Part of Me (O2L)

chapter 4

“Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”- John Green, The Fault In Our Stars.

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VidCon was only a week away and I was, in no way, shape, or form, prepared for it. I was not ready to face my fans. Or my friends for that matter. I had made the YouTube announcement a little over two weeks ago, and I’m still too scared to turn phone back on. I mean, that’s what I’ve been blaming it on. As for the best friends I had lost, their funeral was this week, exactly four weeks from the day they died. 

I wanted to see how everyone was taking the YouTube announcement, but at the same time, it was the farthest thing off from what I wanted. I was petrified of rejection. And it was rejection that I felt I would receive if I charged my phone. So, I didn’t. I just left my phone on the floor. Buried under clothes and all the other crap lying around on the floor of my bedroom.

I knew that eventually, I would have to return to the world, but I didn’t think that now was the right time. I figured that I would do it tomorrow, and that until tomorrow, I would just wait in my room, and try to figure some stuff out.

The first thing that I needed to figure out was where I could live, besides my father’s house. So I ran through the options in my head. I didn’t have any friends close with me, to a point that I could ask to live with them. The only friends that I was that close with were dead.

There was always Ashton, but she already had a roommate and there was not enough room in her tiny little apartment for her to get another one. Other than Ashton, I didn’t have any other friends, that were both girls, and that were close enough to me for me to live with. I couldn’t live with any male YouTubers. It was absolutely out of the question. People would go insane. Make up dating rumors, and other completely and utterly idiotic statements, with no facts at all to back them up.  Yet people would still believe it. Because if it’s on and Instagram post, there’s no way that it could be false, right?

My aggravated thoughts were interrupted by the ring of a doorbell. My father wasn’t home, and I didn’t want to talk to anybody, so I just waited for the person ringing my doorbell to go away. However, apparently they didn’t get that I was attempting to avoid them, and they just kept ringing and ringing the doorbell.

With an aggravated huff of my breath, I jumped up from bed. I grabbed my huge purple comforter off my bed and wrapped it around my body. Whoever is ringing my doorbell is going to regret coming here. I was not in the mood for talking to anybody. The only way that I would be friendly with this person is if Jesus himself came to me and told me that the fate of the earth depended on it.

I walked down the stairs lazily. I literally am about to kill myself a bitch. I griped the door handle, already regretting letting this person in, and pulled open the door. When I looked outside I saw a group of people standing on my porch. However, contradicting my prior beliefs, Jehovah’s Witnesses were not standing outside my door.

Ashton was standing outside of my house, along with a bunch of other YouTubers like Sawyer Hartman, Tyler Oakley, Joey Graceffa, Andrea Russet, and Andrew Lowe.  I didn’t really know what to say. I didn’t even know most of them well. They were Aston’s friends.  That was the thing about Aston. She had such an awkward group of friends. I mean, not the people themselves, but the group as a whole. She had the ability to be able to hang out with YouTubers that were at the top, and YouTubers who were barely making it. It completely baffled me.

I stood staring at them, for I couldn’t tell you how long. Eventually Ashton stepped inside the house and pulled me into a suffocatingly tight hug. I froze in place, hands plastered to my sides.  I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I had never, and I mean never, turned down a hug from Ashton. But there was a first for everything.