The Other K.B.

"Is this the one?" I took a photo of the secondhand Nokia I'd just bought and dropped it in the comments under pop star Julian Cole's post, the one offering $25,000 for a phone he'd lost.

Then I found something else. My own phone number from high school, saved right there in that phone's contacts. Ninetynineplus unsent texts sitting in the drafts folder.

I opened them up. All of it was the same thing: one boy confessing, over and over, and never once out loud. Had to be somebody I knew from school, I figured.

Chapter 1 Nokia cameras were having a moment again, so I splurged on a blue Nokia N8 on eBay, purely for the photos. In high school I couldn't afford one.

Only a handful of kids in my class had them, their photos always came out the best, and I spent three solid years being jealous.

Back then I thought the thing was basically a real camera. Except it had barely arrived before the seller changed his mind and messaged me through eBay asking me to send it back.

He even offered me $250 for the trouble. By the time I saw Julian Cole's post, the whole internet had already lost its mind. [Celebrities are on another level.

Twentyfive grand to get one old phone back.] [Holy crap, twentyfive grand out of nowhere.

I'm about to drive to my mom's house, dig out my old one, and try to claim it.] [Whichever lucky person ended up with Julian's phone is about to be rich!] [There's got to be something important in there.

Celebrities are rich, not stupid.] Overnight, that model went through the roof on eBay. I checked, and the same one was listing for $125 more than I'd paid.

A lot of people posted photos trying to claim it. His team didn't confirm a single one. Then Julian posted the specifics. [There's a moon sticker on the back.

The drafts folder has my high school crush in it, a lot of texts I never sent. This phone really means everything to me.

Please, you guys.] Still scrolling the trending topics, I turned the phone over. There it was. A moon sticker.

Those stickers were everywhere at our school for a while back then, and the moon was one of the designs everybody wanted.

People stuck their favorites on notebook covers, phone cases, water bottles, the inside of their locker doors. Your own private signature. What were the odds.

I had accidentally bought Julian Cole's phone. I went back into the drafts folder.

Sure enough, everything Julian had felt at seventeen was in there, and every message opened with the same two letters. K.B.

Once I knew whose phone it was, the rest explained itself. Kayleigh Brennan. I knew exactly who that was.

She was the itgirl of our graduating class, the one the entire school could name, and she'd been in Julian's class.

Junior year a talent scout found her, signed her, and sent her to Los Angeles to study acting. After she left, I heard Julian took it hard for a while.

But I wasn't at school during that stretch, so I never saw it. Her debut went off without a hitch, and now she was a young actress with a real following.

Which technically made her and Julian colleagues. It was just that seeing those initials, I went blank for a second. Because my name sounds exactly like hers.

Hers is spelled Kayleigh. Mine is Kaylee. Out loud there's no difference at all, and the initials match too. K.B. Kayleigh Brennan was the one everyone was watching.

In high school the two of them hosted the Winter Showcase together, two years running. Plenty of people said they were made for each other.

Him talented, her gorgeous, the kind of pair that just looks right. And me? I just happened to have the same name as the girl Julian liked.

I stared at those two letters on the screen and something sour came up in my chest.

Nobody knew that in high school, I spent three years quietly in love with Julian Cole, who sat in the homeroom directly across the hall from mine.

Chapter 2 The summer we graduated, I worked up the nerve to write Julian a love letter. I never got the chance to give it to him. The news broke that he'd signed a record deal.

My roommate Gigi saw the lostandfound post and leaned over to look at my phone. "Kay, babe, look at Julian's post!" "If I'm remembering right, yesterday when we went out shooting, that Nokia you bought online had a moon sticker on the back." Her eyes lit up. "Twentyfive thousand dollars!

That is a fortune!" "Is my girl Kay about to be rich?!" Gigi was more worked up about it than I was. "Message him.

Message him right now!" "This is the closest I have ever been to Julian Cole." "Kay, babe, I love Julian so much.

While you're at it, could you get me a ticket to the show?" Gigi had been a stan since she was a kid, the selfappointed celebrity encyclopedia of our dorm.

After her last favorite got canceled, she'd gone all in on Julian.

She checked into the fan group chat on schedule every single day, was always in on the group push to get hate posts reported and taken down, and had his poster taped up over her bed.

That scumbag seller wanted to pocket the difference. In his dreams.

I made a burner account on X and went into the comments under Julian's post. [Is this the one?] It wasn't long before Julian DMed me. [Thank you so much! That's it!

When can we do the handoff?] Thinking about the career fair and the interviews still ahead of me, I typed back meekly. [I've got interviews coming up, so I can't really get away right now.] Julian: [I could come to you.

Can you give me an address?] Gigi saw that and got even more wound up.

While I was still working out how to answer, she took my phone out of my hand and answered for me. [Northbrook!] [Also, aren't you coming out here for a show?

Any chance you could throw in a concert ticket while you're at it?] On the other end, Julian took a long time to come back.

Julian: [Northbrook, huh?] sweetpeachcobbler: [Is something wrong?] Julian: [Northbrook's great. I've got an old classmate at Northbrook too.] I'd almost forgotten.

Grant Whitaker, Julian's best friend from high school, went to our school too.

