The man in front of me, just as confused as the rest of us, of course, gives the camera two thumbs-up and smiles wildly. On the jumbo screens above us, the man is grinning frantically, and below his face it says “MATT BELLASSAI, Favorite Social Media Star.”

Behind the cameraman, all the while, the producer is hysterically waving her hands. “NOT HIM!” she’s shouting in vain, pulling at her hair. “NOT HIM!” But everything around us is too loud, the cameraman can’t hear, and the man in front of me is waving too wildly for anybody to care.

The woman with the statue comes forward and hands the award to me, but it’s too late. The cameraman is already moving back up the aisle to his next shot, and the producer is following, shaking her head behind him. The lights are dimming. Flames are shooting from the stage. The music begins to blare. And Jason Derulo walks out to thunderous applause.

It’s all over in about twenty seconds.

•  •  •

The moments afterward are still a little blurry, in no small part because Jason Derulo was screaming onstage. I believe the first words that came out of my mouth afterward were “What the fuck just happened?” Jeremy’s mouth hung open and he started nervously laughing beside me. “Dude,” he said, “I have no idea.” His concern in that moment, I imagine, was making sure I didn’t run directly into Jason Derulo’s flames. “That . . . was a mess,” he said. And then I think I said something like “I want to use this award to bash someone’s head in.”

And yes, to be perfectly fair, they did hand it to me and it did have my name on it—all very exciting, I won! I got to take it home!—but it was also quite heavy and in that moment, I thought, it would have made the perfect blunt object with which to smash a certain cameraman’s soft skull.

Soon enough, my phone started buzzing as people expressed a combination of elation and mourning, like I’d just won a brand-new puppy that someone subsequently stabbed to death in front of me. “Sorry, dude, that sucks,” one friend texted me. “But at least you won!” And then from my mother: “We still love you.” As if the entire incident had cast their love in doubt, however briefly.

The next commercial break, as chaos broke out again, a different producer came to see me and asked if I wanted to go backstage and talk to the press. That’s what all winners do, typically when they walk offstage—you go to a room backstage and the press asks you dumb questions like, “How does it feel to win?”

“Um. Sure, I guess,” I told him. I still barely knew what was going on. My heart was still beating violently in my chest.