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so maybe annie downloads snapchat on jeff’s phone before she leaves for DC, and he’s all grouchy about it, saying he’s too old for the new wave of social media and he thinks, at 25, she probably is too. but annie sends him and the rest of their friends snaps each day and, though he never mentions it when they talk on the phone, she can tell he always views them right away.
after a couple of weeks she gets alerts that he’s taking screenshots and it makes her laugh, because she’s not sending anything worth saving – just photos of her bored at her desk and the tiny bedroom in her capitol hill apartment and the foamy leaf design in her $4 latte.
the next time they talk she tries to keep it to herself – because he must not know she gets alerts when he screenshots and she doesn’t want to embarrass him – but somehow she just blurts it out and then there’s stunned silence on the line and she kinda panics a bit.
but after a moment jeff just laughs, a quiet, bashful laugh she doesn’t often hear from him, and even though they’re not facetiming she knows he’s shrugging his shoulders.
“i just like seeing glimpses of your life, i guess,” he says. “and the time limit stresses me out – how am i supposed to digest a photo in under 10 seconds? it’s ridiculous.”
she texts him photos after that. every time he replies, “[screenshot].”
***
jeff winger is totally one of those people who uses instagram on the down-low.
like, he has an account to follow his favorite comedians and hot actresses, but he doesn’t follow anyone he knows in real life and he definitely doesn’t post any photos. (though, if he did, he has no doubt he’d become IG-famous for his selfies alone. still, he’d rather lay low.)
but then one day he opens the app while waiting in line at the DMV and there’s a follower notification waiting for him. he frowns when he navigates to the activity feed and sees the username: the-annie-e.
he can’t help but chuckle to himself because of course she found him. she’s probably using her newly acquired FBI skills to sniff out every piece of his minimal social media presence.
the line he’s waiting in is at a standstill, so he begins scrolling through her photos starting with the most recent. there’s a collage of britta with a happy birthday message, photos depicting her D.C. unpacking progress, and a myriad of food pics, which he normally finds irritating but, in her case, it’s kinda cute.
the people in front of him start to shuffle forward but someone has to tap him on the shoulder to tell him to move up because he’s completely engrossed in her photos now. the study group features prominently and there are long comment chains on those posts that have him laughing aloud again.
he’s nearly at the front of the line when he sees it – one of her first photos, posted back in 2010. it’s a selfie of him and her – one he vaguely remembers taking because she’d wanted to test the camera on her new phone. as they leaned in close he’d teased her about her generation’s narcissistic tendencies, and she giggled but then scolded him for messing up the shot. she made him take it again.
this one is the first, though – the outtake – and it makes his insides feel all fuzzy. annie’s looking at the camera with an open-mouthed grin, mid-laugh, but jeff, his head is turned to the side with his gaze trained on her. he’s smiling too, but it’s softer, and his eyes, well. his pupils may as well be cartoon hearts.
a grumpy DMV worker finally signals jeff over, but he barely notices because he just read her caption.
photographic evidence that jeff winger, despite his protestations, is kinda adorable. (hopefully he never joins instagram lol)
he likes the photo and follows her back.
***
ugh, facebook. jeff used to like facebook.
back before it became the social behemoth it is today – before his mom and cousins and great-aunt bessie joined – it was pretty cool. sure, he mostly used it to hit on girls who had gotten way prettier since high school, and, okay, that may have resulted in a few bungled flings. but whatever. his statuses never got fewer than 50 likes and he was never short on dates.
but before he even set foot on the greendale campus he’d basically abandoned his account. the site had become so lame, and not only because the girls he’d gone out with were now posting photos of their alarmingly chubby babies.
so when annie announced that she’d friended everyone on the study group on their third meeting he had to re-download the app on his phone. he accepted her request just so she wouldn’t bug him about it and then dragged the blue square to his app graveyard, never to think of it again.
except she kept tagging him in things.
status updates and location check-ins and photos he hadn’t even known were being taken. he finally took her aside one day and explained that he liked to lay low online, but she just rolled her eyes and gave him that look that she’d shoot pierce whenever he talked about creating a myfacepage.
so, from then on, he tolerates it. sometimes, he likes her photos. and every once in a while – when he has a particularly witty retort – he comments on her statuses.
by the time she moves to DC, he’s actually glad he has it. he realized it’s like a journal, for her, more so than her other social media accounts. when he scrolls through his newsfeed between summer classes it makes him smile to see the new friends she’s making, the photos of the view from her balcony, and the restaurant she’d checked into the night before. she seems really happy.
then one morning, he rolls over in bed to shut off his alarm and sees she’d tagged him in a post at 2:17 a.m. it’s a photo of her in someone’s swanky apartment, which inexplicably makes his temper flare. but then he notices she’s holding a bottle of scotch – his favorite brand – and pointing to the label. there’s a little frown on her face.
the caption says, “miss yuo Jeff.”
he sits up, grinning to himself, and types out a comment.
