Chapter 1: Projecting

August 2013 (six months earlier...)

"You're not obsessed. You're projecting."

"Projecting?" Tessa looked up from the thick coil of auburn hair that she'd been braiding and unbraiding for the past half hour. She met eyes uncertainly with her psychotherapist, Dr. Regan, sitting on the other side of the bedroom.

"It's a common defense mechanism," Dr. Regan said. Her tone remained emotionless as usual - the human equivalent of a white noise machine - but she shifted uncomfortably as she spoke. She sat perched in a low-slung pink beanbag chair with her legs crossed at the ankles, striving to maintain a professional demeanor. Normally, she only met with clients in her office, but she'd made an exception for Tessa.

Tessa's gaze dropped to the older woman's pantyhose, bunching at the knees, and she couldn't help but feel a grudging admiration. It took some serious mental fortitude to brave the heat of the West Texas summer dressed in nylons. Tessa herself wore nothing but a thin tank top and a pair of cotton sleep shorts that barely skimmed the tops of her slender thighs.

"Projection," Dr. Regan continued. "We use that term when an individual takes her own thoughts and feelings and attributes them to another person – in your case, to a celebrity."

"But I've never met Eric Thorn. I've never even been to one of his concerts."

Dr. Regan picked up Tessa's thought journal and flipped to the beginning. She made no comment on the drawings scribbled across the cover: a hodgepodge of hearts, woodland creatures, and eyeless human faces. Forget projection, Tessa thought, wrinkling her nose. They should probably discuss why she couldn't even stand her own doodle-people looking at her.

"Tell me about this." Her therapist indicated one of Tessa's early entries. "What piqued your interest enough to write something down about him?"

"About Eric?" Tessa peered across the room at the journal page in question. "I was watching TMZ, I guess. They'd caught him walking around New York City with some actress from Pretty Little Liars. So naturally they assumed that he was dating her."

"But that's not what you wrote down."

"Of course not. Have you seen TMZ? It's like fanfiction but less believable."

Dr. Regan raised an eyebrow from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. "Tell me what you wrote instead."

Tessa reached to take the journal from her therapist's hands. She felt a vague unease as she glanced down at the page. She remembered how the grainy paparazzi footage had held her transfixed. Eric and that girl. . . . He hadn't looked like he was on a date. Not even close. The video showed him walking briskly, with a furtive glance over his shoulder as he picked up the pace. Then the camera zoomed in close. Those piercing blue eyes of his had looked straight out of the screen. And the look on his face. . . .

"He didn't look like some happy guy with a new girlfriend." Tessa told her therapist. "Not to me."

"What did it look like to you?"

Tessa closed her eyes and dropped her voice to a near whisper. "Like he was scared out of his mind."

"Good Tessa." Dr. Regan nodded her encouragement. "And what do you think that might say about your own state of mind?"

"You mean, I just imagined it? I'm actually the one who's scared out of my mind?"

Dr. Regan leaned forward intently. She tucked a strand of greying hair behind her ear.

"I suppose that's possible," Tessa said slowly, her eyebrows drawing together. "That's one of my worst fears, I guess. Walking around some crowded city sidewalk, not knowing if I'm being followed. . . ."

Dr. Regan took back the thought journal and flipped it closed. "Excellent. Keep going."

"It wasn't just that one time, though," Tessa said, thinking aloud. "I was curious about him after that, so I started watching a bunch of his stuff. Interview clips and stuff. They're all like that - especially the recent ones. It's weird. It's like he's pretending to be happy, but he's faking it. Every time he looks straight into the camera, you can see this little glimmer of fear come through."

"Fear of what?"

"Like he feels haunted by something. Haunted, or . . . " Tessa broke off, searching for the right word. Her eyes slid over the journal cover and landed on one of the baby deer she'd drawn, running for its life. "Hunted, maybe? I don't know."

"That's very interesting, Tessa."

"Really? It's interesting?" Tessa let out a disbelieving laugh. Dr. Regan didn't even know the half of it. The truth was, Tessa couldn't stop thinking about him. Every time she sat down to do her mindfulness exercises, she just ended up writing stories about Eric Thorn. She'd already filled up two whole journals with all the elaborate plots she'd imagined. "It can't be healthy, right?"

Dr. Regan pulled out a yellow legal pad and jotted a quick note. "You may feel safer exploring your own anxieties by assigning them to someone else. That can be quite useful, actually, as long as you recognize what you're doing."

"But why did I choose him? Why Eric Thorn of all people?"

"You tell me, Tessa. Why do you think you've fixated on him?"

Tessa felt her face heat up. She'd considered herself a fan since his debut album a few years ago, but her fascination had reached a whole new level in recent weeks. Just the thought of his name now was enough to send her heart thumping. She'd taken down all the other posters and photographs that used to decorate the pale yellow walls of her bedroom, but she'd left her Eric Thorn concert poster in its place of honor above her bed.

