My Online Secret Admirer
By J. Tomas
Published by Queerteen Press at Smashwords
An imprint of JMS Books LLC
Visit queerteen-press.com for more information.
Copyright 2012 J. Tomas
ISBN 9781611522723
For more titles by J. Tomas at Smashwords visit https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jtomas
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Cover Credits: mikegraffigna
Used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.
Cover Design: J.M. Snyder
All rights reserved.
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No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America. Queerteen Press is an imprint of JMS Books LLC.
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My Online Secret Admirer
By J. Tomas
I signed up for Computers as an elective with my best friend Talley and my best girl friend Marie because it sounded awesome—learning to create websites, maintaining blogs, all sorts of neat stuff. By winter break we were supposed to start our own blogs online. I thought this would be the best class ever, and I needed an easy A to help bring up my grades my junior year of high school.
But the first few months were nothing but stupid history, Babbage and vacuum tubes and Basic. Who coded in Basic anymore? By fall break we were just starting to get into the internet side of things, and leave it to the school to make that boring as crap, too. The first thing our teacher Mr. Mosley did was throw a slide on the wall showing the background code for a popular website. Talley and I glanced at each other like what the hell? No one told us we’d actually have to learn how to code HTML by hand! I was so not taking it again next year. Easy A, my ass.
We even had to review how search engines work. Who cared? But Mr. Mosley spent the whole hour droning on and on about the history of Google while everyone in class ignored him. We were in the lab upstairs, each student assigned to a computer, so I hid behind my monitor and spent the time Googling funny words to see what I’d get. I couldn’t look up curse words—I know, I tried—the school must’ve had a really tight filter built in. After a few minutes of goofing around, I typed in my own name just to be silly and hit ENTER.
I got a lot of crap from genealogy sites, of course. My own Facebook page didn’t even show up until the bottom of the results. No wonder I rarely got new friend requests!
I added quotation marks around my name—see, I was paying attention in class. Hit ENTER again. This time my Facebook page was the first listed, go me. Under that was a link to a blog…and I knew it wasn’t mine because I hadn’t bothered creating one yet.
Trapped in SBHS.
What a great name! Too bad someone already thought of it. I could always call mine the same thing and pretend I never saw this one. Or maybe just call it Trapped in Smedley. Wait, no. That sounded like a horror story. Though this was high school, after all.
Who was I kidding? I didn’t plan to start my blog until the assignment due date was a bit closer. Then I’d just slap something together. Computers was an elective; I didn’t need it to graduate.
Thank God, too, because listening to Mr. Mosley could put anyone to sleep. From sheer boredom, I clicked on the link to the Trapped blog and hoped whoever owned it was a bit more lively than the class I was in.
The page loaded—it was white with a gray shaded border around the single column of text. A small notation in the sidebar announced the page was a project for school, no name of who created it. No mention of our school by name, either, just the initials and, in the sidebar, the words GO TIGERS!! That was our mascot, so I knew it was our school. Under that read Class of ‘13, which meant the blog had to belong to someone in our grade.
In this class.
I looked around to see if anyone had somehow noticed I’d pulled up their site. I sat at the last computer in the back row, so I had a great view of the rest of the class. Everyone seemed glued to their monitors except for Jaime Tuttle, who furiously scribbled everything Mr. Mosley said as if it were gospel. She threw a glance my way and hunched down further over her desk, half-covering her paper with one arm as if to keep me from cheating off it. As if I would.
Beside me, Talley had his head propped up in one hand, eyelids fluttering as he dozed. A faint snore came from him every so often, and his mouth hung open a little. If I hadn’t known him so long, I would’ve tried to toss tiny little spitballs into his mouth to see how many I could get inside before he woke up. Hell, if I didn’t have this blog to read now, I’d be tempted anyway, friends or not.
On the other side of Talley, Marie frowned at the computer. She kept looking up at Mr. Mosley as if she were paying attention, but when I leaned back in my chair, I saw she was reading the OMG! celebrity news on Yahoo! I thought of writing a quick note on a piece of paper, balling it up, and tossing it over Talley’s head to her. Google yourself. See what you get. Maybe she was on this blog, too.
Or maybe it was her blog. That thought stopped me. What exactly did it say about me, anyway?
As I turned back to the screen, I realized this couldn’t be Marie’s site. Not enough hearts, for one. She’s as girly as they come. Even if she were stuck with a drab gray template like this one, she’d still change the font color to an atrocious shade of pink.
There were two blog posts. The first was a default one—This is your first post! Delete this text and write something cool about yourself! Whoever created the blog hadn’t bothered.
The second mentioned me. Hell, it mentioned a lot of people I knew—the author had apparently snagged one of those online survey things where you answered the questions using the names of people in your class. The heading read Class of 2013, Butler High. Then it had a list of numbered traits, and beside each was a name of someone in our class.
Sluttiest girl—Jennifer Carter. Sleaziest guy—??? Smartest girl—Jaime Tuttle. Smartest guy—NOT Timmy Talley.
I almost laughed out loud. That was the truth. Talley had lived next door to me all my life and we were best friends, but he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch, as my mother liked to say. He was on the wrestling team and was pretty good at it, only because he was built like a Mack truck. He didn’t have the grades to play football, but he was a badass on the wrestling mat. Mostly I think he just sat on his opponent until they gave—sometimes we play-wrestled while watching TV and he always pinned me down. I could say for a fact that, with his bulk bearing down on you, you couldn’t breathe. His best hope for getting into college was a scholarship and he knew it.