two in a million,, tommyinnit.

xxviii

Of course, it's not as easy as that.

The key to keeping a meet-up with your online friends a secret without your short-tempered mother (or your steeply-accumulating fanbase) is, I've found, to lie low. Retain a normal streaming schedule, make the odd shower-thought tweet every so often, continue talking to your best friends in front of and away from the camera, but don't stray too far from habit or tell the internet too much about how you will be spending the start of the coming month.

But it proves much more difficult in practice. The following two weeks are the closest thing to hell I've experienced.

It's the workload from college that lights the first fuse.

Even with the mere three A-levels I'm taking, the homework they're throwing at us is unreal. Essay on this. Project about that. As if being followed around by a gossiping Liza all day isn't tiring enough.

For the first time in months, my streaming schedule is cut down, but it still leaves me with only the spare time I can filch on weekends and the middle of the night to finish the avalanche of schoolwork I have to complete to get as ahead as possible.

"If it's that hard, just quit," Tommy says after a yawn one midnight; his face is flickering on the screen of my rapidly-dying phone whilst I chug coffee - my usual Sprite's shameful replacement due to the caffeine rush - and bash out a report for my Physics class.

I slam my forehead against the keyboard with a groan, a stream of random letters consequently zooming across the Word document. "It's not that easy, though, dickwad. I mean, who knows what Red-in-ten-years is gonna want to do with her life? Maybe she'll care about this stuff then."

"Whatever." He tucks his knees into his chest, pulling his bedcovers round his shoulders like a toddler playing superheroes. "You're the idiot who chose to study Mathematics." He warbles the last word in the contemptuous, south-English posh accent he knows I despise.

"Well, isn't your sense of humour just immaculate?" I mock, finally concluding the piece of work and smashing the 'Save' button.

"You can't talk, arseface," he shoots back, shifting his camera, but not before I catch the grin that yanks at a corner of his mouth.

"Oh yeah? Your chat literally voted on who was the funniest on your last stream, and who won again?" I cup my ear, looking towards the camera with a smirk.

"Ugh, but that's cheating. My chat loves you." He snorts. "Whenever I talk to women, it gives them an actual reason to call me a simp."

"Are you denying that statement?"

He rolls his eyes. "You're the one who chose to live with me in Minecraft. Just saying."

"And you're calling that simp behaviour? No, not compared to you. See, you actually kept my dumb little flower, and you call me all the time, plus we always-" I stop myself.

Fuck. Here comes the newest symptom of the whole crush thing. Rambling. And it's even worse when I'm surviving on four hours of sleep and an energy drink.

"Y'know what, it's actually pretty late, I better- I better go now." A short laugh. Awkward bitch. "Education system and all that."

With another face-contorting yawn that forces me to stifle my laughter with my jumper sleeve, he nods. "Yeah. You're right. Although I don't know if I've fulfilled my arguing-with-a-ginger quota yet today. So we might have to stay for another, like, ten minutes?" He shrugs, and a half-endearing, half-outright-weird smile appears on his face.

I scoff. "Tomathy, we've been on this call for nearly four hours."

He coughs. "Yeah. No, I meant we haven't discussed the next clue thing yet."