Swallow me, swallow me, SWALLOW ME NOW.
The shiny marble floor didn’t heed my call. It just lay there, unaffected by my silent screams.
“So for our first song,” Riley said, smiling in front. “we’re going to be performing our acoustic rendition of What Makes You Beautiful,” he paused and looked straight at me. “by One Direction.”
With that, he winked.
NOW, FLOOR. NOW.
The ground continued to ignore me as the blonde dude with the guitar started to play the song’s opening chords.
“You’re insecure. Don’t know what for. You’re turning heads when you walk through the do-oh-or!” Riley sang into the mic, both eyes STILL on me.
“Sarah, is Riley looking at you?!” Max suddenly squealed.
“No way, it’s probably some other girl!” Sarah squealed back, while consciously fixing her hair.
As Maggie, Sarah and Max started spazzing out over Riley’s supposed flirting with Sarah, I pulled out my phone and logged on Twitter.
@JustJaneKeller: Listening to One Direction will never be the same again.
*
“SHUT UP, IT’S NOT FUNNY,” I said through gritted teeth as Ryan’s laughter continued to sound off my phone.
“You know it is,” he said, chuckling. “Who goes to a concert without even knowing what the band looks like?”
“Girls who were forced to go because their cousin needs special care and attention?”
Ryan just laughed harder in response.
“Okay, it was stupid,” I relented, with a snort of laughter. “But how was I supposed to know that they-HOLY MOLY RYAN, HE’S COMING MY WAY, HOLD ON.”
I quickly ducked behind a tall girl as I tried to make my way around to the other side of the mini van parked beside me.
The concert was over and the band was meeting some fans outside before the bus party started. I managed to avoid Riley during the meet and greet in between sets when Maggie got “usies”-which apparently, are just selfies but with another person- and autographs with them because there were so many people crowding around them, it was easy for me to keep myself incognito.
However, at one point, Maggie spotted me in the crowd, hiding by the oversized shirts at the merch table and pulled me over to take their pictures.
I avoided his eye while taking the shots but of course he just HAD to look straight into the camera with a knowing little smile every once in a while, just to further my humiliation.
He looked like he was about to say something to me when, to my great relief, another group of giggling girls rushed over to him to get their share of usies.
But now the game was getting tricky. There were fairly a small amount of people left- just those going to the bus party and some fans waiting for their ride home- and avoiding him, I knew, was pointless. But I had to at least try to delay the inevitable.
I sat on the cold ground and leaned against the car’s back doors. Remembering Ryan was still on the phone, I put it up to my ear and said, “There’s a conspiracy against me, isn’t there? I mean, of all the people I could’ve bumped into, of all the people I could’ve complained about having to see a band I know nothing about, and find to be a knock off version of One Direction to, it just HAD to be one of the members of said band.”
“If it makes you feel any better, you didn’t exactly call us a knock off,” said a voice a few feet away from me.
GAME OVER.