After I joined a club I'd run into Grant now and then, and every time, I'd tense up before I could stop myself. Once he found out we'd gone to the same high school, he added me.

Every so often one of his posts would come up, sharing something about Julian.

Every few days the paparazzi caught Julian turning up in Northbrook and tried to track down whoever he was seeing. Every time, the guy in the photo turned out to be Grant.

Then Julian came back, no hesitation at all. [Just keep that phone safe for me. Forget one ticket, you can have two!] sweetpeachcobbler: [Deal.

See you in two weeks!] Before I was anywhere near ready, Gigi had locked in the date for me. Afterward, Julian screenshotted my comment and posted again. [Got lucky and found it.

Haven't gotten it back yet, but thank you all for showing me what the internet can do.] It took people a beat to catch up. [Oh my God, who is Julian Cole in love with?

He spent twentyfive grand getting one old phone back!] [Even guys that hot have unrequited crush problems?] [How lucky is the girl he likes?!] [Jules is so pure about this.

Liking one person for that many years!] The whole conversation swung somewhere else, fast. Now everyone had clocked it. Julian had spent years in high school in love with a girl.

My DMs were about to explode. Chapter 3 Gossip aggregator accounts were offering serious money for the contents of those texts.

One of his rivals went further and doubled it: $50,000 for the phone, purely to dig up "dirt" on him.

For a while there, the entire internet was hunting for the girl Julian had loved in high school.

The paparazzi followed the trail and found out how much Julian and Kayleigh Brennan talked in private, and the dating rumor shot straight to the top of trending.

Back when Kayleigh was first starting out, she'd let slip on a livestream that she and Julian had known each other for years. Nobody cared at the time.

Now that it mattered, people dug the clip back up. Everybody had something to say about it. [That's wild, Kayleigh actually knew Julian?

What are the odds.] [Kayleigh used to like his posts constantly.

Did none of you notice?] Then kids from their high school came forward to say the two of them had been the school's star hosting duo.

Add in the photos somebody found in the event album on the school website, and every last detail confirmed it. The girl at the center of this crush was Kayleigh Brennan.

And I was the one who'd known the truth this whole time. Looking at the pictures of them side by side, every one of those old teenage feelings came back up.

Like I was back in that summer. Junior year, Julian and Kayleigh got picked to host the Winter Showcase.

I was a student reporter for the school paper, so I had to go interview them beforehand. They were backstage running their script.

I recorded the interview and took a few candids, and the whole time I didn't dare look Julian straight in the face once.

It wasn't until I'd packed up my camera and started to stand that Julian, behind me, spoke. He said the name. I wasn't sure who he was calling.

Almost in the same instant, Kayleigh and I both turned around.

We answered at the exact same time. "Yeah?" Julian looked at me and asked, polite as anything, "Could I get your number?" My heart took off. I thought I'd misheard him.

I looked at him, not sure. Julian's eyes went to the camera in my hands, and he explained, "I want today's photos. So it's easy to reach you later." So that was it.

Julian wanted my number for the pictures of him and Kayleigh. My fingers clamped down on the hem of my shirt.

I held my face flat, and the little bit of light in my eyes went out on the spot.

Next to us, Kayleigh gave a shy smile. "Jules, if you like those, I'll do a photo booth strip at the mall this weekend and give you one." I put the feeling away and turned back to him, smiling. "Sure." Julian picked up the hosting script beside him and handed me a pen.

His hands were clean and longfingered, the tendons sharp under the skin, and his eyes had that bright teenage shine to them.

I took the script from him and carefully wrote my name and my phone number next to his.

Afraid the whole thing would go awkward, I made a joke of it. "Don't worry, I'll get the photos cleaned up for you… for you two." That was probably the closest I ever got to Julian.

The pictures I took of Julian and Kayleigh ended up running in the school paper. Nobody noticed that the reporter's byline on that story was mine.

Two weeks later, on the day of the handoff, Julian showed up exactly like he said he would.

Something came up for me and I had to go to an interview at the station, so I sent my other roommate Lulu to give him the phone, which also gave her a shot at meeting her idol.

Lulu grabbed me in a hug. "I love you so much, girl!" When I got back to the dorm after the interview, Lulu looked off. Like she'd just been dumped. I went over and asked her.

Chapter 4 "Meeting your idol didn't make you happy?" Lulu had her eyebrows pulled together, something clearly sitting heavy on her.

I was starting to worry when she jumped up laughing, so excited she couldn't hide a second of it. "Kay, babe, you are not going to believe this." "Julian actually gave me tickets to the show.

It's in a couple of days. Let's go together, okay?" I said yes without hesitating, because it was Julian's first concert. After this show, I really would be saying goodbye to him.

I'd just logged into my burner to scroll his posts in secret when a DM popped up. It was Julian.

He'd sent a picture of the Nokia's camera roll, and all of it was shots Lulu and I had taken of each other. Oh no. I'd been so busy I forgot to delete them.

This was mortifying, so I dropped straight into groveling. [I'm so sorry, I forgot to delete my photos and they're eating up your storage.] [Could you just wipe them for me?] A second later, Julian's reply came through. [I wanted to ask, do you know the girl in these photos?

I've been looking for her for a long time.] Was Julian mistaking me for Lulu? He must have thought the person behind this account was Lulu