She is a superstar, she is an indie darling. I know this sounds like a contradiction, but I can assure you that it isn’t. Her last album won best indie record at the Grammys, and if you were to go on her website and read her artist bio, you would see that she cites her inspirations as Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell. She’s also currently opening on tour for the biggest megastar on Earth, who patented her own shade of blue last year, so you can see why I don’t think she’ll stay an indie darling for much longer.
Maybe I said it wrong. She is, will be, a superstar; she is, was, an indie darling.
My boyfriend is an indie darling too, but in a different way. Three years ago he landed this part on a sci-fi BBC series where he played an alien come to Earth who falls in love with a manic-depressive college student in London. His co-star was famous already, the daughter of a director who had five Oscar-nominated films. Back then he was still at UCL, auditioning on the weekends and working as a clerk at a vintage shop between classes. The series catapulted him to fancam fame, thousands of girls obsessed with him online, gossip subreddits devoted to his every appearance.
I am none of these things. Until I started dating my boyfriend, the only people who recognized my name were casting directors and extremely online fashion girls, and even the second was often debatable. When I started modeling I got into the unhealthy habit of name-searching online, and one time I found that I had been mentioned in one girl’s inspiration thread on Twitter. I scrolled through the entire thing, looking for myself, until I reached the end and realized that she had confused me for another Chinese-American model, only she was skinnier with bigger eyes.
Now I am relevant, or relevant-adjacent. I discovered a snark subreddit dedicated to me two days ago, and in the past month, ever since my boyfriend tagged me in an Instagram post, my following count has risen from the low twenty thousands to two hundred thousand. I find myself considering my outfits more carefully than ever, wondering if these cargo pants make me look thin, if this black tank top flatters my shoulders. I am known, but only as an afterthought. When my boyfriend was dating the superstar her name always came first. Now when the tabloids write about him my name doesn’t even show up in the headline, sometimes—I am simply the girlfriend, or his new girlfriend, or, on occasion, the rebound.
***
The commenters on the snark subreddit are wondering how I met my boyfriend. Some say that I must have thrown myself at him, that maybe I was a yacht girl, that I probably followed one of those accounts on Instagram tracking his every step, every sighting, this is the basketball court in the East Village where he was spotted yesterday, here’s the Italian restaurant in Kips Bay that he went to with his mother.
The truth is very simple. We met on Raya. I’d signed up out of curiosity more than anything else, wondering if I qualified as enough of a public figure to even have my account approved in the first place. It was the first and only dating app I’d ever paid for.
He was the first and only person I met off it too. Our first date was at a wine bar in Nolita, some hole-in-the-wall place where the staff either pretended not to or actually didn’t recognize him. I wore a black top and low-rise vintage Miss Sixty jeans with platform boots, my casting call outfit. He was tall, taller than I’d thought he’d be—one of my actress friends told me once that every male actor lied about their height, revised it upwards, but he hadn’t. He wore an unassuming navy t-shirt and black jeans, Wales Bonner Sambas on his feet. We talked about Britpop, Korean corn dogs, and the ethics of true crime podcasts. We talked until the wine bar closed, then we found a sake bar and talked some more. When the sake bar closed we walked around Alphabet City, mosquitoes biting at our ankles in the late June heat, the humidity making my carefully curled layers fall. Of course there was a second date.
***
I am a better conversationalist with men than with women. This is a red flag, which is why I would never say it out loud. With women I find myself jostling for space, searching for something to add to what they have already said, which is difficult, especially amongst women who I admire, because usually they have sufficiently articulated what I would have liked to say, and in fewer and better words. I find myself asking vapid, stupid questions, desperate for their approval, which only makes me seem more vapid and helpless.
This does not happen with men. With men I always know how to continue the conversation. I know how to ask all the right questions—about their jobs, about their family, about their childhood hobbies that they’re just getting back into—how to smile the right way, how to nod and convey that I am engaged, I am listening, I am fascinated. It is for this reason that I am almost offended when men don’t want a second date, because I’ve already put on the performance of my life for them—what do you mean you don’t want an encore?
***
In August my boyfriend asked to be my boyfriend. It was over dinner at an omakase restaurant, five hundred dollars that he batted away like it was nothing.
I need you to understand what this will mean, he said, his eyes filled with concern. He took my hand in his, and I felt the cool weight of his silver rings under my fingers. People will ask you questions. You’ll get interview requests. People might try to find out where you live. They might try to follow you home from the grocery store. I won’t have a lot of ways to protect you.
That’s okay, I said. I thought, back then, that I was sufficiently hardened against any sort of intrusion. I’d spent eighteen years of my life with a mother that poked and prodded at every insecurity, nurturing them like tulips in her garden. I knew that my nose was too long, that my monolids were undesirable, that my ribcage was too large, that my voice was too shrill, that I existed with a sort of awkward uncertainty, always searching people’s faces for some sort of emotion that I could not understand. I squeezed his hand. I want to be with you.
