Chapter One: The Girl Behind the Screen
My name is Liam, and if you’d told me a year ago that a Snapchat notification would flip my entire world upside down, I would’ve laughed in your face. But that’s exactly how this story starts with a single notification, glowing on my screen at 11:47 p.m. on a random Tuesday.
Sophia wants to add you.
I remembered staring at that name for a second too long. I didn’t know her, never met her. But my profile was public, one of those impulsive decisions I made freshman year when I thought clout mattered and apparently she’d stumbled across it and decided I was worth a shot.
I accepted.
She sent the first message almost immediately, like she’d been waiting behind the screen for me to say yes. “Hey, I saw your profile and okay this is embarrassing, I thought you were really cute. Had to shoot my shot.”
I grinned so hard my face hurt. Sophia had this energy in her texts, this warmth that jumped straight through the phone. We talked that whole night. Then the next. Then every night after that, for months.
She’d tell me about her chaotic family dinners, her dreams of working in fashion journalism, the way she cried during Pixar movies but pretended she didn’t. I’d tell her about my late-night gym sessions, my overprotective older sister, the fact that I still hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do with my life. We built something real in those late-night calls or at least, I thought we did.
Here’s the wild part: three months into talking, we found out we were both headed to the same university in New York City that fall. Columbia. I remember screaming into my pillow when she sent the acceptance letter screenshot with the caption, “Guess we’re gonna be neighbors, Liam.”
It felt like fate. Like the universe had orchestrated the whole thing, the algorithm, the profile, the months of falling for a voice and a face on a screen before ever touching her hand in real life.
We started calling ourselves names even before we ever met in person. That’s how sure I was. That’s how sure we were.
We planned everything. Which dining hall we’d eat at first. Which dorm building she’d try to get assigned to so we’d be close. And the big one, the Freshers party. Every student talked about it like a rite of passage, this massive welcome bash the university threw during orientation week, and we promised each other we’d go together. Our first real date, except it wouldn’t feel like a first date because by then we’d already know each other’s souls.
“I already know what I’m wearing,” she texted me one night, weeks before moving. “You’re gonna lose your mind.”
“I already lost it months ago,” I typed back. “You did that already.”
I meant it. God, I meant every single word.
The day I moved into my dorm, my hands were literally shaking. Not from the boxes, not from the heat, not from my roommate’s obnoxiously loud speaker system blasting through the hallway. It was because I knew Sophia was somewhere on this same campus, unpacking her own boxes, probably just as nervous as I was.
We met for the first time three days later, outside the campus library, right as the sun was dipping behind the buildings and painting everything gold. She looked exactly like her pictures-no, even better. There was a shyness to her in person, something soft and hesitant that hadn’t fully translated through a phone screen.
“Hi,” she said, and I swear it was the most beautiful word I’d ever heard.
“Hi,” I said back, feeling like an i***t because I couldn’t think of anything better.
We hugged. It was awkward and a little too long and neither of us cared. For a moment, standing there on that sidewalk with the New York evening buzzing around us, I thought: this is it. This is the beginning of everything good.
If only I’d known what was coming.
Because online, Sophia was warm. Present. Attentive. She checked in on me constantly, remembered every little detail I mentioned in passing, made me feel like the center of her universe from three hundred miles away.
But the girl standing in front of me on campus- the real, physical, breathing Sophia was going to show me a version of herself I never saw coming. And it would break something in me I didn’t know could break.
That first week, though, none of that mattered yet. We walked around campus like tourists in our own lives, planning our schedules around each other’s classes, already counting down the days to the Freshers party we’d promised each other months before it was even real.
“You excited?” she asked me, bumping her shoulder into mine as we walked back toward the dorms that night.
“For the party?” I said. “Or for us?”
She smiled-that same smile from all those late-night video calls, and looked away like she was hiding something.
“Both,” she said quietly.
I didn’t think anything of it then. I was too busy falling. Too busy believing that the girl who’d found me online was the same girl I’d get to keep forever.
I was wrong. And it wouldn’t take long for me to find out just how wrong I was.
