~Ivy- fifteen years old~

I was going to kill my best friend if she didn't hurry up.

It was almost midnight and Kade Hendrix's newest album was set to come out in less than five minutes--no, wait, make that four minutes.

I was dying to see if the rest of the album matched the songs that he'd already dropped as singles leading up to the new piece of work and hoped to all the gods above that it did because his new pop/folk combination was so far out of left field from his usual techno leaning traditional pop that had gotten him famous in the first place.

When I listened to music, I wanted to connect to the lyrics I was listening to. I wanted something so gut-wrenching that even if I hadn't been through a horrible heartbreak before in my life I could pretend that I had lived through it just by hearing the stricken synth and heart wrangling harmonies entwined in the words.

Constance burst through the door as if her entire ass were on fire. Good. That should teach her about being late to the Kade Hendrix eargasm fest we were about to feast our senses on.

"I know I'm late but you can't hate me because I brought snacks."

She was right, obviously. Snacks immediately forfeited my right to be angry at her for being late.

As long as it involved mint chocolate...

"And I got the chocolate chip mint ice cream, the whole tub, and three spoons since we always end up dropping one and don't feel like making it to the fridge."

Arms filled with a few sacks piled to the brim with chocolate, candy and ice cream (and extra spoons), Con took her rightful seat beside me on my colorful rainbow rug in the center of my bedroom.

My mom let me redecorate the room however I wanted after my dad left again so I had chosen something colorful and vibrant but that had been six years ago and it was due for an upgrade.

"Are you ready for this, bish?!"

"More than ready. I heard he wrote some songs completely alone along with cowriting the rest."

"Great, so not only does he have more talent in his pinky finger than I do in my entire body, but he's also the most gorgeous human alive too. Sometimes I wish I knew what it was like being God's favorite."

Con sighed dreamily as she drifted her focus to her phone, face scrunching up in confusion as I checked my own phone and saw the time, it was 11:59.

"It's go time!"

She didn't answer my excited screech. She didn't even look the least bit enthused.

"Con! What's wrong?"

"Check your voicemail, Ives. Something's wrong."

"What?"

Blood rushed in my ears as I did what she had told me, but I didn't want to believe what I was hearing as I played my mom's rushed voicemail she'd left me.

'Hey, Ivy. I need to talk to you about your father. He's petitioned the courts, again. Listen, don't look at the news, it's not pretty. I really don't want to say this in a voicemail, but...okay. You're going to have to stay with him for a little while, just for me to get things under control. It won't be forever, I promise. Call me back, I love you to Venus and Saturn and all the ways that matter.'

"What does this mean?"

"It means everything is about to change."

Kade Hendrix's first brand new song hit the speakers before I had a chance to turn it off.

~Present Day~

I was pretty sure my best friend had no idea that I was in love with him.

The male best friend, not my female counterpart, Constance, who was currently sucking face with said male best friend.

Well, this sucked.

"No, babe, please can we pick the movie? You picked last time and it was terrible."

Isaac Hartwood's large hands wrapped around Constance's blonde hair, pulling her face close to his while they shared a meaningful moment about movies.

Blech. Yuck. Ew.

Why do I wish that was me?

My two best friends got together shortly after I moved to live with my dad while my mom collectively got all of her shit together, but when I moved back it was like BAM! I was magically made a third wheel.

Bippity Boppity Boop and all that shit.

Where was my fairy fucking godmother anyway?  Did the pumpkin carriage rot before she made it to Arizona?

"What do you think Ivy? Should we let Con pick the movie?"

I could not breathe. Screw these lungs in my chest. This shit hurt.

It wasn't so bad most of the time when we could hang out like we used to, but times like these, when my chest caved in and my heart grew ten sizes simply by the lopsided honey smile Isaac threw my way, I wished that I could go back in time and make any choice for myself, that I could've chosen to stay in New York with my mother and the family I'd carved out in my hometown.

I'd missed my moment by four entire years.

Nineteen years old and in my sophomore year of college, and here I was pining after a boy I couldn't have while he was shacked up with someone else, forced to watch him be happy with the one person I physically couldn't be mad at.

I wished that fifteen had been an appropriate enough age to recognize your soulmate when you spotted them, because once they were taken, it was like a rough gouging of your eye sockets anytime they even touched someone else.

Especially when that someone else was your best friend, and you had to sit there and suffer through it in silence while on your phone, trying to drown out their obnoxious kissing sounds in the background of the movie you were all supposed to be watching together.

"Uh...no, definitely not. I don't feel like watching a horror movie tonight," I finally answered Isaac's warm blue eyes, and they crinkled a little around the edges when he smiled brightly at me, seemingly in agreement, but there I was overanalyzing that simple act like it was a molecule and I was the scientist holding it underneath a microscope, searching for anything that might mean he liked me as much as I liked him.

