After several weeks of training, I was finally allowed to meet the three dolphins that had just arrived at Egmont Zoo. As I drove there early on a Saturday morning, my mind was racing, thinking of how cute it would be to play with them every day. I headed down Ocean Avenue, still imagining what they might be like and hoping that I wouldn't get stuck in traffic again. I didn't want anything to delay my meeting with the dolphins.

I yawned as my GPS directed me, still exhausted from the night before. Aditi and I, along with some freshmen, were up until two in the morning playing D&D. One of the freshmen had agreed to be our DM, so I got a chance to use my extensive knowledge of spells as a druid. It was a blast, and I couldn't wait to play again the next week, but even Dungeons and Dragons couldn't compare to playing with dolphins.

Thankfully, I didn't run into too much traffic, and I made it to the dolphin exhibit on time. When I got there, Claudia was inside, standing next to the pool. I spotted one of the dolphins immediately. The majestic creature was leaping in and out of the water, full of energy even at this time of day. I watched the dolphin in awe.

Claudia waved to me, and I walked over to her, still watching the dolphin. In fact, I crashed right into Claudia. "Sorry!" I exclaimed. "I wasn't paying attention."

Claudia laughed and said, "It's okay, Dani." She gestured toward the dolphin that was jumping around. "That's McCoy. He's been acting like this ever since he arrived. We can't get him to calm down."

"Where are the other two? I thought you said that there were three."

"They're in the other pool right now. You'll meet them soon. Would you like to feed McCoy?"

"I'd love to," I said, barely able to contain my excitement.

"My assistant is getting food for the dolphins right now," Claudia explained. "He should be back soon."

All of a sudden, a man in his twenties with shaggy dark hair emerged from a supply closet, carrying a bucket. I hadn't seen his face in years, but I recognized him immediately. His appearance had barely changed at all. "Tommy?" I said. "What are you doing here?"

"I work here," Tommy said. "What are you doing here, Dani?"

"I always thought that you started managing another band or something after the Love Martyrs broke up," I said.

Tommy laughed. "After those rumors got out?" he said. "It would have been impossible to get another job in the music industry, so I moved to Egmont Beach. Again, why are you here?"

"I go to Egmont College, and I'm working here too. Claudia hired me to help out."

I wanted to say something more. If I had the nerve, I would have told him that they weren't just rumors. I would have told him what I knew - somebody needed to hear the truth after all this time. Instead, I answered his question and kept it all buried, just like I had for the last four years.

"I see that you two already know each other," Claudia said with a slight smile.

"I used to manage her band," Tommy explained in a voice that clearly indicated that he didn't want to discuss it further. Honestly, neither did I.

He then handed me a fish from the bucket. I still wasn't over the shock of seeing Tommy again at the Egmont Zoo, of all places. In fact, it was probably the first time that I had seen him without Blake by his side. The two of them were inseparable in my memory.

I tried to forget about the past for a moment and focus on McCoy. I held out the fish, and McCoy darted toward it. He jumped up into the air to yank the fish out of my hand, and he swallowed it in one huge gulp. "That was so cool!" I said as McCoy swam away.

Tommy was less amused. "Let's go into the other pool and feed Kirk and Spock."

"Who named these dolphins?" I asked, laughing.

"Some Trekkie at the zoo in Tampa," Claudia said as she led Tommy and I into the other pool. She then gestured toward a dolphin listlessly floating at the surface. "That's Spock," she said. There was another dolphin deeper in the water, flinging himself against the tank wall over and over again. "That's Kirk," she said. "None of the three dolphins were treated well at the zoo in Tampa. These two are having a particularly hard time adjusting."

"I think there might be something wrong with McCoy too," Tommy added. "There's something fake about the way he seems so bright and happy all the time."

I reached into the bucket, grabbed a fish, and held it out over the water, but neither dolphin seemed to want it. I waited for several minutes, hoping that one of them would come and get it like McCoy did, but nothing happened. Eventually, I just started tossing fish into the water, and Spock moved slightly to eat the one that was right in front of him, while Kirk kept on ramming his body against the tank wall. My heart broke as I watched him, and I had to turn away and stare out the window at the curious zoo visitors trying to get a look into the new dolphin exhibit.

"What should I do next?" I asked Claudia.

"You can help Tommy clean the water filter," Claudia said.

Tommy groaned, and I followed him to the water filter. "Cleaning the water filter is the worst," he explained. "Claudia, can I play some music while I do this?"

"Go ahead," Claudia said.

