Page 1 of Damsel in Disguise

1. BLOOM

ariella

They say sweet sixteen is when you bloom.

I’d say sweet sixteen is when your obsession blooms.

For instance, it’s when an individual decides what they want to be—a profession, I mean. They start acting like one, pretending they’re adults already.

I chose to be his.

Then again, sixteen means too much social media, staying up too late, either texting your friends or doomscrolling Pinterest boards and Instagram reels until the dark outside your window starts to thin.

For me, it’s the latter. The best friends I had are unfortunately… no longer on the living side. It’s been two years since they died.

I’m eighteen now. But after the hole they left in my heart, I personally decided not to let anyone get as close as them.

Then there are nights I don’t scroll at all. Nights, I just lie there, staring at the specific folder in my gallery I made only for him.

I found him a few days before my best friends died. He’s been there with me till today, anchoring me through thick and thin without knowing how his influence is affecting my life. So that makes it a whole year of obsessing over him.

Alistair Hertley. That’s the name I dug up.

Photos of him from every angle I could find online. Some blurry. Some poorly cropped. Who cares? I study them anyway, wondering if this man will remain my permanent obsession forever.

I’m not quite an adult, yet my body betrays me every time I catch my reflection—too voluptuous for my age, curves exactly where grown women pay obscene amounts to create them. And still my waist is narrow enough to fit easily into a man’s hands. I like to dream it’s his hands.

I’m five feet tall, whereas he’s six-two. I know that too. I also know he’s ten years older than I am.

Alistair Hertley is a British professor at Oxford University, specializing in electrical and electronics engineering. I never thought engineering would ever interest me until I found his YouTube channel called CoreCircuits.

There are video after video, explaining the basic concepts, then gradually progressing to higher-level, more complicated topics.

I replayed them obsessively at first, just to never stop seeing him, never realizing I was slowly drowning in this lifeless side of science. I was starstruck by the way he spoke, his enthusiasm in explaining complicated things.

Having 54.8M followers he still managed to reply to every questions in the comment sections. So I made sure to comment on his all his videos, just to get his attention in any way. I’m sure by now anyone will find a few comments on each video under the username @phasevariance.

And somewhere along the way, his face, his voice, anything he’d show online started to stitch in to my brain.

Every equation. Every explanation. I blamed it on repetition. A hundred views from my account at least, maybe more. Now I can predict the next word before he says it.

He always wears that smile—bright, effortless, lighting up my day no matter how dull it’s been. I’ve barely ever seen him grumpy. But I know better.

That smile is a façade, carefully constructed to hide whatever lives beneath. A demon dressed in academic charm.

Over the past year, I’ve earned and maintained the top fan badge across all his social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube whatever it is, you name it. It’s like a quiet achievement for me. A private claim.

Right now, I’m watching one of his older videos, where he’s explaining Fourier Analysis. A mathematical lecture, dry on the surface, but essential if you want to understand AC sources properly. His voice fills my headphones as equations bloom across the screen.

I watch.

I listen.

And I sink a little deeper each time.

I’m in a sour mood tonight, and watching mathematics lectures is never supposed to be the cure for that. Not for anyone normal. But for me, it’s distracting enough to pull my mind away from the way Dad single-handedly ruined what was supposed to be a family dinner earlier this evening and drag it somewhere safer.

I watch the way his dimples deepen when he realizes he’s made a subtle mistake while working through a Fourier equation. It’s barely there, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it embarrassment.