Dreaming In Stereo

Part 7 -- Haters, Get Lost

They started on the slope, just the three of them, dressed in blue jackets and light-wash ripped jeans and denim shorts, and backwards baseball caps. Ethan jogged ahead, laughing a little, his phone clutched in one hand.

"Hey Ethan! Wait up!" shouted Chris.

Lara laughed as she also ditched Chris and chased after Ethan, grabbing his cap as she raced past him. Her hair flew behind her in waves of soft, sun-drenched brown highlighted with streaks of gold.

The trail led the three fourteen-year old figures to the woods, where they were engulfed with a mass of dense olive leaves, odd roots and bumpy twigs. After a few sharp turns, crossing through narrow paths, bumpy roots and unruly rocks they arrived at a path leading upwards. Lara produced her phone from her a pocket and started playing a song. The three of them stood for a couple seconds in silence, until Ethan tossed Lara his phone.

All of a sudden, Ethan burst out singing and dancing.

"Now watch me whip, whip, now watch me nae nae!" He danced, shouting.

"Ethan!" Lara screamed in delight, amidst Chris's hollering of laughter, "I've got it all on tape!" She was holding up Ethan's iPhone, which he had so unwittingly passed to her right before dancing.

"Oh, no, no, no, no no.." Ethan yelled. Chris laughed louder and Ethan shoved him off the tall rock Chris had been balancing on.

"Ah, Ethan!" Chris complained as he stumbled on the ground.

Ethan sprinted at Lara, reaching for the phone, but she was jumping up in delight, switching the phone between her two hands. "Posting it on Instagram, posting it on Insta--posted."

Ethan made a desperate grab at the phone, but as he checked the post, his heart dropped with a heavy thud. The amount of likes, comments, funny-faced emojis were climbing with the second. It was too late.

"I hate you, Lara," Ethan said monotonously. But then he burst out into fits of laughter anyway. Still, Ethan deleted the post and replaced it with a simple photo instead.

"There. Damage fixed," Ethan grinned happily.

Chris grabbed the phone from his hand and read from the comments, which were appearing very quickly. He read one out.

"Hey Ethan, nice whip you got there. Why's the video gone?" Chris read.

Ethan buried his face in his hands and groaned loudly.

"Lara, high-five!" Chris said to Lara, grinning. "We'll be talking about this one for a very long time."

The next day, however, as Ethan checked his DM's, he found an account which had posted to him an edit of Ethan and Chris's face all screwed up and photoshopped. The caption read:

'You guys suck you can't sing both of u goto hell and die cuz no one gives a crap about u. the judgs only trned bcuz they felt bad 4 u bcuz none of u can sing so if u had any brains u would jump off a roof.'

Ethan turned off the phone, but his heart felt heavy as he went for breakfast with his family.

"Why the sad faces?" His mum asked as she helped Tahlia slather maple syrup over her pancakes. "Is it because we're leaving tomorrow morning?"

It was true. The next day, the Karpathy family were leaving Sydney and returning to Geelong, Victoria, where Ethan and Tahlia had been born and raised their whole lives. And Ethan was sad to be leaving Chris and Lara, who he now considered some of his best friends. And Jakob and their half-hearted band. Oh, well. They could always come back for visits.

"No," Ethan replied slowly. "It's nothing."

He thought back to the comment. Ethan only read the words once--skimming through it quickly but steadily--but now the hateful words were etched into his memory. They kept haunting him, surfacing quickly, but then going back away so that they lingered in his mind, a nasty shadow, a reminder.

"Ethan?" His mum asked nervously.

"Hm?" Ethan looked down and realised that he had been so deep in thought that he was drizzling maple syrup over the tabletop and not the pancakes himself. He blushed and started to wipe away the syrup, soaking it up with tissue paper. "Oh, sorry."

"Are you sure you're okay? You're not yourself today," Mrs Karpathy repeated nervously as she watched Ethan pick up the tissue paper and let it slip between his fingers almost absentmindedly.

"It's nothing," Ethan repeated firmly.

"What's 'it'?" Mrs Karpathy badgered him. She wasn't going to let the matter drop so easily.

"Nothing."

"I don't think it's nothing," She continued. "Could you please just tell me what it is, Ethan, so we can help you!"

Ethan opened his mouth angrily to retort, but before any words escaped his mouth Mr Karpathy rested a hand on his wife's shoulder and said, "Just drop it. I'll talk to him later."

That afternoon, Ethan was over at Lara's. Chris was there, too. The pair of them were talking happily but Ethan was somewhere far away, distracted, staring out.

"Etho?" Chris asked. "Hello? You with us?"

"Hm?" Ethan turned suddenly. "Oh, hi. Yeah, I agree."

Chris laughed nervously. "Dude, are you okay? You seem a little--"

"Distracted," Lara finished. "What's going on?"

Ethan pulled together his courage and told his friends about all the hate that he had been receiving. It hadn't been just that one message, from just that one account. It had been multiple accounts. Multiple times. With each word he felt a load lifted from his chest, and with each word his friends listened more intently, their expressions turning from intrigued to serious.

"Ethan..." Chris said. "I get that too. I've received a couple of them. But Lara helped me out with it."

"Yup," Lara smiled. "Give me your phone."

"What, so you can post embarrassing videos of me?" Ethan joked, but he handed his phone over to Lara. She tapped into the DM, scrolling through, and whistled.

"That is a lot of haters," Lara said. "No offense, I mean."

"None taken," Ethan replied smoothly.

Lara tapped into the most recent picture, reading it silently. Ethan leant over her shoulder to see what she was typing in response:

haters, get lost.

Then she blocked the account, and all the other accounts, before handing Ethan's phone back to him.

"Next time you see a hater, just respond with a f*cking awesome comeback and then block them," She said with a smile.

Ethan glanced at Chris, who looked back at him and laughed. Lara was one badass girl, that was for sure.

I had so much fun writing this chapter and I hope you guys will reading it! I'm not even sure if Lara is a badass bitch but I made her one 'cause it'd help move the story along a bit! Anyway, as I've already said it sucks that In Stereo has been eliminated, but really X Factor was just a stepping stone to them becoming the biggest band of all time. :)

ps. I know I've been doing A LOT of Ethan chapters recently, but that's because I'm having him go back to Geelong Vic soon and they'll be a lot of chapters just about Chris, Jakob and Lara and none about him because they all live in Sydney while Ethan is all the way in Victoria.