I know what you're thinking, trust me. I know what you're thinking, what this has made you think.

You're thinking that I'm in love with Kennedy Abrams.

This is a totally viable conclusion for you all to have drawn, but at the same time...it's not 100% right. But also not 100% wrong. The way I see her and think about her and revolved my life and happiness around her seems like some kind of toxic relationship that only I knew we were even a part of. And in all honesty, I think I was in love with Kennedy Abrams. At least a little bit. I think I still consider myself a straight woman, but at the same time...something about Kennedy Abrams set something off in me.

I was in love with her life, and I wanted it for myself. I was in love with how she acted and how everyone else acted around her. I was in love with that part of her. Her popularity and the ease with which she seemingly waltzed through her life. I think for a time, I was in love with her. The human being of Kennedy Abrams. But when it all boiled down to it, I was in love with what a friendship with her could offer me.

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8:27 AM. Rebecca stood outside of Kennedy's apartment door, waiting for the clock to hit 8:30. She didn't want to be early, but she also didn't want to be late. So, she had arrived early and would just stand outside the door until it was time for her to...be on time.

8:28 AM.

She wondered if anyone were looking at her through the peephole. Could they see her standing there, waiting for the clock to get to the right time? Did she look pathetic? Hopefully no one was standing there. That would be strange in and of itself; standing at your peephole watching someone loiter on your 'Come on in!' doormat instead of opening the door and inviting them inside.

8:29 AM.

She could always just knock a minute early. It wouldn't hurt anyone, she didn't think. It would probably be fine. Rebecca felt her hands starting to sweat around the Clemson keychain she had wrapped in her left hand and her phone that she was holding in her right. She needed to be able to knock on a door a minute early. There was nothing wrong with that. She was being stupid.

8:30 AM.

Might as well knock right on time.

Rebecca knocked three times on the door and waited a few seconds before hearing a lock turn from the other side. The door opened and Kennedy was standing behind it, smiling widely as she welcomed Rebecca back into the apartment that she had been in less than 36 hours earlier.

"How are you?" Kennedy asked enthusiastically, flipping her ponytail over her shoulder as she walked into the rest of the apartment, clearly expecting Rebecca to follow. "How was the rest of your Sunday?"

"It was fine." Rebecca replied casually, "Nothing major happened. Just a relaxing day."

"I love that for you." Kennedy grinned as the two walked into the living room, where three people Rebecca didn't recognize were sitting around and talking to each other. They all looked up when Kennedy and Rebecca walked in, and immediately looked to Kennedy for clarification on who else they were looking at.

"Rebecca, I'd like you to meet my friends-slash-roommates." Kennedy gestured towards the girl sitting on an armchair closest to Rebecca, "This is Rian Clark, the absolute most social person you will ever meet. She runs the Social Action club on campus. Everyone, this is Rebecca Eaves, a girl I met at the gym this weekend."

"Nice to meet you." Rian smiled at Rebecca, "And I'm not that social. I just like talking to people!"

"Nice to meet you too." Rebecca laughed, "I love your scarf." She nodded towards the light blue scarf tied up in Rian's short red hair, which combined with the rosy pink satin bathrobe made her look like a character out of a 1950s movie.

"Thanks!" Rian blushed slightly, but Rebecca had a feeling it was just for show.

"And then we have Lyla Rose," Kennedy nodded towards the other girl, who was sitting on the couch next to the only guy in the room, her long brown hair tied up in two French braids and her dark red satin robe a matching pattern to Rian's, "She's on the Clemson dance team in case you recognized her, and is way talented."

"Stop, you'll make me blush my face cream off." Lyla laughed, "Nice to meet you, Rebecca."

"You too." Rebecca nodded, immediately feeling weird for complimenting Rian and not Lyla. But it was too late to do so at that point, since Kennedy was moving on.

"And then we have the only one who isn't technically a roommate, but still lives here half the time." Kennedy rolled her eyes, "Doug Samuelson. He's Lyla's boyfriend and plays for the school football team."

"I recognized the name." Rebecca nodded, "Nice to meet you, Doug."

"Same here." Doug replied. He looked like the average jock to Rebecca: over six foot, short brown hair, relatively built. Rebecca noticed that he was remarkably preoccupied with the V-neck of Lyla's robe and uncomfortably shifted her gaze away from him.

"So, this is just a three-bedroom?" Rebecca asked, only seeing one bedroom door but realizing that there was a staircase that led to an upstairs area, "I didn't know those were offered."

