TRITTANY: Finally Noticed

Never Gonna Happen

TREVOR

I woke up the following day, rolling over and forcing myself to open my heavy eyes. It took me a moment to adjust to where I was. When it became clear to me, I felt like I was sixteen again. I remembered waking up like this every morning before I went to school or dance or on a weekend. My entire time as a teenager took place within these four walls until I moved to the The Six. Once I had partially adjusted to being awake, I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. It was the same fading white that it had always been. The drapes were still drawn closed and the room was still dull, even though I could tell the sun was up outside because the crack under my door was bright. The jumbled sheets were tangled at my feet and the pillows were falling off of the bed. I repositioned the way I was lying and reached over to the nightstand, grabbing my cellphone. When I clicked the button, there were a lot of notifications which had come through overnight. The time read 09:57.

I began to scroll downward, reading through each of my notifications. The odd liked Tweet here, a Facebook Request there. However, right at the bottom of the screen, was a text from Lamar. It must've been sent a literal five minutes after I had fallen asleep.

Lamar
Dude, you might wanna check your Instagram. Seriously dude, World War 3 going on 😂

I furrowed my brow in confusion, wondering what he meant. Nonetheless I signed into my Instagram after unlocking my phone. I wasn't quite sure what to search for or if this supposed 'third world war' would just be in my news feed. The usual bubbles appeared in the usual tabs for tags and mentions and DMs. However, there was no sign of anything peculiar in my news feed. I checked the mentions, hoping to see if Lamar had tagged me in something. He hadn't. All of my mentions were from fans. I didn't really look at them properly because I was on the hunt for something Lamar could've been speaking about. I searched for Lamar's account, there was nothing there that could be related to what he was talking about. At that point I felt kind of stumped.

Out of habit, I clicked on my tagged tab, mostly just to clear the bubble and maybe have a scroll through the stuff the fans had tagged me in. It was as I did so, that I saw it.

The same picture appeared a thousand times in my tagged list. It was a picture I hadn't seen yet, staring back at me hundreds and hundreds of times. For a picture I had been so popularly tagged in, I wasn't even in it! Someone else was though, and before I had even read any captions on any of the photos, I had a good idea what they would be along the lines of.

The picture had two people in it, one familiar and the other very familiar. I recognised the less familiar person almost immediately. After all, it was only the night before now that I had been stalking his social media account. (Pretend I didn't say that.) It was the same guy as before, with the unmistakable dancer muscles and casual smile. This time he had sunglasses on his forehead wasn't wearing a shirt. From what I could see, he was once again taking the picture. I studied the background of the photo for a moment, and realised almost instantly that he was on a beach. The sand spread out for miles behind the two people in the photo and I could see umbrellas and beach towels for miles. My eye caught the edge of the photo for a second, where I could just see the tail of the tide washing up on the shore.

Despite how focused I may have been on the beach or on this other guy or on the water, I couldn't ignore how focused I was on the other person in the picture. I didn't have to see the captions to know that she was the reason I was being tagged at all here. She sat there, behind the guy she was with, smiling towards the camera sweetly. She had her sunglasses covering her eyes, and even though they may have arguably been her best feature, she still looked beautiful. Her hair was scraped up into a ponytail, high at the top of her head, but I could see her bangs sweeping across her forehead like the usually did, although this time they were in a single curl. She was wearing the top half of a white bikini. I could see the ties of it at the back of her neck, poking over her shoulder. On her bottom half she was wearing high waisted shorts, probably ones she had yet to take off to sunbathe. I didn't realise I was subconsciously smiling at the photo until the screen started to dull and I had to tap it to stop my phone from locking. Then again, Britt always had a way of making people smile.