Page 76 of The Love Haters

When Rue sent us for some more ice, on the walk back across the lawn, it was finally time to make the ask. Maybe he’d feel guilty about all the laughing he’d done at my expense and capitulate. I had to take the shot, either way.

I was about to say it. I really was. I had just opened my mouth to say,I need to ask you to save my job…But that’s when Ginger met us with my phone in her hand. “Here you go,” she said. “It’s been buzzing off the table.”

I took it and, as Ginger and Hutch went off to take the ice to Rue, I fell behind to check the screen. There were twenty texts—with new ones still dinging like crazy—all pure outrage:OMGand!!!!!and the scream emoji.

All question-asking of Hutch was forgotten. I scrolled through to find my best source for clarity: Beanie. Her text just said,Call me before you click that link.

But another text came in on top of it from a former colleague I hadn’t seen in a year, and it had the link in it. Right there. So clickable. And the impulse to find out what the hell was going on was so strong that against Beanie’s very clear advice, I clicked it.

The second I saw the headline, I clapped the phone to my chest, instinctually making sure no one else could see it.

I looked again. Had I really seen what I just saw?

A millisecond confirmed it.

Yes.

It was an article on a gossip site. In a bold font, the headline read:

REAL-LIFE “KATIE” FROM THE SONG EXPOSED!

EX-FIANCÉE OF LUCAS BANKS HAS REALLY LET HERSELF GO

Under it was a photo of me. For proof.

Proof that I looked… terrible.

But it wasn’t some sneaky paparazzi photo. Not some grainy, stolen image of me. Not even a recent one.

The photo with this article was fromfive years ago. Before Lucas got famous, and before we were engaged, and before I’d ever been mocked online. I had posted this photomyself. It was just a screenshot from my social media—back when I used to do that kind of thing. It was the kind of sweet, naïve picture you’d post if you thought it was only for your friends. I was smiling, and wearing a different, but similar, floral dress to the one the internet had hated so much at the Billboard Awards.

It was a photo, in fact, that I’d always liked.

A photo I’d always thought was kind of… pretty.

I scanned the article—all about the “true story” behind the song. And then it described a version of my life, somehow managing to get the basic gist of it all pretty right and 75 percent of the details totally wrong, the reporter concluding soundly that after Lucas cheated, I became suicidal and gained fifty pounds. Or a hundred. Depending on the source.

The confidence of the tone was astonishingly destabilizing. The author of this article—a person who went by the simple moniker “Lissi G”—was so certain about everything, it made me pause for a second.

HadI become suicidal?

Thereweresome pretty dark days in there.

HadI gained fifty pounds?

Given that Beanie had burned my scale, we might never know.

But one thing was certain.Thisgirl inthisphoto hadn’t done either of those things. Because her future heartbreaks hadn’t happened to her yet.

I peeked back at the phone in my hand, and as my brain realized what my body was about to do, a ticker-tape warning started zipping across my mind:Don’t check the comments. Donotcheck the comments!

… Even as—yeah—I checked the comments.

What was I hoping for?

I have no idea. I knew it was a bad choice. I knew the internet wasn’t going to rise up in inspiring unison to defend me. I was not—andI knew this—going to see comments like, “Hey! Leave this girl alone! She’s lovely, and she’s fine, she seems like a nice person—and it’s thisexact toxicitythat’s going to bring down human civilization.”

All checking could possibly do was make thingsso muchworse.

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