"Oh, they are, but not here." Kennedy laughed, "There are three bedrooms upstairs and one down here. We have a major secret about that room." She winked at Lyla and Rian, who grinned to themselves at the mention of the fourth bedroom.

"A major secret?" Rebecca repeated, "I'm guessing that I'm not going to be privy to that one?"

"I guess we can tell you." Kennedy sighed, dramatizing her annoyance at having to divulge their secret. Rebecca felt herself perk up a bit, excited to be included on a massive secret with Kennedy Abrams.

"You cannot tell anyone about this. Serious." Kennedy instructed, extending her pinky finger out and clearly expecting Rebecca to reciprocate, "Promise?"

Rebecca nodding, hooking her pinky finger around Kennedy's and shaking slightly.

"Alright." Kennedy whispered, as if everyone in the apartment wasn't already aware of the fourth bedroom's use, "We're kind of renting out the fourth bedroom illegally as an Airbnb. Clemson has no idea."

Rebecca raised her eyebrows.

"Oh. Cool."

Kennedy shrugged.

"It's a good source of income, not gonna lie."

Rebecca nodded uncomfortably. She was actually pretty disappointed; she had expected some sort of murder story or insane haunting or crime committed. Not that they were having random, previously-vetted people stay with them and pay them for it.

"Well, the coffee's already done, so let's take it out to the porch." Kennedy offered, leading Rebecca out to a sliding door that went to a screened-in porch extended out from the living room. "Take a seat, I'll grab the coffee."

Rebecca nodded and walked out to the porch, sitting down in one of the cushioned seats and leaning back, looking out on a cloudless blue sky. The sun was blocked by the porch's cover, but it was shining on the parking lot below them, and Rebecca felt like she could stay there forever, staring at the sky and wishing she could forget about the classes and responsibilities she was neglecting to be sitting there.

She didn't understand how Kennedy was able to live this life. She had looked flawless when she opened the front door at 8:30 in the morning: hair in a high ponytail, wearing light grey joggers with navy blue stripes down the side and a dark red cropped tank that showed off the fact that she somehow managed to have abs in college. She looked like something out of an athleisure ad, while Rebecca felt like a sloth in her baggy black sweatpants and oversized purple t-shirt that sported her high school's name in peeling yellow letters.

Kennedy was good at everything. Rebecca had come to realize that that fact would never be disproved.

Kennedy walked out onto the porch and handed Rebecca a white-and-pink-striped mug filled to the brim with black coffee. Rebecca thanked her as the other girl sat down in the seat next to her, taking a sip and watching as Rebecca followed suit. The coffee immediately burned the roof of her mouth and she tried not to make a face, as Kennedy didn't seem fazed by the temperature of the drink at all.

It was also bitter. Who drank straight black coffee? There was no cream or sugar or anything in the drink to help sweeten it, but Rebecca didn't want to complain; she was a guest. She didn't get an opinion.

"You know what I realized yesterday?" Kennedy asked after a few seconds of sipping in silence, "I don't think I ever got your Instagram."

Rebecca felt her face start to turn crimson and shook her head.

"I don't think you did." She laughed, taking out her phone and quickly going to unfollow the other girl before she knew Rebecca's handle. "We should fix that!"

"For sure." Kennedy nodded her agreement, pulling out her own phone and opening up Instagram, "What's your username?"

Rebecca hit 'unfollow' on Kennedy's page and immediately erased her search history.

"Um, it's @beceaves." She replied, watching as Kennedy typed the letters into her search bar. "No dashes or anything."

Kennedy stared at her phone screen for a second, her head tilted to the side as her brows furrowed in apparent confusion.

"I think I already follow you for some reason." She laughed, flipping her phone around to show the proof to Rebecca, "That's so strange! Who would've thought?"

Rebecca felt her heartrate pick up and laughed in response. Kennedy had probably mindlessly followed her back when Rebecca had followed her account over a year ago. But now the evidence was gone, seeing as she had just unfollowed Kennedy.

"Anyways," Kennedy leaned back in her seat, "My user is @kabe99. If you wanna follow me back."

"Of course!" Rebecca forced a laugh that she knew sounded forced and tried not to care about, "All done."

She hit 'follow back' on the screen and watched as the notification popped up on Kennedy's phone. Kennedy grinned and started to scroll through Rebecca's page, looking at her different pictures that had absolutely no theme or pattern to them whatsoever—which was quite different than Kennedy's clearly carefully curated page.

