Passionfruit

5.

The apartment was at least twice the size of our last, the light wooden floors of the kitchen covered in countless boxes. I set another down on the pile, unaware of what exactly it contained but being careful nonetheless, and glanced up the stairs towards the loft.

An apartment with a second floor, I thought to myself with wonder.

"The hell do you have in here?" Io asked, gingerly placing a box on the ground, his arms shaking under the weight. Gumi skipped in through the front door after him. She carried nothing.

"Only important stuff!" She insisted, crossing her arms. "But... I really appreciate you carrying it for me."

He shrugged. "Need anything else?"

I widened my eyes, turning away from the two of them. Whatever was going on there was none of my business.

"Enough small talk," Miku announced as she entered, carrying a few small boxes. "We have decisions to make. Like who gets the master bedroom."

"You guys can fight over it," I told them, looking towards the open door in the corner of the kitchen. "I'll take that one. The corner."

"You're just gonna volunteer for the smallest room?" Gumi asked.

It was the smallest, but it was also tucked away, farthest from the other two and right next to the kitchen and loft entrance.

"It has the deck," I told her. "I like the deck."

Miku shrugged, turning to Gumi to begin their heated debate, which I knew the green-haired girl would win. There was no way she could fit all her clothes into one closet and the master bedroom came with two, one of which was a walk-in.

Instead of participating in the fight, I opened the door to my new deck, connected both to the kitchen and my room, and stepped outside.

Tires on asphalt, honks, yells, and laughter were just a few things I heard from the city below. The building was only about ten floors tall, but we were fortunate enough to be at the top, offering quite a stunning view of the city. The Boulevard ran below me, stretching east-west. To my left, in the distance, I could see the ocean, glistening in the light of the cloudless sky. The beach was not visible, though. Too many other, taller buildings. But to my right was a perfect, unobstructed view of the Hollywood sign, though it was a bit far and therefore small on the hillside. At night, I thought to myself. This is going to be an amazing view.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket.

To say the video went viral would be an understatement. Even though I only had about fifty-thousand followers when the argument broke out, the clip of me singing TR's song had amassed almost four hundred thousand views, with seventy-five thousand likes and another ridiculous number of retweets. Of course, the spillover of this attention added masses to all three of our follower counts, our monthly listeners on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, and even trickled into some of our merch orders.

The excitement of such popularity had been surprisingly brief. After all, the pressure was on us even more now that we were gaining attention, and we still had an album release to plan for. And pray for.

Thankfully, most of the attention my video was getting was overwhelmingly positive. I say most, because there were also the frequent tweets from fans of the boy band, either defending them, agreeing with their claims about us, or just being downright awful in the comments. Scrolling through, the majority of them seemed to be diehard fangirls. Even though I wanted so badly to look down on them, it was hard. All I could think about were the girls we met at the mall the other day. They were just fans. People defending their likes and opinions.