Follow Me(2)

At first, we talked for hours on the phone each night. I twisted those hairs around my finger and listened to Sabrina say how much she hated California and how much she missed me. She promised she still loved me. She promised nothing would change. She promised. But her calls gradually became less and less frequent. She started taking an hour, and then two or three, to respond to text messages. I assumed she felt as gutted as I did, so I mailed her gifts and flowers to cheer her up, sent her poems all but written in blood squeezed from my aching heart.

And then Astrid Marshall, one of Sabrina’s bitchier friends, sent me a link to a YouTube video called “HOTTEST GUYS AT NEWMAN HIGH RATED!” I felt sick as I watched Sabrina, her gorgeous hair hacked to her chin and streaked through with brassy blonde, sitting in some unfamiliar family room in a circle of strange girls. The ringleader—a bleached blonde who was wearing so much makeup that her face was a different shade than her neck—screeched a greeting into the camera and then led the others in discussing which of the boys at Sabrina’s new school were the “hottest.” My stomach churned as Sabrina giggled and nodded in agreement, but the bile started to really climb my throat when someone asked her, “But you have a long-distance boyfriend, don’t you, Sabrina?” She shook her head quickly, her alien hair swishing around her small face. “No, no. There’s this guy who’s, like, obsessed with me, but we’re not going out. I just keep him around for the gifts.” The entire circle cackled with cruel laughter, and I slammed shut the computer before that treacherous whore could take another bite out of my heart.

That night, I stole a lighter from one of my older brothers and watched those glimmering strands blacken and break.

When I confronted Sabrina about the video, she cried that she was sorry. But that was just another lie. She was only sorry that she was caught, that her duplicity had been exposed. After all, a quick search had shown me that there were more videos, and in them Sabrina didn’t look sorry at all. That stone-cold bitch had moved on, leaving me completely and utterly destroyed. For years, I thought my heart had been broken beyond repair. I thought I would never love again.

But then there was Audrey.

Ironically, Sabrina is the one who brought me to Audrey. If it weren’t for Sabrina and her lies, I never would have ended up on the Overexposed forums. That was where I took shelter, commiserating with other men who had discovered disheartening truths online about the women they thought they loved. The other commenters helped me gain perspective, helped me see that this was less a reflection of me and more a reflection of Sabrina and the grasping, unhappy women like her.

But the forums didn’t just contain grievances and complaints about ex-girlfriends. They were also home to lively discussion about online women. You know the type: the bloggers, the vloggers, the Tumblrinas, the Instagram models. The women who peddle their bodies online like fruit at the supermarket. The consensus on those threads was that admiring these virtual women was better, easier than finding one in real life because all women lie, and at least these liars were up front about it. It was no secret that their perfect bodies were Photoshopped, that their sultry eyelashes were glued on. Online women could never humiliate you. They couldn’t carve a gaping wound in your soul because they didn’t have souls themselves.

The thing that I would never admit to in those threads was that I missed the beating heart of a real woman. I missed burying my face in soft hair, inhaling the scent of perfumed skin. I missed the softness of feminine lips beneath mine. If only that bitch Sabrina hadn’t broken me.

And then one night, I was lying in my extra-long twin bed, listening to my roommate snore and battling insomnia by browsing Overexposed. I was on a thread where users were posting screengrabs of their ideal woman when something caught my eye. I rocketed to a seated position, my chest clenched so tightly I could barely breathe. The thumbnail image was small, only an inch or two at most, but I would recognize that mane of shimmering, red-tinged hair anywhere.

Sabrina.

With trembling fingers, I tapped open the picture. Relief and disappointment coalesced as I realized it wasn’t her. It was another flame-haired beauty smiling at the camera, her name discernible in the screenshot from her social media post: Audrey.

Her resemblance to Sabrina had initially taken my breath away, but the more I studied her, the more I saw the differences. Both were small and red-haired, but Audrey was sharper, more femme fatale. Aquamarine eyes flashed beneath thick lashes, heart-shaped face came to a point, pale breasts swelled beneath a plunging neckline. My mouth filled with saliva; heat surged through my body.

Audrey.

I found the rest of her online presence, from her Tumblr to her WordPress blog, and followed her wherever I could. For days, I binged on her. I went through her blog archives, committing every image to memory, parsing every chatty post for its deeper meaning. She was more adventurous than Sabrina ever had been, and funnier, too. I learned what she was listening to, what she was watching, what she was reading; I devoured every morsel of herself that she shared.

Lucky for me, that was pretty much everything.

My favorite image was of her standing on a beach, her milky-white skin glowing against her black crochet bikini. She was partially turned away from the camera, her body angled toward the ocean behind her, her eyes looking straight through the screen into mine. One hand restrained her flowing hair, the other was extended to the camera, beckoning, as if to say, Follow me.