Tessa glanced at it over her shoulder, and her eyes lingered on the familiar image: Eric performing on stage, with an electric guitar slung across the sculpted muscles of his chest. He had his head thrown back, eyes closed, lost in the music. . . .

"I don't know." Tessa said with a sheepish laugh. "Maybe because he's hot?"

Dr. Regan squinted across the room at Eric's sweaty torso. "I'm guessing there's a little more to it than that," she said. "But let's leave it as something for you to think about for our next session. Now, what about your desensitization exercises? How did it go this week?"

Tessa bit nervously at her thumbnail, already chewed down to the nub. Her therapist filled the silence as she hesitated.

"Last week you were able to sit downstairs in the living room with your mom and your friend, Scott, for half an hour."

"Yeah," Tessa muttered.

"And your goal for this week was to try touching the front door knob of the house."

"That didn't exactly happen." Tessa sighed. She knew that she'd messed up. She'd been in therapy for months now, ever since she left college halfway through her freshman year and fled home to the safety of her childhood bedroom. It had taken her forever just to summon the courage to step outside her bedroom door, but the past week had been a huge step backward. "I've just been feeling really overwhelmed this week," she said. "There's this . . . thing . . . happening. It's stupid."

Dr. Regan frowned. "What thing?"

"Nothing. It's just something that happened on Twitter."

The therapist stopped scribbling notes and looked up in surprise. "You're on Twitter?"

"I'm really sorry," Tessa said. She hadn't mentioned her Twitter account before. It hadn't seemed relevant. She rarely ever tweeted nowadays. But this past week, Twitter had somehow managed to occupy most of her waking thoughts. "I know what you're going to say. I should probably deactivate so I can focus on my exercises better."

"No, Tessa. That would only isolate you further." Dr. Regan jotted furiously as she spoke. "Any kind of social interaction can potentially hold therapeutic value."

"Really?" Tessa glanced skeptically at her phone, resting on the bedside table in a red leather cellphone case. She'd left it there, face down, so that she wouldn't be distracted by any new Twitter notifications during the hour-long session.

Dr. Regan nodded. "Our goal is for you to interact with other people in the outside world of course, but social media can serve as a positive first step."

"OK. Well, that's pretty much all I did all week, so . . ."

"Do you have followers? People with whom you interact?"

Tessa laughed. What a question. If anyone had asked her a few days ago, the answer would have been different: A couple hundred followers, who mostly ignored her existence. But when Tessa had last checked her account this morning, the follower count stood at 30K. Tessa still felt a little dizzy, thinking of it. Thirty thousand followers. Thirty thousand sets of eyes, watching her every tweet. Her emotions kept swinging back and forth like a pendulum, from terror at the thought of all of them, to an irrational desire for more. Her fingers itched to check her phone again now. How many more had she gained in the time since she and Dr. Regan started talking?

"It's kind of intense," she said, as she picked up the phone and glanced down.

Tessa H
@TessaHeartsEric
Followers: 30.1 K

She showed the screen to her therapist.

"Wow." Dr. Regan's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. She wrote something else on her pad.

"My account basically blew up this week."

"What happened?"

Tessa fiddled with the edge of her bedspread where the hem had started to fray. She avoided her therapist's eyes. "It started with a story I've been writing. About Eric. I posted one online last weekend. I called it Obsessed." She watched a row of stitching come undone as she pulled at a loose thread. "It was supposed to be a little joke at my own expense, you know?"

"And what happened?"

"I started this hashtag, #EricThornObsessed." Tessa looked up. "Do you know what a hashtag is?"

"I'm familiar with the concept." Dr. Regan's voice remained impassive but her eyes lit with amusement, and Tessa bit her lip. She generally assumed that anyone Dr. Regan's age didn't even know how to download an app, but she must have misjudged her therapist. Tessa's mouth curved into a shy smile as she continued.

"I was trying to get other fans of his to read it. So I made all these tweets with sexy pictures of him and the link to my story. And it just . . . blew up somehow. It happened so fast. First one of the bigger Eric Thorn fan accounts retweeted me. And then @FangrlProblem retweeted. And then @_LadyBoners retweeted. And then—I forget after that. I think it was @TeenThings? Or maybe @GirlPosts? One of those huge accounts that everyone follows. And then it was everywhere after that. I think it hit number one on Wednesday? Maybe Thursday?" Tessa swiped across the screen of her phone and held it out to Dr. Regan again. "See? These are all the hashtags trending worldwide."

And there, still hovering third on the list, were the words Tessa had first typed into her phone six days ago, now amplified by more voices than she even dared to fathom:

#EricThornObsessed
21.8 million tweets

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{Banner Image thanks to starhavens}