“miss you too, drunkie.”
then he gets an idea.
***
believe it or not, jeff actually likes twitter.
it lets him keep relatively on top of the news without having to read any long, boring articles, and he never misses a meme or funnyordie video.
when annie found his account and subsequently followed him, he followed her back… for about a week. that unfollow earned him several days of the cold shoulder from her, but it was worth it. her tweeting style was a disaster.
she syncs all of her accounts! anything she posts on facebook, instagram, foursquare, periscope, and, hell, even myfitnesspal, is duplicated on her twitter page. it clogs up his feed, and he doesn’t understand why she expects people to view the same content twice.
“i write original, twitter-exclusive tweets, too!” she says, when explains his reasoning to her.
“sorry, but i have a system – i follow just the right amount of people so that i can catch up on everyone’s tweets while i sit at red lights on the drive to school,” he says. “when i followed you, i didn’t even get halfway. and my thumb cramped up.”
he never follows her back. sure, when she moves to DC he starts checking her page once in a while just to make sure he doesn’t miss anything, but he maintains that syncing accounts was ridiculous. the epitome of millennial oversharing.
so, no one is more surprised than jeff when one morning in august he finds himself sitting in the back of a taxi and syncing all of his accounts.
his heart is racing, a little, and his palms are sweaty, so he asks the driver to turn up the AC. he’s finally managed it – linking his facebook, instagram, and twitter – as the cab comes to a stop. it’s probably overkill to post the same thing on all three sites, but he needs to make sure she doesn’t miss this.
he waits until he’s gone through security and is sitting at the gate, with his new burberry duffel at his feet. then he holds up his boarding pass and snaps a photo. it’s perfect – you can see planes out the window in the background – and his travel destination on the ticket is clear as day.
DEN → DCA
they’re calling his boarding group when he hits post.
***
six seconds is not a lot of time.
jeff can barely take a sip of scotch in six seconds, or send a text, or, hell, even scratch his ass. so when annie rolls over in bed and tries to show him her new favorite video app – called something like leaf or twig or vine – he scoffs and snatches the phone from her hands. (for the record, he distracts her in three seconds flat.)
she recorded snippets of his whole weekend in D.C. and, though he scoffed, he kinda loved it – her memorializing their time together. but he doesn’t get a chance to watch any of them until he downloads the app via the in-flight wifi on his way home.
and, woah, in annie’s hands, six seconds feels a lot longer.
there’s a mash-up of him standing in front of all of the city’s major sights, looking unimpressed with his arms crossed and shades down. it’s pretty amusing, actually, and it does sorta look like he’s leaning against the washington monument, like annie said it did.
and there’s one of annie walking through her apartment in a floral dress, holding a mug of coffee. “up early to start the day!” she says, and he can hear a door creak. the video cuts to a shot of him dead asleep in her bed. “oh,” she deadpans, “never mind.” (she must’ve stripped and slipped back under the covers after that, which explains why there were two wrinkled dresses on the floor when he woke up.)
there are a few that document their drive down to the coast – fighting over the radio stations, making bad puns while they’re stuck in traffic. but the best shows their feet walking along the beach below the shadow of their joined hands. it cuts to a ripple of a wave washing over their toes, and then you can see jeff’s face, smiling down at her. the caption says, “jeff’s first time seeing the ocean!” which is kinda funny, because all he saw was her.
there definitely isn’t the one she didn’t let him post – the one she literally tackled him when he threatened to share it. and he still thinks it’s a shame that the footage was deleted because she looked crazy hot, even if she said videos taken from below are really unflattering. (she let him prove her wrong on a regular video, later, and it’s now saved in password-protected folders on both of their phones.)
then he gets to the very first video she posted during their time together – one he didn’t even know she had recorded. it shows him walking out to baggage claim, looking around, and then there’s a squeak and the camera jostles – because she was jumping and waving – and then he’s jogging, no – running – to her, and the last second is a blur, because he’d lifted her into his arms and twirled her around and around.
he doesn’t need a recording to remember her face when he put her down, how there were tears in her eyes and this wide, bright grin that hit him like a punch to the chest, but in a good way. his laugh sounded light as he cupped her face and leaned down, resting his forehead against hers before meeting her lips.
but if he did have that moment on video he’d post it everywhere, because he gets it now. snapchat, instagram, facebook – all of it – is about keeping the people who matter to you close by, no matter how far away you are.
and he’s going to keep annie with him, always.
***
(somewhere, above a mantle in baltimore, is a photo of a family in the DCA baggage claim, welcoming their oldest son back from a semester abroad. in the background, nearly out of frame, is a tall man bending to kiss a pretty brunette in a bright dress. even though you can hardly make out their faces, it’s clear they’re smiling.)