Then, my mouth fell open when I heard the click of his phone’s camera. I blinked at him. Kaleo didn’t say anything. A moment later, I felt my phone vibrate and saw he’d tagged me in a post. It was a story post of me sitting across from him with a goofy smile on my face. The caption only said: shawty. I glanced at him and back down. I debated on sharing it to my page and ultimately decided it wasn’t that big of a deal so I did it.
I started to get followers immediately. I went to Kaleo’s page. He had over two million followers.
“Why do you have two million followers, Kaleo?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“I cut some celebrity hair sometimes and it gets me a lot of static. Then, JV posts stupid videos of me and tags them all the time. A few of them have gone viral so I’m sure at least a quarter of them are from all that.”
“You tagged me in that post and now they’re all trying to follow me.”
“Damn. For real?”
“Yeah. Should I lock my page?”
“If you don’t have a desire to do social media work it may be a good idea. The hype will die down in a little while. People have short attention spans.”
I rushed through my settings to make my page private and watched a few requests immediately pop up.
“This is insane, Kaleo.” I flipped my phone around so he could see all of the request coming through.
“Go ahead and mute your notifications at least for the night.”
“Alright.”
“Aye!’ JV yelled at us from where he was swapping out his golf clubs. “Y’all sure y’all don’t want to play?”
“I’m good.” Kaleo gave him a little wave.
“I’m okay too. Thank you.”
JV nodded once and walked over to the area to take his swing.
Kaleo tilted his head one way then the other, successfully cracking it.
“Can I ask you something without you tripping?” he asked.
I nodded immediately out of pure curiosity. “Sure.”
“Why’d your people name you Novi?”
“It’s short for November.” I giggled.
“November?”
“My mom’s name is April and she thought it would be cute to stick with the monthly names but she thought May and June were too common. I have a sister named December. So, we’re Novi and Dessi for short. They don’t get us the looks or judgement our actual names do.”
“November,” he repeated. “Alright. Cool.”
“Where’d your family get Kaleo from?”
“It’s a Hawaiian name meaning the voice, but my dad always tells me my mom harped and harped on the fact that it was a strong name usually associated with someone who has acommanding presence. It’s all about strength and power, or at least that was an intention.”
“Your mom is from Hawaii?”
“My grandpa, her dad was. He loved that she picked a name from Hawaii apparently.” I shrugged.”She named me in honor of her dad and my dad got to name my brother in honor of his family.”
“That’s cool.” I smiled. “And Kaleo is a beautiful name.”