Rebecca went through Kennedy's feed as well, acting as if she hadn't seen all of these pictures before. The most recent was a picture of Kennedy at the party from Saturday night, holding a cup and laughing with her arm around a girl who looked like Lyla and a guy who Rebecca didn't recognize. The background of the photo was dark, but Rebecca could tell that they were standing in front of the living room, the light on their faces coming from the kitchen. The place Rebecca was pretty sure she had been standing when this picture was taken. She vaguely remembered Kennedy calling for a picture and instructing the unwitting photographer on exactly how to stand and where to point the camera. She knew what to do to ensure she looked her best.

Rebecca could not relate whatsoever. When she had people take pictures of her and her friends (or just her by herself) she usually felt like she got the phone back and saw a photo of her looking her absolute worst.

Or maybe she did know how to make herself look better in pictures and was simply scared of offending the volunteer photographer by asking them to do something different when they were already going out of their way to take the picture in the first place.

The second-most-recent picture was of Kennedy by herself, sitting on the grass and smiling up at the camera as if she didn't have a care in the world other than being on that spot and smiling for that camera. Everything about the picture screamed candid: she looked like she had just swung her head around to smile at the person taking the picture, she was leaning back on her hands with her legs stretched out, and she had a strand of hair across the side of her face that she surely would have batted away if the photo had been planned.

Which meant the photo had obviously been planned.

"Your Instagram is so...unique." Kennedy commented absentmindedly as she continued to scroll, "I kind of am way in love with it."

Rebecca blushed slightly, trying not to appear like she agreed with Kennedy's statement.

"I just post about what I like, I guess." She shrugged casually, exiting out of the Instagram app and turning her phone off. "It's not aesthetically pleasing like yours is."

Kennedy laughed, shaking her head.

"Aesthetically pleasing? I wish someone would call my feed that."

"Well, I just did." Rebecca replied uncomfortably.

"Oh, true." Kennedy laughed again, this time a bit less enthusiastically. "I didn't even realize."

Rebecca nodded slowly, taking another sip of coffee. It tasted so. Bad.

"I think your feed would make a great influencer feed." Rebecca commented as she tried to get the coffee down her throat without vomiting, "There's at least eighty people fawning over you in the comments of every photo, and you have thousands of followers. It would probably be super easy to make your feed marketable."

Kennedy sat up a little higher but altogether seemed to not believe Rebecca.

"As flattering as that is, I don't think that my feed is good enough to be an influencer's." She shrugged, "I think that too many people who knew me in high school follow me to ever have my account become anything big."

Rebecca laughed.

"I guess so." She shrugged, wondering if plugging her nose would dilute the coffee's taste at all. "I would have already tried by now if I were in your position. It's fascinating, isn't it?"

"What?" Kennedy asked.

"Influencers. How they rise in followers and engagement practically overnight. They just appear, out of nowhere, and you follow them because 2.1 million people can't be wrong, right?"

Kennedy tilted her head to the side thoughtfully, taking a sip of her coffee and setting her phone in her lap.

"Huh. I guess I had never thought of it in that way."

Rebecca shrugged. She had always thought that the bandwagon mindset of people on social media was fascinating. People would do things because they saw other people doing them, and people didn't want to be left out of the loop. A new influencer popped up and everyone had to follow them and figure out exactly why they were as popular as they were. The more followers, the better. People trusted other people's taste, even if they didn't know them personally.

"I think about making a fake influencer account sometimes." Kennedy mused quietly, taking another sip of coffee and staring blankly at the sky in front of them. "I've always wondered how many people I could trick into thinking it was a real person living the kind of life that famous Instagrammers seem to perpetuate so easily."

The two sat in silence for a few minutes before Kennedy checked her Apple watch for the time.

"I'd better start getting ready for my noon class." She sighed, and Rebecca checked her Fitbit. 11:01.

"I'll head out." She agreed, standing up and setting the coffee mug on the table beside her seat, "Thanks for having me, and thanks for the coffee."

Kennedy eyed Rebecca's three-quarter-full mug and nodded.

"Of course. Anytime."

She walked back through the living room, which was now completely void of people, and through the front door, waving goodbye to Kennedy as she went. 11:03. It was far too late to make it to any of her classes, seeing as her last one had begun three minutes earlier and she was still in her sweatpants.

To the gym it was.

Hopefully she wouldn't run into any of her professors there, which had happened before on more than one occasion. As she walked towards her car, Rebecca couldn't help but think: what would it really be like to run an influencer's Instagram? An account so popular that it made actual revenue off of people liking and commenting on pictures that cost them nothing to post.

She wished she knew what that could be like.