Tommy ran off, and when he came back, loud guitar pop was playing throughout the dolphin exhibit. I immediately recognized the tune - it was one of the songs that Blake had played for me when I was in middle school.

I want a girl who will laugh for no one else

When I'm away, she puts her makeup on the shelf

When I'm away, she never leaves the house

I want a girl who laughs for no one else

I don't know why, but that song has always made me feel a little uncomfortable. I told this to Blake once, and he laughed and explained that it was a satire. "They're making fun of controlling guys who won't let their girlfriends leave the house," he said. "It's brilliant, really."

Years later, after my friendship with Blake had been irrevocably destroyed, Aditi asked me during a game of D&D what I was looking for in a boy, since she had just spent the last fifteen minutes telling me about how she wanted her first college boyfriend to have perfectly symmetrical features and an eight-pack.

"I'm not interested in boys," I told her.

"Oh," Aditi said, surprised, but not judgmental. "What are you looking for in a girl then?"

I thought about it for a few minutes and then said, "I want a girl who laughs for everyone else."

Aditi seemed confused, but I had told her the truth. I wanted a girl who could find joy in the smallest things, a girl who could share that joy with the world, a girl who knew what made her happy and would pursue it with or without me. I wanted a girl who was free-spirited, independent, and brave, everything that the girlfriend in the song wasn't.

I looked toward Tommy, wondering if he knew how many times Blake and I had listened to "No One Else" together. He didn't look back at me, bobbing his head up and down to the beat as he scrubbed the water filter. I finally broke this ice and asked, "How did you end up with this job?"

"I thought I already explained this to you," Tommy grumbled.

"No, you really didn't."

"I almost had a job as a manager at Sony," Tommy said suddenly. "They were impressed by my work with you and Blake, and they were about to hire me until they did a background check. They Googled the Love Martyrs, and as soon as they saw what that girl said about Blake, they told me that they had found someone who was 'a better fit for the job.' Now I'm stuck cleaning dolphin shit out of a water filter."

"But you get to play with dolphins. I know people who would kill to get to do that every day."

"You don't understand, Dani. Music was just a side thing for you, but it was everything for Blake and I. That lying Japanese bitch ruined any chance we had of making it."

I wanted to say something again, but I stayed quiet and helped Tommy clean the water filter. After a few minutes of awkward silence, I asked, "Do you ever wish that you could go back and manage the Love Martyrs again?"

"All the time," Tommy said.

A few hours went by, and Tommy and I did various menial tasks in the dolphin exhibit, from helping Claudia perform a checkup on each dolphin to cleaning up the deck. Every time I glanced at Tommy, I thought about what he had said. Tommy hadn't done anything wrong, despite his hurtful words. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now he was stuck with a job that he hated. Had the same thing happened to Blake? I hadn't even spoken to him in four years, so there was no way to know.

When it was time to leave, I said goodbye to Claudia and headed out of the zoo and into the parking lot. My first day with the dolphins had been nothing like I had expected, and strangely enough, I wanted nothing more than to go back to my dorm in Wallace Hall and lie down. For the first two years I was there, the college had been safe, and I wasn't sure why this year was different. I never had to think about Madeline or Tommy or worst of all, Blake.

Speak of the devil.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him leaning on the hood of his red Mazda. He looked almost exactly the same as he had when I saw in high school. The only difference was that his hair was a lighter, more of a pale pink than the hot pink that it had been when he was in Love Martyrs. I turned my head to get a better look at him, but when his eyes met mine, I quickly looked away and got into my car.

I quickly buckled my seatbelt and drove out of the parking lot, but when I looked into the rearview mirror, I saw that the red Mazda was right behind me. I took a left turn at the next light, heading back to Egmont College, but when I looked back again, he was still there. It was as if Blake was following me. However, when I took a right turn at the next light, he went straight. Maybe we just happened to be going in the same direction, I thought.

I parked the car and walked to Wallace Hall. On my way there, I wondered if I was just imagining things. Maybe seeing Tommy again and hearing that Weezer song had made me overly nervous about seeing Blake, so my mind had conjured him up out of thin air, like a manifestation of my worst nightmare. Maybe it was just someone who looked like him, and I was mistaken about everything. Maybe I was going crazy from sleep deprivation. It wouldn't be the first time that had happened at Egmont. There was no way that I had really seen Blake. How would he have even gotten to Florida? Last I had heard, he was still living in Cleveland. Blake couldn't possibly have come here just to hang out in the parking lot of the Egmont Zoo.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Blake wasn't always like this.

