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On the stage of the auditorium, students shuffled various props about as they cleaned. It was just about lunch time, and many were eager to be done with the class period. In the haste to get something to eat, they all failed to notice the vampire sitting amongst the rarely-used catwalks close to the ceiling. Perks of a vampire, he never had to break in to get up there. He could simply float up.
Liam rolled his eyes and closed the Twitter app on his phone. Some show, renewed for its final season, had just aired the previous night and his feed was blowing up about it. So mainstream, no one had any taste. He thought he followed people that would be immune to the consumption of such low-brow media, but apparently not. Mentally, he took note to unfollow some people and compose a vague tweet about it later.
Repositioning his legs to get more comfortable, he flipped through his extensive, carefully organised home pages before eventually settling on Instagram. Facebook was out of the question since 2015, but Instagram still held his interest. Hopefully a platform based on images would be immune to the tawdry series’ advances.
So far, so good. His feed was full of obscure, but craftily edited photos of a variety of subjects from macabre dead animals to … Polly’s latest ‘drug haul.’ Liam made a face, pondered the best series of emojis to reflect his disdain for something so uncreative, then posted his comment with a smirk. Stew, silhouette, bamboo, label, raised hand emoji (in that order) perfectly captured his feelings on the image.
He went to click away from the post after his glorious comment was posted, but paused. Polly hadn’t posted anything to her Instagram in a while, or at least he hadn't seen it. With his large amount of accounts followed, if she posted anything it may have been swallowed. Liam could not be out of the loop of his friends, it was unacceptable, even if their posts were… hard to look at, at best.
Polly was no visionary in the art of proper Instagramming, but she was good about keeping her feed fresh. It turns out Liam had only missed two posts: a broken beer bottle with a frowning emoji he recognised from her Snapchat story a few days ago, and a selfie showing off her breasts in a new bra she had ordered, also from her Snapchat story. Feeling content that he hadn’t actually missed anything new, Liam nodded and scrolled back to the top of the page, pausing when he noticed something interesting.
Damien wasn’t under the suggested accounts to follow.
On principle, Liam refused to follow the irritating demon, but always made a note to check his page every few days (purely to keep current, of course, nothing more). Usually he navigated there from his suggested (because he definitely didn’t memorise Damien’s handle years ago), but the spot usually filled with an obnoxiously red icon was taken up instead by… a default icon? Ugh, Liam thought to himself, a bot account to report. What a waste of my time.
“They can’t even be bothered to come up with an original name… BL4CK_GOLD? Even spam accounts could at least try to be creative,” Liam mumbled to himself, comfortable in the silence of the auditorium. He clicked on the page out of curiosity, wondering what sorts of scams people were coming up with these days. Instead, he was greeted with… Oz?
There were only six posts, and the aesthetic of the page was awful. No colour scheme, no direction, no artistry. Instead, there were a couple grainy pictures of food, a stray cat, some movie tickets to some B class film (discounted), and a single selfie. Wait, a selfie?
Sure enough, there the monster was, in all his yellow button up glory. It was after school (Liam recognised the cracks of the high school’s parking lot --fourth spot, second row, adjacent to the tree), and Oz was holding an umbrella. It wasn’t raining, and the overly-high angle of the camera made it even more awkward, but there it was. Posted. And now on Liam’s screen, in front of his eyes.
The caption was terrible. It wasn’t a good selfie.
In fact, it was a god-awful selfie, worse than his sad excuse for food pics.
But something about it… Before he even realised it, Liam had taken a screenshot of the image. He’s spent a decent amount of time with Oz, especially at game nights at his apartment, but he’s never really seen him smile. But this shitty, grainy selfie… It’s there. The gentle upturn of his cheek bones, scrunching his eyes up the tiniest bit. Without a mouth, it’s hard to tell, but it’s clearly there if enough attention was paid.
And Liam was paying close attention.
He looked for a couple seconds longer before finally pocketing his phone. Oz’s page definitely could use some work. And a better camera. Instagram posts were supposed to be vague and difficult to make out, but only artfully so, and on his terms. Not because the camera was actually worse than the one on Scott’s phone after he accidentally ate it the second time (how was the damn thing still running?).
The vampire made up his mind and got to his feet, tucking his satchel neatly under his arm before gracefully dropping down to the auditorium floor. He figured he was fashionably late enough to go to lunch and conveniently sit next to a certain fear monster. It would be easy work to casually drop Oz’s page into the conversation as he took today’s food pic while appearing entirely unaffected and nonchalant.
Somehow, he’d help Oz learn to properly post pics.
And if half the reason was only to get better quality selfies of him, that was strictly classified , and it was only in an ironic sense anyway.