Remember Me (Jack Maynard)

Chapter 2

"Hang on a minute," I said, sitting up in bed a little bit more. "You're telling me that I live with this guy, who I know absolutely nothing about? And that I'm twenty-two years old and living in London."

"I know this is a lot to process," he said.

"How did we end up here?" I asked him.

"YouTube," he said, and I looked at him in confusion. "It's an extremely popular platform now for social media. I do it, Zoe does, and her boyfriend Alfie. Conor, Jack, all of us. You do on occasion, though it's mainly Jack. You guys vlog together sometimes, just things about your day."

"How did I meet him?" I asked.

"I introduced you two," he explained. "Jack's one of my best mates. I came back to Brighton for a weekend and brought him back with me. Him and his brother, Conor, and our friend Mikey. I invited you to come hang out with us, and so we ended up going for dinner and then heading back to hang out. You guys kind of just got talking and got along really well. You were about nineteen then, and so was he. You guys are the same age, and Conor's two years older. You guys kept chatting after that, and he'd go to Brighton to see you and you'd come up to London to see him every now and then."

"And I moved in with him?" I asked, and he nodded.

"It'd been about a year and a half, and you guys were getting sick of having to travel all the time to see each other." Joe said then. "So Jack offered for you to come move in with them."

"Them?" I asked.

"Jack, Conor, and their friend Josh." he said. "So you did move in with them, and that's where you all still live."

"When was that?" I asked.

"A little over a year ago," he said.

"So Jack and I have been together for..."

"Over two and a half years," he finished for me, and my eyes widened.

"No wonder he's so upset," I said, "but Joe, I don't know him."

"I know," he said, "and I'm not going to make you stay there because it'd only scare you. We come off a bit... strong. Difference is, you know me well enough. I've got a spare room in my flat, why don't you come stay with me for awhile? We can get your stuff from Jack's, and you can sleep at my place. You'll still see them, but it'll be less overwhelming."

"Okay," I said then.

"In the meantime," Joe said. "I really need to get going, it's getting late. But here," he said, pulling a Macbook out of his bag. Why don't you go through YouTube and watch some things? I'm on there, Jack's on there, you can kind of get to know, well... us. How I am these days. Who he is in general. Your vlogs are on there too, but if you're not ready to watch those then it's okay. I'll see you in the morning, okay?"

"Okay," I said, taking the computer from him. "Thanks Joe,"

"Don't mention it," he said, "but don't stay up too late, okay? Get some rest, you need it."

I promised Joe that I would, and he left the room then, leaving me alone. I slowly opened the computer, going onto the YouTube website and noticing that things had, in fact, changed drastically. It was then that I realized I had no clue what Jack's last name was and didn't know how to find him.

Once I found Joe's subscription list, I scrolled then until I found the name "Jack Maynard", which was accompanied by a picture that I recognized as being the blonde boy from earlier. So I clicked on his profile, a list of videos coming up shortly later. He had over eight hundred thousand subscribers, which is way more than Joe had had back when he used to film videos pranking me. Though I gathered Joe had many many more these days.

Jack's videos were a lot of tags, challenges, and groups of people playing games. I decided to click on a video called the "roommate tag", and had a picture of me, Jack, and two guys that I didn't know on the thumbnail picture. I clicked on it, hoping it might jog some of my memory, but when the video started, I wasn't in it. It was Jack, and a lanky redheaded boy, who was then introduced into the video as Josh. Jack explained that Conor and I were both out and that we'd be back soon. It was Conor's turn to go get groceries, but I was needed to supervise him.

As I watched the video, I had come to the conclusion of how weird the two boys were, but also that Jack repeatedly picked on him and made fun of him. I knew it was just to be funny, but something about it bugged me. The more I watched it, the more it seemed as if Jack and I had almost nothing in common. He was loud and outspoken, whereas I was more quiet and introverted. What was it that attracted me to him in the first place? Had I really changed that much in the past five years?

"Oh look, there are the roomies," Jack said at one point in the video, and I saw Conor and I enter the background with a few bags of groceries and cross to the other side of the room and exit into what I assumed was the kitchen. I noticed then in the video that my hair was a different color, and then looked down to realize for the first time that the bottoms of my hair were, in fact, blue, like in the video.

"Sorry we're late," my voice said, and I came back into the frame, sitting down in a chair next to Jack and kissing his cheek. Seeing me there, I quickly closed out of the video and shut the computer down, unable to watch any more. I didn't know who that girl was. And I wasn't ready to find out.