It was nonsense, of course. He was in love with Con.

On the outside, Constance could seem difficult and hard, but crack open her shell and she was all soft and gooey inside, afraid to actually hurt someone's feelings.

It was that gooey inside that made Isaac fall madly in love with her. I totally got it, too. If I liked girls, I would be head over heels for her, too.

Too bad I was stuck loving the other half of our best friend trio, and that was getting me absolutely nowhere.

Constance whined at me refusing to pick her favorite movie genre and whipped her big blonde head around to me to try and wither me with her stare, but ended up making her seem like a baby panda pouting when their food was stolen from them.

"Well, now I'm not going to tell you my secret."

"Secret?"

Even Isaac whipped his head to face his girlfriend, who was half sitting in his lap while the other buttcheek rested on the small futon couch they were monopolizing, forcing me to sit on the floor in front of Con's tv screen in our small ass dorm room.

"Yeah, what secret?"

"Uh-uh-uh. Not until you let me pick the new scary Netflix movie that just came out. It has a romance subplot so that should make you happy," Con stated while turning to me with a sly wink.

She had gotten me there. It didn't matter what the genre was; so long as there was romance somewhere in the movie, tv show, book, I was game.

"Fine. Now what's your big secret?"

She shifted off of Isaac's lap and conspiratorially winked at her boyfriend before rubbing her hands together like a diabolical villain preparing to announce their mastermind plan.

"Unplugged, intimate, once in a lifetime. These are the words that were used to describe this event on the ticket website that I was on last night to try and win seats. Only the top tier members of the fan club usually get these because they are so obsessed they hire hackers or code breakers or something to get the tickets before they go live."

I waited for her to elaborate, but she never did, only staring at me expectantly like I was supposed to know exactly what she was talking about. A concert?

"You won tickets to an unplugged concert? Who's singing?"

She had on a shit-eating grin while Isaac slumped back in his seat like he was already preparing to be uncomfortable for the rest of the night, the 'secret' dawning on him because she'd clearly already told him all about it. Traitor.

"I'll give you three guesses, but if you don't get them in the first three, I'm giving your ticket away to Isaac's sister."

"No the hell you're not. Sila is the last person you want at his concert."

Issac had said 'his' concert, so I prepared a list in my head of the top three singers in Con's musical lineup.

"Post Malone."

"Nope."

"Give me a hint."

She leaned forward again, almost nose to nose with me.

"His first single hit the scene five years ago.  We were fourteen years old, and he was on every poster you've every owned."

"No."

"Oh, yes."

"No fucking way."

Isaac piped up, "Actually, it's 'yes fucking way' especially considering the hundreds of times she's screamed in my ear about it."

"You're lying."

My hands were shaking.

"I swear on my dead grandmother's grave."

"That's not something you should swear on, babe," Isaac, said softly, but she ignored him.

My brain couldn't process anything--not the sickly sweet candy smell from the provisions Con had brought with her, not the too-hot room that was sweltering because of the half broken air conditioner that flooded the space with musty and stale summer air, especially not the gooey loved up smiles my best friend was giving my other best friend.

"Kade. Fucking. Hendrix, baby," Constance announced, mouth twisted up in a smile that showed off her pearly white teeth with the small gap in the middle that she always hated but everyone else assured her was adorable because, well, it just was.

Her pale blonde hair gleamed in the dim lighting of our dorm, slightly mussed from Issac's fingers, but for the first time in all of our friendship, I didn't feel the sudden urge to compare myself to her. I didn't feel jealous of her and her relationship with Isaac.

How could I?

After she had done something so perfect and amazing as to get us tickets to see the artist that had brought us through countless hardships together: my move to Arizona with my father, my mom's subsequent mental breakdown and spiral into addiction, my first breakup and the rumors that quickly followed here at college...

And then there were the things she'd endured like her dad's layoff from the company he'd been with since the beginning and her family's subsequent financial hardships, losing her virginity to a boy who, in Taylor Swift's words, "changed his mind", and both her grandmother and grandfather's deaths.

Through it all, we'd listened to Kade's music as our lifeline. He'd quickly ventured from sticky sweet bubblegum pop that initially attracted us to him with his iconic immature fo-hawk hairdo to the alternative and soft pop music that continued to adapt and change with him growing up which, coincidentally, followed the same maturity path as his own fans so he never lost his following by changing up his sound.

Like Madonna, Brittney, and so many others, he constantly reinvented himself, his image, his sound...and we ate every single piece of it up.

Naturally, consuming his art so fervently translated, at least for Con, into obsessing about his personal life.

