Page 27 of Bitter Rival

I keep scrolling through photos of kids hanging out at the beach, teenage boys at a skate park, and a photo of Daisy riding a skateboard. She’s wearing cutoffs and a Nirvana T-shirt, her skin tan, and her hair sun-bleached. She looks like she’s around thirteen in the photo. Still just a kid with long skinny limbs and no curves yet, but she was already beautiful.

Scrolling through her Instagram is like watching her grow up right before my eyes as she transitions from early teens to her later teens.

I stop at a photo of Daisy kissing a guy who appeared in other photos.

The caption reads: Would you take a bullet for me, baby?

Her Instagram feed has the same dreamlike, vintage look as the photos taped to her wall—ethereal, muted, infused with pink.

I don’t know if they’re her friends or just random teens in the photos, but she’s captured youth in all its beauty and complexity and bravado.

Girls posing on a beach in bikinis with their heads cut off.

Life…through the lens of the male gaze.

Kids running from the cops down an alley where a homeless man is sleeping next to his dog.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled…do better, America.

A girl with dark hair in a torn green dress curled into the fetal position by the side of a crystal blue swimming pool, her red lipstick smeared.

Boys will be boys…are we still buying that bullshit?

A guy with his head thrown back, hands clenched into fists at his sides with a black eye and a bruise on his cheekbone. A cloud of smoke hovers above his head from the cigarette clamped between his lips. He’s shirtless, jeans ripped and torn with holes in the knees, and the American flag draped around his shoulders.

Freedom…just another word for nothing left to lose. Celebrating the red, the white, the black and blues.

It’s the same guy she was kissing, one of the kids from the skate park who looked like trouble, and I can’t help but wonder if this is Finn.

Her last post is a photo of three duffel bags on the curb in front of a taco place.

Time to blow this taco stand. Goodbye, Santa Monica dream. If it was just a dream, why did it feel so real?

I check the date. It was posted eight years ago in July.

When Daisy was just barely seventeen.

I end up going down the Daisy Maja rabbit hole, clicking links like an online gambler in need of a fix.

Daisy got her big break at fifteen when she won a photo contest, and her work was featured in Teen Vogue.

According to an interviewer, Daisy is a “wunderkind,” a “prodigy” commissioned to shoot her first campaign for Converse at fifteen, had her first solo exhibit at seventeen, and shot campaigns for major brands before she’d even finished high school.

When she was eleven, she “borrowed” her stepdad’s Olympus OM10, which is still her favorite camera to shoot with, and she’s been documenting her life and the world around her ever since.

I click on a photo Daisy is tagged in and such is the power of the internet that it takes me directly to Finn. John Finnegan is the drummer for Ash Tuesday.

He has an aversion to wearing shirts, he’s been arrested on possession charges twice, and under a photo of him and Daisy sitting on the roof of a car with the desert in the background the caption reads: My ride or die. I’d take a bullet for you, baby.

I check the date—it was posted four days after Daisy’s photo of the duffel bags in front of the taco stand.

After clicking on her book of annotated photos and adding it to my cart, I throw my phone down in disgust and scrub my hand over my face.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

I have better things to do than stalking Daisy like a tween with a crush.

I change into running clothes, jog down the stairs, and bolt out the door just as the sun is rising.

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