Good. Anyway, it’ll probably be fine, he said, a sort of forced confidence in his voice. I’m not Chris Evans, after all. Who cares who I date anyway?
***
Many people care, most of all the superstar’s fans. Two weeks ago she released a new single. It’s sad. Most of her songs are sad. In it she references Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, so you know she’s really going through it. It’s a song about diverging paths and loss, all the choices you didn’t make, all the choices you should have made. It’s probably about my boyfriend, which makes sense. They broke up about seven months ago, which is certainly within the societally approved timeframe for grieving a long-term relationship of two-and-a-half years. In celebrity years, that’s practically a lifetime. They were the kind of couple who always went on pap walks, straight out of central casting. When the song came out, my boyfriend’s name trended on Twitter for forty-eight hours straight.
Of course, the superstar also has a new boyfriend now—the frontman of an indie rock band that opened for the Arctic Monkeys last year—so I’m not sure if she’s actually that sad about the breakup still. Or maybe she wrote the song seven months ago and wanted to release it anyway, because if you’re going to spend weeks and weeks revising and crying over something, you might as well profit off it. Or maybe she isn’t really over my boyfriend, but it isn’t like any of us can do anything about that.
***
If she really isn’t over my boyfriend, that makes us even.
I wasn’t over my ex when I started seeing my boyfriend, which is something I have never told anyone, largely because it’s embarrassing.
My ex, Steven, is nothing like my boyfriend. My boyfriend is tall, with hair the color of dark honey, brown eyes flecked with pale green in the sunlight, with a closet fit for a GQ photoshoot. He buys me flowers just because. He sends me songs every morning that he thinks I’d like. He runs three miles a day at minimum, goes to the gym nightly, never skips leg day.
Steven is my height, maybe half an inch taller at most, lanky and awkward. Once, I wanted to marry him. We met in my second year at Columbia and I knew he liked me within a month of us becoming acquainted with each other, which is saying something, because I don’t consider myself to be a particularly observant person. I noticed the way he always walked in lockstep with me to class, his intense, prolonged eye contact that made me feel as though I was being unwound. I had to ask him out, because I knew he never would.
He was a CS major, always embroiled in some debate on tech Twitter that I tried to tune out. He could be obnoxious and condescending and I loved him with my entire heart. We essentially moved in together by the second month of our relationship, to the point where I started subletting my room in the West Village. He was forgetful, prone to skipping meals accidentally, which served me perfectly well as we hit junior year and I descended into the worst bout of anorexic restriction that I’d experienced in years. Of course, this was one thing that he did notice, and for the second half of junior year we ate every meal together, him sticking by my side for an hour afterwards to make sure I didn’t run to the toilet. He shouldn’t have worried. Bulimia frightened me, first because I needed to preserve my teeth to keep booking jobs, second because I knew that I would never be able to stop once I started.
I don’t know why I liked him so much, still. Maybe it was because of his tacit disapproval of my modeling jobs, which I somehow liked, taking it as a sign that he wanted me for who I was, for my personality, instead of the way I looked or the parties that I could hypothetically get him into. He didn’t like parties anyway, found them simultaneously overstimulating and dull.
We broke up a day after graduation. He was off to a graduate program in California, and though I begged him to try, told him that I would do anything to make long-distance work, his stance was firm. It would be draining, he said. He was a bad texter, and I wouldn’t enjoy it. If we were meant to be, we’d find each other again. I cried into his arms for three hours until I realized no amount of begging or tears would make him change his mind.
***
Steven texted me when I started dating my boyfriend, or, more accurately, when a photo of us kissing at a bookstore went viral on Twitter. We were—are—still friends, will send each other links to funny videos or ask how the other is doing.
so how’d you meet this celebrity, he texted me. I could hear the judgment in his voice, even over a screen, thousands of miles away. is he as sad boy core as he seems in interviews lmao. The lmao did not sound very sincere.
lol just a dating app, I replied. idk does he come off that sad in interviews? i think he’s just kind of camera shy.
didn’t know an actor could be camera shy, he texted. kind of contradictory right.
I sent a shrugging emoji. I didn’t know what Steven wanted me to say.
I watched the three dots on his end start, stop, and then start again.
happy for you, he sent. you guys look good together, i hope he’s treating you well.
A greeting-card congratulations. I waited for him to send something else, but he didn’t.
***
A confession: when I first started seeing my boyfriend, if Steven had called me up at two in the morning, begging me to get back together, promising that we could try long-distance, I would have said yes. I would have said yes, texted my boyfriend asking to talk, and not even shed a single tear.
Of course, he didn’t. Steven has never been a begger. That was always my role.
