But that’s not my fault, and she knows that. She can’t really be mad about that, can she?

When I get back to the apartment, I lock myself in the closet and FaceTime Becca, bouncing on my heels hoping she’ll finally answer.

Finally, her face appears and she says, “Noah?”

“Hey,” I say, “I’m sorry for whatever I did to piss you off, Becca. You’re my best friend, and I—”

“Shut up for a second.”

So I do.

“Have you checked the Diary recently?”

And I have to admit that I’m a terrible person and I haven’t.

“Well, check it now. You need to see this.”

So I pull out my laptop and pull up my Tumblr dashboard and scroll through the notifications. I’m half expecting to find twenty thousand hate messages or something, but instead, I find Bunfrees, the super popular news site. Wait, what.

It looks like some Bunfrees writer decided to do an exposé on millennial love culture—as if millennials aren’t all forty and married by now—and they decided to embed the Diary in one of the posts. Which, you know, would be pretty cool if they were actually going to pay me for it.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is the part that people are circulating around Tumblr like wildfire—a screenshot from the comment section of the Bunfrees post saying, “This blog is a lie and these stories are stolen. This one’s about my friend, and they never gave them permission to use it.”

Which, really, is laughable since I literally made up every story from the Diary. But wow, they even linked to another blog where they posted some story about a friend meeting a hot guy at an ice cream shop like eight months ago. And really, the details are different—the description of the shop, leaving a phone instead of a wallet, literally all of the dialogue—but people are eating it up, and I’m just about ready to pull my goddamn hair out. This isn’t like the last troll. Even if I post thirty pictures of Drew and me kissing, it still won’t refute these claims.

It might not be too late to make a statement, but then, it’s my word against theirs, and that probably won’t hold a lot of weight.

Why do people keep doing this?

“What the hell?” I say.

I hear Becca sigh, but she doesn’t say anything. I guess she’s at as much of a loss as I am.

“I’m sure it’ll blow over,” she says finally. “I mean, people steal stuff all the time, and no one cares.”

But I care. Even if people stick with the Diary, all it means is that they think I’m a thief, and they’re cool with that. I don’t want them to think I’m a thief at all!