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Someone sniggered behind him just as he was about to pay at the supermarket. Caesar blinked and looked up from his wallet. In the line behind him and a lovely looking older lady were two boys, around 13 years of age, if Caesar had to hazard a guess. One of them had a phone in his hand they were glancing not-that-subtly at Caesar and it was fairly obvious they were laughing at him. What wasn't obvious, however, was why . He frowned.
The boys sniggered again. The old lady behind him gave them a glare. Caesar was starting to feel self conscious. Was there something on his face?
The cashier pulled his attention back to the situation at hand by clearing her throat and he gave her an apologetic smile and payed for his groceries.
He couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the day. What really bothered him was that this wasn’t the first time something similar had happened. Recently he could swear random people on the street were staring at him longer, or trying to hide their laughter, or purposefully not looking at him. In most cases, like the scene just earlier, it wasn’t subtle, but Caesar could never for the life of him understand why it was happening. Frankly, he wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was actually happening.
It was possible he had gone crazy and was just being paranoid.
Still, he needed to get to the bottom of this.
~x~
He brought it up with Joseph that evening.
“When I was at the shop earlier,” he started and Joseph looked up from his phone, “there were these two boys behind me in line and I could swear they were laughing at me.”
“What do you mean, laughing at you?” Joseph asked. “Were you doing something dumb?”
“Doing dumb things is really more your thing, you know,” Caesar said and Joseph shrugged, not even trying to deny it. “No, I wasn’t doing anything, I was just standing at the register. I would’ve thought they were laughing at something on their phones, but they kept very obviously looking up at me.”
“Oh,” said Joseph, in that voice he used when he was trying to pretend he didn’t know about something when he clearly did. Caesar squinted at him.
“You know something about this,” Caesar said. It wasn’t a question. Joseph looked away, which was as good as a confession. “What did you do?”
“Why do you assume I did something?” Joseph huffed, but Caesar gave him a pointed look and he let out a whine. “Okay, don’t freak out now,” he said, lifting his hands in a placating manner. Caesar’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
“I make no promises as to how I’ll react,” Caesar said, digging out the phone. It kept buzzing and buzzing. “If you’ve done something colossally idiotic…”
It was Suzie. She had sent him a barrage of texts and was still at it. Caesar blinked.
“What’s wrong?” Joseph asked.
“Suzie keeps spamming me with something, hold on,” Caesar said, opening the chat and then pointing a finger at Joseph. “Don’t think you can change the subject though! So you better explain what kind of bullshit you’ve pulled this time, orrrrrr…”
He scrolled through the messages. Most of them were just his name in caps lock, but in their midst were some semi coherent messages too, like « whwat the fuck i saw tnis on my twitter feed whst the FUCK» and «jfc cae did yij know about this???» and «thiswas jojo right i thas to be jojo». And then there was a picture.
Caesar stared at his phone in disbelief. His own face stared back.
“You…” he said. Joseph swallowed, quite audibly. “Did you… turn me into a fucking meme ?”
“Nooo, of course not!’ Joseph said, waving a hand, and Caesar looked up at him with a blank face. “I turned you into three!” And then he grinned, like the unapologetic little shit that he was. Caesar’s eye twitched.
He was going to murder Joseph when he slept.