'Who was this song about' and 'I can't wait until he writes about this breakup so we know what really happened'' were constant conversations held between us in regards to him, but I felt almost...icky being so super involved in social media stalking him.

Yes, I followed him on social media platforms of course to make sure I didn't miss any new music notifications, but did I spend hours on Youtube combing through gossip videos and internet sleuthing to figure out his exact location at any and all times? No, but I didn't give Con any grief for doing so.

She was what I'd call a super fan, and I supposed I was, too, in that there was never a song put out by him that I didn't immediately love, but she took it a step too far.

I had never even dreamed of meeting Kade until this moment, and for some reason I was shocked to realize that it was something I actually did want to do. I wanted to meet the person who inspired me to begin my poetry journey, to put my work out there for others to consume.

It was because of Kade's lyrics that I'd written my first series of poems and submitted the collection to my high school's lit mag and it had been instantly accepted and printed in their next issue, and the success had only snowballed from there.

Submissions to the local papers translated into popular news outlets reaching out to me instead and asking for any new material, and of course I always had at least three journals filled to the brim with new content so I always had something to give them, even if I felt they weren't my best pieces.

I had ignored the critics calling my work subpar or calling all poetry nonsense or pretentious, because that was what my role model at the time had done. Kade had never let any of his criticism get to him, only built from it.

I remembered vividly an interview where a deranged anti-fan had shouted that he had terrible music in an interview and he handled it with such grace and answered humbly, 'thank you for your opinion. I'm always trying new things and experimenting with music and lyrics, and if that didn't click with you then I'm sorry, but maybe my next album will have something you'll like' and then flashed his anti-fan the biggest, most heartwarming dazzling smile that outshone even Isaac's in a glittering sunshine afternoon and that was when I realized I could never meet him.

How crazy bizarre would that be?

'Hey I'm your biggest fan, you inspired me and my career and my major in college, I've even been published in three major literary publications because of it! Let's collab sometime on your music I've got a few cool ideas for some lyrics that I think would fit great with your new direction!'?

No. I'd probably stumble on every other word and slur them together like I was a drunk like my mom. I shivered. I never wanted to be like her.

"Ivy?? Oh god, I think we broke her."

Isaac waved a hand in front of my face, airbrushed tan skin taking up most of my line of sight, but I still could not believe it.

"You...you really got these tickets?"

My eyelashes were wet. I couldn't believe my best friend loved me this much, and I was secretly harboring the world's biggest crush on the love of her life.

The tears dripping silently down my face flowed even harder at that thought.

What kind of a friend was I?

I would stop this crush on Isaac if it was the last thing I did. I'd...go out and get a boyfriend. I would find someone I was interested in and ignore Isaac if I had to.

"Of course I did. Are you okay? I was expecting a different reaction."

"I'm more than okay, I'm just...shocked. I never thought I'd ever get to meet a celebrity in my life!"

"Uh...are you forgetting the time you met your favorite poet at that banquet where you won that fancy award? What was it, the 'Distinguished Teens in Poetry for...Amazing Awesomeness'?"

I laughed through my tears, because she was actually right. I'd met the best feminist poet of my time at that banquet, and still I didn't consider her to be anywhere near the caliber of famous as Kade Hendrix, because being a well known poet did not translate to commercially known on the street corner or having camera phones pointed at you wherever you went.

"I still can't believe you did this for us," I admonished, hands going to my cheeks to ground myself, make myself realize this was real life.

She grabbed my hands away from my face and held them in her own slim, cool hands.

"I did this for you, dummy. You never do anything for yourself, especially not since-" she cut herself off, not wanting talk of my mother to ruin the night.

"You're my best friend, Con. I love you so much, but I also don't know how I could ever repay you. How much were the tickets?!"

She zipped her lips and refused to answer, even though I tried all I could to get her to. She was rich and I was, well...a poet with a deadbeat mother and a half absentee father at college that said half absentee father paid for...conditionally. I was dead broke.

I didn't let myself actually freak out until Isaac had left and Constance went with him to the frat house where he had his own room and different rules for having girls over.

I didn't dare let the smile take over my face, either. Nope. Not even a little bit. I definitely did not squeal and scream into a pillow like a crazy teenager.

That smile that I definitely wasn't wearing definitely didn't slip, either, as I listened to my voicemail that I always played by my ear every single night before bed, falling asleep floating to the lullaby my mother had always used to sing to me, before.

Before.

Kade Fucking Hendrix.

Three months couldn't come quick enough.

Journal Entry # 408

'Can He'

Can he see

This bruised artwork painting my heart

The color of his mercy

Can he tell

This organ in my chest

Started bleeding on my sleeve

Until it fell

Right on the floor

Where he holds her in his arms

Instead of me

A/N:
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