I Was Born for This. Alice Oseman

Mac.’

      He laughs, as if what I’ve said is really weird. ‘Wow, a big question!’ He leans forward, putting his elbows on his knees. ‘Well, I’m eighteen, I just finished sixth form, I’m off to Exeter Uni in a few weeks’ time to do History.’

      I nod as if I am super interested in these facts.

      ‘And, er … well, I guess I’m just a big music fan!’

      He laughs and scratches his head, like this is a really embarrassing thing to admit.

      ‘That’s so interesting,’ I say. I’ve learnt absolutely nothing about him at all. ‘So you and Juliet started chatting on Tumblr?’

      He grins sheepishly. ‘Oh, yeah, well, I messaged her a few months back, just to start up a conversation, you know? And we got talking. I think we’re quite similar.’

      ‘Mmm, yeah, totally!’ I try not to say this in a sarcastic way. Juliet and Mac couldn’t be more dissimilar. Juliet likes memes and dissecting fandom theories. Mac looks like he posts #like4like selfies on Instagram.

      ‘How about you?’ he asks. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

      ‘Okay then,’ I say, eyebrows raised, as if I have accepted a challenge to duel. ‘I’m also eighteen, I’ve also just finished school, and I’m going to uni to study psychology in October.’

      ‘Psychology? That’s pretty cool. Do you want to be a psychologist? Or, like, a therapist or something?’

      I hold up my hands and shrug. ‘Who the heck knows, man!’

      He laughs, but he looks a little panicked, not knowing whether he should laugh or not. Easier than telling him the full truth, anyway, which is that I chose psychology because it’s the only subject I’m even slightly good at or interested in at school – I’m below average at everything else – and I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

      Which is a bit shit, to be honest, especially when your older brother is in his third year of a medicine degree at Imperial College London, and your mum and dad are both teachers, and really you should have ended up with better genes than this.

      But I don’t need to think about any of that right now. This week is for The Ark. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I can deal with the rest of my life after.

      ‘Honestly,’ says Mac, ‘I barely know what I want to be after uni. I mean, I chose history because I find it interesting, but, like, it’s not the sort of subject that leads you into a straightforward career path, unlike what Juliet’s doing, which is so brave obviously, not going down the lawyer route like her parents and going for backstage theatre stuff instead …’

      He rambles on for a couple of minutes without leaving pauses for me to speak, and I find myself switching off again. I can actually see why he and Juliet get along. She’s more of a listener.

      ‘Hey,’ he says suddenly, ‘we should follow each other on Tumblr!’

      ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yeah, cool, sure.’

      We both get our phones out of our pockets.

      ‘What’s your URL?’ he asks.

      ‘jimmysangels.’

      He laughs. ‘Like Charlie’s Angels? That’s cool. What a classic.’

      I’ve actually never seen Charlie’s Angels. ‘Well, my name’s Angel, and you know, I love Jimmy, so, there you go.’

      ‘Is your name actually Angel? Because that’s really cool.’

      I pause, but I end up saying with a smile, ‘Yep!’

      Not technically a lie.

      ‘Mac’s short for Cormac, which is so stupid, because Cormac’s an Irish name and I’m not even slightly Irish–’

      ‘What’s your URL?’

      ‘Oh, yeah, it’s mac-anderson.’ I assume that’s his full name. Cormac Anderson. His Tumblr mobile description reads ‘mac, 18, uk. i live for good music and cool shoes’. This makes me have a look across the room to see what shoes he was wearing earlier, and I’m disappointed to find that they’re Yeezys. Why does everyone have Yeezys? Aren’t they like £800?

      ‘There,’ he says.

      ‘Cool,’ I say.

      We sit in silence for a moment, nodding at each other.

      The door opens, and Juliet comes back to us. Thank actual God. Mac looks up at her with immense relief.

      She freezes in the doorway and grins, moving her head from me to Mac.

      ‘You two look like you’ve had … a conversation,’ she says.

      ‘That is accurate,’ I say.

      ‘Yeah, we’re BFFs now,’ says Mac, smiling. ‘We don’t need you any more, Jules.’

      Jules? I want to die. First ‘You know, trains’ and now ‘Jules’? Jules?

      She walks into the room and sits back down on the sofa next to Mac. ‘That’s too bad because it’s only a couple of hours until we see The Ark and you will literally have to kick me out if you think I’m gonna miss that.’

      He nudges her and murmurs something I can’t hear from my armchair. She laughs. I get a weird thought that they’re laughing at me, but obviously they wouldn’t do that right in front of my face. Would they? No. They continue their flirty banter and I open up Twitter for the hundredth time in an attempt to escape from the romantic comedy I seem to have ended up in as the comic-relief ethnically diverse side character.

      I miss the Juliet from earlier already.

      By 1 a.m. I’m constantly refreshing @ArkUpdates for any sign that The Ark are on their way. The red-carpet livestream doesn’t start for another hour, but you never know when someone might get a quick shot of them in their car, or leaving their hotel, or whatever, wherever.

      You can never really guess what’s going to happen next in The Ark fandom.

      The fandom is one of the biggest on the internet and I’ve been here since the beginning. It’s everywhere – Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube and pretty much every other major social media website – and it’s spreading by the day. Fans range from ten-year-olds who just tweet the boys with ‘FOLLOW ME BACK!!!’ to fans in their late twenties writing fanfiction longer than five novels put together and fans my age, constantly discussing and theorising and loving and hating and always, always thinking about our boys.

      I got into it when it started, four years ago, back when The Ark were just posting covers on YouTube. I was there when they got their record deal after one of their videos went viral. I was there when they first performed on Radio 1 and when their first single went to number one in the UK.

      I was there through the media shitstorm that occurred when Jimmy, aged sixteen, revealed that he’s transgender – he was assigned female at birth. I was there through all the think pieces. The good ones:

      Jimmy Kaga-Ricci: A New Trans Icon.

      And the many bad ones:

       Has ‘Diversity’ Finally Gone Too Far?

      The Ark: A Black Guy, a White Guy and a Mixed-Race Trans Guy.

       Is The Ark’s Newfound Fame a Response to Millennials’ Obsession with Diversity?

       Is Political Correctness Destroying the Music Industry?

      Most of it was a load of middle-aged whining, but there were a few sensible people that could see the good in the fact that a trans guy was becoming one of the most famous and well-loved musicians in the history of the world.

      I was there through the GQ magazine cover and their first festival