She released a quiet groan.
“You okay?” Andi asked, clearly catching the sound. She shut her car door, and they headed through the parking lot and toward the Northwood Arts Festival, which was set up in Ridgecrest Park.
She gave herself a mental shake. “Yup. All good. Just tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.” Another lie. God, they were just sliding off her tongue now. Who was she?
“Thanks so much for agreeing to do this with me.” Andi led the way through the makeshift entryway, which consisted of braided twigs and flowers created by one of the artists there.
“Please,” Cherry said with a snort. “Thankyou. I’m really honored.” Andi had asked her to come with her to walk through the festival and to hang at the LGBTQIA+ Pride Table to take some shots, shake some hands, say hi to folks. It would be a nice push for Andi’s brand, but she would tag Cherry in many of the posts, and the likelihood of Cherry gaining a significant number of new followers from that was high.
She wasn’t somebody who got recognized in public yet, but Andi often did.Hey, you’re that chick I see on TikTok!This wasn’t the first time she’d been somewhere with Andi when a random person came up to her to shake her hand or say hi or ask for a selfie with her. She always watched with a mix of pride in her friend and envy of her career. She wanted that. So very much.
“It’ll be good to get some stuff posted from here, since I head to the mountains tomorrow for that sporting goods trip. Okay,” Andi said, her voice chipper and fun, “cameras out.” She had a great eye for interesting shots, but so did Cherry. For the next hour, they walked around the festival, taking selfies and shots of each other and video of various booths, of themselves, and of each other. Cherry had learned early on—from Andi, actually—that taking a stupid amount of footage to work with was best.The more you have to choose from, the more likely you’ll find something worth choosingwere her wise words at the time, and Cherry had never forgotten them.
“Hey, Andi,” said one of the young guys behind the Pride booth. His name tag said he was Bentley, and Cherry thought what a cool name that was as he gave Andi a hug.
“Bent, this is my good friend Cherry Davis. She’s got a great social media following and is really up and coming, so give her anything you’ve got, okay?”
“Hey, nice to meet you.” Cherry stuck out her hand.
Bentley’s grip was strong, his dark eyes soft and kind. “Any friend of Andi’s, you know? Nice to meet you, too.”
And that’s how Andi did it. She introduced Cherry to everybody she knew, told them who she was, and asked them to treat her as they would Andi. Her generosity was one of the things Cherry loved most. Andi never treated Cherry as competition. She saw her as a colleague. A coworker. And she never refused to answer questions or give Cherry tips or point out something she might’ve gotten wrong.
They spent the next hour hanging with Bentley and two other Northwood Pride people behind the Pride table—an older lesbian named Jan and a nonbinary teenager named Ty. They talked to people who stopped, handed out Pride bracelets and pamphlets, and answered any questions they could, directing inquirers to Bentley if they couldn’t.
“You’re an influencer, too?” Ty asked Cherry at one point.
“Well, I mean, I’m not as popular as Andi, but that’s my goal. Eventually. I’m Cherry on Top,” she said, remembering what Andi told her about always mentioning her brand because sometimes people felt weird about asking.
“That’s so cool,” Ty said. “I’m on TikTok just doing random shit, but I think about streamlining more.”
“Yeah? In what way?”
Ty tapped a finger against their lips as if searching for the right explanation. “In a helpful way? I’d like to talk about what it means to be nonbinary, to help educate people on pronouns. Stuff like that.” They gave a shrug as their voice kind of trailed off, and Cherry recognized it as a shy uncertainty because she’d had the same thing not so long ago.
“Do it,” she said with enthusiasm, remembering how positive and cheerleaderish Andi had been when she’d expressed a similar desire. “Why not? What have you got to lose? Nobody out there is you, right? There may be similar posters, but nobody is exactly you.”
Ty seemed to take that in, roll it around. “I never thought about it like that,” they said. “You’re right.”
“And I’m happy to answer any questions you have. Pointers. Stuff like that. Just message me.”
“Really?” Ty’s face lit up, their eyebrows rose, and a little splotch of pink formed on each cheek. Adorable. Seriously.
“Really.”
“Hey, Cher, you ready to wander some more?” Andi interrupted them, and Cherry nodded. She squeezed Ty’s shoulder.
“I mean it, okay?”
They nodded and smiled big, and Cherry felt like she’d done something right. She fell into step next to Andi as they left the Pride booth and wandered the festival, looking for more photo ops.
“You offer to help out Ty?” Andi asked as they stood in line at a food truck specializing in poutine that she’d been dying to try.
“They seemed like they could use a nudge.”
Andi nodded, her hair, still lavender, swooping over one eye. “They’re a good kid. I’m glad you stepped in.” She reached for the paper bowl that was handed to her. It held a mountain of fries with curds of melty cheese in and on and around them, all of it smothered in brown gravy that smelled like heaven. “Oh my God, this looks incredible. Can you take a couple shots?”
That Saturday was amazing. It was everything Cherry wanted to do with her life, and she couldn’t wait to get home and edit. Sift through all the shots, all the video, find the right stuff, use the perfect filters, and post. As she walked along next to Andi and took shots of her, posed so Andi could return the favor, she thought about how the day was damn near perfect.