***
The superstar is white, which is probably one of the only reasons I have not devoted an unhealthy number of hours to stalking her Instagram, comparing every inch of her body to my own. She is short, with dark, curly hair, long eyelashes, and an eclectic style that Stevie Nicks would approve of. She’s pretty, of course.
I didn’t listen to her music until I started dating my boyfriend. I have never been the kind of person who can listen to music idly, without regard for lyricism or poetry. I am far too prone to distraction for that. When I do listen to music, it’s on my morning runs, and usually only house or EDM, beats pounding through my headphones as I jog past the Hudson.
Her songs are nice, though. Wistful. Yearning. I put her on during my Sunday evening trip to Trader Joe’s for groceries and listen to her sing about my boyfriend doing laundry for her when she was too depressed to get out of bed and how it feels to watch him rise in the morning, hair sticking up at the back, yawning over the sink, all set to soft guitar strings. She uses a lot of oil painting metaphors, references Fitzgerald, Hemingway. She probably loved him a lot. She did. They loved each other. I think about how I can’t even bear to look back on old photographs of Steven, sometimes, and wonder how it must feel for the superstar to know that every emotion she ever felt about my boyfriend is out there for the world to poke and prod at for all eternity, in every song she’s ever put out.
***
I post on Instagram, which turns out to be a mistake. It’s just a spring dump, a digital of me at the club that Marley took last month, some outfits I liked, one photo of my boyfriend leaning out my balcony from behind, him resting his elbows on the railing and looking down at the street below. I don’t get any unexpected comments under my post—it’s still almost entirely Columbia and hometown friends, one or two spammers and a few brands asking to collab with me—but then I check the snark subreddit, because clearly I don’t value my own mental or emotional well-being, and there the comments are brutal.
So insane to me that this is the girl he went for after tbh, says one commenter. Like can you find anyone else more dime a dozen?? There’s at least forty girls who look just like her in NYC. I’m so TIRED of all the y2k type digital dumps also like they literally all look the same. Genuinely what is original about her.
Another commenter is convinced that I’ve gotten lip filler. Maybe rhino too, but I’m not totally sure, they add. If you scroll back far enough, you can see that her nose has definitely shrunk in the past year. But also I know people say that aging, etc changes things in your bone structure. But that much?
you take one look at her and you can see she’s just entirely self-absorbed, a different comment says. i doubt they’ll last past the summer though. what i love about him is that he’s so multifaceted and i just can’t see her being that. and really she’s just skinny, besides that i don’t think she’s particularly striking or interesting to look at. like yeah bella hadid’s gotten sooooo much surgery but at least you want to look at her you know. like there’s something to look at.
I scroll and scroll until my stomach is churning and I’ve chewed the skin around my nails raw. I am no Carla Bruni, apparently. I am no Suki Waterhouse or Devon Aoki, I am a glorified influencer at best and my boyfriend is certain to be tired of me by July. Eventually my phone runs out of battery and I just let it die. I leave the apartment without it, take a walk around the block, buy a joint at the corner dispensary and spend the night getting high, let the world turn and turn around me until I feel like I’m swaddled in blankets on a ship going across the ocean, letting the waves rock me gently, back and forth, back and forth.
***
I wonder if the superstar and I would be friends. Probably I would just be intimidated by her. I would try too hard to befriend her, actually, ask her too many questions about her life, about how she’s doing. I would want her to see that I’m good, non-threatening, that I wish we could have met in some other way, that I think she’s really, truly, so, so cool, that I wish I could be that cool, that I wish we had something in common other than my boyfriend.
But then I probably would never have even thought about her if not for my boyfriend. Our connection is so tenuous, only happenstance. I would never have clicked on every article about her, would never have scrolled through her Instagram so many times, would never have listened to any of her music, would likely never have known about her at all.
***
I don’t tell my boyfriend about the snark subreddit. He isn’t particularly online—he told me once that he hates seeing news about himself, that it just makes him feel self-conscious—and if he knew about it, it would only serve to make him feel terrible. He would probably over-apologize, place the blame on himself, call up his publicist and ask her if there’s anything she could do about it. He’s off in London right now anyway, filming a guest spot for an episode of Doctor Who. When I call him, I don’t bother him with my own problems. Instead, I ask about his family, ask about filming, tell him about running into one of his former co-stars at a restaurant in Soho.
At night I scroll. I watch thousands of people tally up my every flaw, I watch TikToks of the superstar performing, I read through old messages with Steven and reassure myself that I am interesting, that there is something people like me for that is inherent within me, that I am not as dull as wallpaper or the ingredients of a shampoo bottle. I tell myself that I am more than a girlfriend, that I am a person, that I have a voice, a name, something to distinguish myself from all the others.
Kathryn Zheng is a Chinese-American writer and recent graduate of Stanford University. Her writing has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Stanford Daily, The Leland Quarterly, The Eunoia Review, and The Blue Marble Review. In her spare time, she enjoys drawing, crocheting, and exploring vintage shops.
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