When I was a freshman in high school, Blake and I had PE together, and there was a Wii in the fitness center. Every time we went to the fitness center, which was quite often, since the teacher couldn't be bothered to schedule anything more exciting, Blake and I played Just Dance. While the football players were lifting weights and everyone else was pretending like they were exercising on a stationary bike and not just playing on their phone, Blake and I danced like nobody was watching and made silly jokes about every single dance routine in the game.

About a month into the school year, Blake discovered the greatest song in the whole game: Rasputin by Boney M. It was just about the only song that we hadn't tried yet, and when Blake clicked on it, a bearded man in a fur hat and a long coat popped up on the screen, with St. Basil Cathedral in the background. The song started, and we tried our best to follow the man with the fur hat through his ridiculously stereotypical dance moves. Even before the lyrics began, Blake and I were cracking up, but it got even better when the chorus began.

This song had the phrase "Russia's greatest love machine" in the chorus. I'm not kidding. You can't make stuff like this up.

Blake and I couldn't actually dance after we heard that. We were laughing too hard to follow along with the dance routine, and we ended up getting one star on our dancing. "Who cares?" Blake said when he saw our score. "I'd give that song five stars!"

After that, we played "Rasputin" every time we were in the fitness center. The joke never seemed to get old, even after nearly two years of playing that song over and over again. It felt like Blake and I had discovered the hidden gem of Just Dance, if one could consider a corny Eurodance tune about a Russian historical figure a hidden gem. To us, however, "Rasputin" was so absurd that it worked. It was a song that we could dance and scream along to, and nobody but us would understand why we loved it so much.

Sometime during my sophomore year, I was at Blake's house, and we were singing along to Rasputin again. By that point, we both knew every lyric by heart.

"This man's just got to go!" declared his enemies

But the ladies begged, "Don't you try to do it, please"

No doubt this Rasputin had lots of hidden cars

Though he was a brute, they just fell into his arms...

Blake stopped suddenly. "Wait a second, Dani," he said. "Lots of hidden cars?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's the lyric, right?"

"No, it's 'lots of hidden charms.'"

"I always thought that it was 'lots of hidden cars.' Maybe Rasputin had a huge parking garage filled with cars or something, and that's why all of the women loved him."

Blake laughed and then asked, "Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Cars weren't even invented yet."

"It's not like 'Rasputin' is the most historically accurate song in the world."

"It's not, but 'charms' and 'arms' rhyme. 'Cars' and 'arms' don't."

"I get it, Blake," I said. "I just misheard the lyrics. Can you give me a break?"

He didn't give me a break. The next day at school, he gestured toward one of the popular girls in our PE class, sipping on her frappuccino instead of actually working out, and whispered to me, "I bet she has lots of hidden cars." I laughed so hard that the girl turned around and gave me a strange look, and I reminded myself that even if she had heard what Blake said, she wouldn't have understood the joke.

Another time, we were in a parking garage in the city, and as we searched for Blake's car, I said, "I told you that Rasputin had lots of hidden cars!"

It went on like that for a long time, right up until the day that our friendship ended. Every time something happened that had anything to do with charms or cars, one of us would say something about "lots of hidden cars," and we would both burst out laughing. Even now, sometimes I'm tempted to make that joke, but then I remember that there's nobody left in my life who would get it.

They took the Wii in the fitness center away after Blake graduated from McKinley. In a way, that was the beginning of the end.

I hummed "Rasputin" to myself as I entered Wallace Hall, looking back to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating again. Blake wasn't there, which only made me even more convinced that I hadn't really seen him in the parking lot at the Egmont Zoo. There were a million reasons why he couldn't have been there, even though I usually trusted what I saw. I opened the door to my dorm, and I crashed onto my bed, ready to be done with the day. However, I soon decided to go onto my computer and see if there was anything new on Twitter. After scrolling through my feed, I found myself typing "Joyce Nielsen" into the search bar.

My interactions with Joyce up until that point could have been counted on one hand. We had been in the same group in biology a couple of times, and once, I had asked her if she wanted to come to D&D. She politely declined, telling me that there was an NGO director on campus, and she wanted to hear her speak.

Aditi told me not to worry about it. "Dungeons and Dragons isn't for everyone," she said. I disagreed, but she also mentioned that adding another person to the party might make the game a little bit unwieldy, which was definitely true. Our D&D group had grown a great deal since the first week of school.

I found her quickly - there was only one Joyce Nielsen on Twitter who looked anything like the girl in my biology class. In her profile picture, she was wearing the same T-shirt that she had worn on the first day of school, and she was drinking from a coffee mug that said "I've Got 99 Problems and the White Heteronormative Patriarchy Is Basically All of Them." I had never seen a more beautiful picture of a woman drinking coffee in my life.

