We start followingeach other on Instagram, and I’m completely normal about it. I make myself use my laptop to scroll all the way back to the beginning of her account—harder to accidentally like a five-year-old picture that way—and I have a rule that I have to wait at least an hour before I view any of her stories because Icannotbe a weird stalker who views all of them the moment they go up, no matter how much I want to.
She doesn’t post that often—once, maybe twice a week—but it’s a record of her life over the past ten years: friends, family, vacations, selfies with every color of hair. There’s a phase where she posted mostly pictures of birds in the wild and then pictures of ice cream cones. She went to Japan in her early twenties with a small group—two men and another woman—and I spend way too long trying to figure out if one of them was her boyfriend.
It doesn’t matter; I’m just curious.
As far as I can tell—and I’m not counting or anything, just casually getting to know the woman who’s going to be a familymember of mine soon—there are three ex-boyfriends in her Instagram feed. The most recent picture with the most recent boyfriend is from a little over two and a half years ago. Madeline isn’t really the type to be over-the-top on social media—there’s nohappy birthday baby I love you so much you’re the number one man in the worldtype stuff, but if you’re looking for it, you can tell.
The boyfriends—the probable boyfriends—all are a pretty similar type, not that I’ve noticed. All three are white, clean-shaven with medium-brown hair, no beards, and have the general look of someone who knows about sailboats. Preppy, I guess. And in the few-and-far-between pictures of them, every single one of these men looks fuckingbesottedwith Madeline.
And then there’s Ben.
Ben is always around. Ben is tall and wide and dark-haired andhandsomein an obnoxiously obvious way. Like whoever drew him did it as a joke to show what someone withtoostrong a jawline would look like and then forgot to fix it later. Her captions about Ben are about twice as ebullient as the captions about any boyfriend, all about how much fun they had birdwatching or paddleboarding or roller-skating. She congratulates Ben on graduating college (sure, fine) and also medical school (ugh) and also on getting selected for a neurosurgery residency in Virginia Beach (are you fucking kidding me).
Ben’s Instagram is private, and if I had a little less self-control, I would absolutely make a fake profile with someone else’s picture and pretend we went to college together so I could see it. The fact that I put down my phone and go for a walk instead is, honestly, a huge improvement in my impulsivity.
The pictures with Ben drive me up a wall. They don’t look like the years-old pictures of her with ex-boyfriends, but only because she looks happier. She’s pretty in every single pictureshe posts, but when she smiles like that, her nose scrunched and her too-sharp eyeteeth showing, she’s…fuck, I don’t know. Radiant. Magnetic. Glowing. And what’s so special about this guy that he gets to make her that happy?
I’m not jealous. There’s no point in beingjealousbecause Madeline and I now have a relationship with very well-defined boundaries, and that’s fine. It’s ideal, really. The best way that this situation could possibly have gone.
And that’s fine. Most of the time, it’s great. It’s enough. It’s only once a week or so that I find myself opening Instagram after midnight, scrolling through her feed, and wishing I could make her smile like that.
October
Madeline:I bet Sprucevale has a good Halloween, it seems like a spooky small town
Javier:Did I tell you I’m leading ghost tours this year?
Madeline:No!
Javier:Well, they’re just Spooky Stuff tours around downtown. A couple church graveyards, the legend about the highwaymen, all the monsters
Madeline:Highwaymen? All the monsters?
Javier:It’s Appalachia!
Madeline:You can’t just say “all the monsters” and not elaborate.
Javier:Google is free, Madeline
Madeline:[middle finger emoji]
Javier:If you ever come visit I’ll give you the tour, how’s that?
Madeline:Now I have to drive six hours to get a couple of spooky stories?
Javier:They’re really good stories
Javier:Want to see my costume?
Madeline:Is it good?
Javier:I can’t believe you’re even asking
I tossmy phone onto the bed and busy myself with leaning a mirror against a wall so that I can maybe forget that I justinvited Madeline to Sprucevale, which is definitely not the behavior of casual stepsiblings with a normal stepsibling relationship. Or maybe it is? Blood-related siblings visit each other; why wouldn’t the step version? It’s fine, it’s normal.
I finally get the angle right on the mirror and snap several pictures of myself.
Then I decide the lighting is atrocious so I set it up again somewhere else because I want to look good in this picture for reasons not worth thinking about. I spend a few minutes picking my favorite and then editing it a little, because why not?
