as Ashley tried her hardest to get the events of said 'big deal' through my clouded head, by the simple use of the two messages on her screen.

but im cuter

Can't disagree with that.

In retrospect, I should have probably checked the chat when I had the chance. I shouldn't have logged off and left everyone waiting. It would have saved Ashley the trouble of taking two buses and hiking up an awkwardly positioned neighbourhood just to tell me what I'd been missing.

"Luke Hemmings replied to our chat!" she shouted, her voice at a much higher pitch than it was when she was standing outside of my front door.

Once I had gathered myself together, I just winced, reluctantly moving the phone out of my face on the account of, 1. her screaming made my ears do nothing but ache, and 2. I didn't believe her in the slightest.

"Sophie!" Ashley slapped me then, hard on the arm. It caught my attention way faster than anything else would have.

"Ow! What was that for?!"

"How are you not freaking out about this?!"

"Because fake chat generators exist, Ash, and Luke Hemmings is famous." I said to her. "Haven't you heard of, 'don't believe everything you see on the internet'?"

"But it's real-"

"So are photoshopped pictures of tigers riding zebras, but people don't believe those!" I could tell that she was already starting to get frustrated with me, but it wasn't like I was ready to cave in; if this was a prank, it was a cruel one. Considering how deeply infatuated I was with the man with the guitar, I wasn't exactly ready to put my full trust into a simple screenshot.

"Check for yourself then, Miss Stubborn," Ashley crossed her arms, eyebrows furrowed. "Go on. Log back onto your weird little sex-stagram and see for yourself."

"I will." I rolled my eyes, taking my own phone out before typing in the passcode. She had a smug look on her face and as she raised her eyebrows knowingly at me, I couldn't help but feel the possibility that I was wrong.

Immediately, my screen flooded with spam messages, notifications, and the odd provocative picture; the first half of it from other people, the other half solely from the groupchat in which I failed to check.

"I don't see anything here, Ash," I said, boredly scrolling through the chat that had somehow blown up over the course of two hours.

"Keep scrolling." she ordered.

So I did. I carried on, an unamused look on my face as Ashley waited impatiently next to me.

I didn't really know what I was expecting, whether I wanted Ashley to jump up and tell me that I had just been pranked or whatever, but what I wasn't expecting was for there to be Luke Hemmings' official instagram account taking part in our groupchat; picture, message, verified tick and all.

"Lemme see," she demanded, as if expecting me to lie out of spite. I let the phone fall back onto her hand, not knowing what to say as she sat up, smirked, and gave me a triumphant look.

"Now do you believe me?" Ashley asked, seemingly over the fact that I was deadset on doubting her less than two minutes ago.

I just nodded my head yes, very slowly, as I took my phone back and exited the chat. My heart had stopped and I couldn't think straight- Luke Hemmings, the Luke Hemmings, had seen our chat. And he'd called me cute- cute. Did I want to celebrate by crying and listening to Sounds Good Feels Good on repeat for the next few weeks? Maybe.

Or did I want to disappear altogether, off of the face of the earth at the thought of him scrolling through my obviously targeted captions and overly-sexual online Instagram pictures? Definitely.

"Sophie?" Ashley clicked her fingers in front of my face, frowning, her eyebrows knitting together all the more as I entered the Settings tab of my account. "Soph- what are you doing?!"

I had no time to delete, restart, deactivate, or block anything on my Instagram profile before she snatched my phone off me, a scolding look on her face as I tried hard not to let her have it. "Sophie!"

"Hey, give it back!

"What were you doing?!"

"Nothi-"

"Were you gonna delete your account?"

"No! Just deactivate it for a little while-"

"That's the same thing! Why would you do that?"

I sighed, shaking my head before holding my hand out. "Ashley, give me my phone back."

"Wow, you sure know how to tell me," she said sarcastically. "You know, any normal teenage girl would kill to get a reply off of Luke Hemmings. And yet here you are, taking it for granted!"

"I'm not taking it for granted." I lied.

"You wanted to delete your account," Ashley said, rather accusingly as she narrowed her eyes at me. "That's pretty much taking it for granted, if you ask me."

It wasn't like I could reason with her, so I didn't. And it wasn't like she was about to give me my phone anytime soon, so I let her keep it.

I told myself to wait until the morning, just until I had slept on it and until I had enough time to let the information sink in. I was ready to delete a majority of my posts, as well as the inappropriate captions that accompanied some of the more innocent ones- but that didn't necessarily go my way, either.

Because for some ungodly reason, I was able to convince myself that it wasn't a big deal. And I left it, seeing as that's what you do when things aren't worth fussing over. I left my account on public, left the captions that directly asked Luke to wrap his hand around my neck for the whole world to see, and I even stayed in the groupchat.

The way I reasoned with myself for doing what I did was this; celebrities reply to their fans all the time, right? Luke probably only said that to get a reaction out of us. He probably had no idea who he was even talking about. He probably saw the word 'cute', thought the conversation was about Michael, and agreed.

There was no way- no way in hell- that Luke Hemmings knew who I was. There was no way that he had time to go through my posts, to dig deep for the one selfie I looked decent in, just to use so that he could reply to the beginning of an insignificant groupchat.

It just seemed too surreal, like it belonged to the deadbeat plot of a fanfiction writer with too much time on her hands and ninety-four incomplete drafts in her Wattpad account. It didn't seem like it could ever happen to me- because stuff like that never happened in real life. I always thought it worked that way; you either read it somewhere, or wish for it in a dream. But it's not there for you to convert into reality.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. And this- the morning after the first message I ever got from the twenty-year old lead singer of 5 Seconds of Summer- is where the real story begins.

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