I clicked on her profile picture, and read her bio.

20 year old college student from Miami, FL. Triple major in English, Music, and Women's Studies (#GoEgmontPanthers). Intersectional feminist. Coffee is my one true love.

I scrolled through her most recent Tweets, most of which were really retweets. There was a little bit of everything on that page, from a post singing the praises of the Brontë sisters to a video of a woman playing the violin with one arm to a news story about something that had happened in Denmark to a recipe for vegan chili. It was all a little bit overwhelming.

I decided to take a look at the pictures that Joyce had posted on Twitter. Some of them didn't tell me much about her: a photo of the Miami skyline, a blurry snapshot of the "Egmont College: Not Your Ordinary College Experience" sign, a picture of her friend's cat. Occasionally, I spotted a photo of her. There was one with her and another girl who went to Egmont, laughing in a dorm room plastered with posters. Another one was of Joyce with a huge group of people who looked like her, clearly on some sort of family trip. She had written "We're having a great time visiting Abuela and Abuelo in Managua this week!" There were a few from the previous year's pride parade, mostly pictures that Joyce had taken of other people. My favorite photo was the only one where Joyce was alone. She was curled up on a sofa, looking lost in thought as she read a book that could have been used as a door stopper instead.

As far as I could tell from her Twitter account, Joyce Nielsen was almost perfect. She was everything that I wished I could be. Joyce could put her love for chocolate aside for her morals. She listened to contemporary classical, which she insisted wasn't an oxymoron in one of her posts. She worked hard and played even harder. She embraced everything new and old fashioned. She was almost definitely out of my league, but instead of being intimidated by her, I was intrigued.

Social media tends to present that sort of idealized image of a person, and I usually knew better than to trust it. However, when it came to Joyce, I wanted to know what else there was to her beyond that Twitter page. I just needed to muster up the nerve to actually talk to her.

I decided that following her on Twitter would be a good first step. I briefly looked over my account, imagining what Joyce might think if she saw it for the first time. She would see the picture of me standing next to the Gulf, with my blemished pale skin, my overly messy short hair, and the tank top that didn't quite fit right. I considered changing my profile picture, but there probably wasn't another picture that looked better. No matter which photo I used, I couldn't compare to Joyce.

I skimmed through my most recent posts, and checked to see what I had posted when I had first gotten the account. Everything was exactly as I thought it would be. My first post was "Hey look, I got a Twitter account!", and it was from June 2nd, 2015, after the band broke up.

I've been careful to erase all evidence that I was ever in The Love Martyrs. After it was all over, I deleted my Facebook account, my Twitter account, and everything else. I needed a fresh start. Now, according to the Internet, I'm just a normal college student who didn't have any social media accounts until June 2015, which conveniently happens to be when Dani Blue from the Love Martyrs deleted all of hers. It's like I'm a superheroine with a secret identity, and a part of me loves that, even considering the circumstances that led up to it.

My current Twitter had its imperfections, but I hoped that Joyce wouldn't care. I clicked the follow button, but I realized that it might not make a difference. Joyce had a ton of followers. What was one more? I did post some cute wildlife photos sometimes, but that was about the only reason why Joyce might care that I had followed her.

Three minutes after I followed Joyce, she followed me back.

While I was still freaking out over the fact that Joyce had followed me, she sent me a message. "Hi Dani! You're in my bio class, right?"

"Yes, that's me," I replied.

"Thanks for the follow!" Joyce wrote.

"No problem."

Joyce didn't respond after that, and I wondered if I had done something wrong. In reality, she was probably just busy, but I managed to convince myself that messaging her "no problem" had somehow offended her, and now she never wanted to speak to me again.

After several minutes of staring at my feed, waiting for a new message to arrive, I closed my laptop, and Blake drifted back into my mind. If I hadn't really seen Blake in the parking lot at Egmont Zoo, then what had happened to him? If Tommy couldn't get a job in the music industry after the Love Martyrs' breakup, then Blake definitely couldn't have joined another band. I felt bad for my former best friend, but I remembered that this was Blake that I was talking about. He didn't deserve my pity.

I thought about Joyce again and how I had scrolled through her Twitter feed, desperate to learn something new about the girl that I was too scared to talk to. At least Blake would have had the nerve to go up to her and start a conversation. Instead, I spent my days feeding traumatized dolphins named after Star Trek characters and cyberstalking Joyce Nielsen.

Sometimes, I wondered if I was any better than Blake.