You were the kind of girl who explained memes with full etymology and citations. Who won the spelling bee and had to hide in the bathroom from the shame of it.

You hated it. Because nerdy wasn’t hot. Hot was effortless. Hot was chaotic eyeliner and being sarcastic-funny while pretending not to care and saying things like “I hate reading” while wearing a crop top.

You didn’t have that. So you made it up. At 3am in a cursed google doc, you invented characters who were everything you weren’t. Sanded them smooth, gave them tragic pasts and tattoos and all.

And then at parties where you knew no one, you introduced yourself as them. Not because you were cool. Because you were anything but. Because you were terrified someone might meet the *real* you and leave.

So you lied first. Stayed two steps ahead. (Prepped for that too, you did. Memorized fake backstories the way other people studied for finals. Which, to be fair, you also did.)

Once you were Lucia, the philosophy student from Melbourne with an accent you put together from a half-watched TikTok and the help of many a drink. You quoted Foucault and completely mispronounced it, but said it with such conviction no one dared correct you. A finance bro joke-proposed to you on a rooftop with a vodka soda. You giggled and said, “I don’t believe in marriage,” but actually went home and googled “can people tell if you’re faking an accent?”

Then there was Jackie, who worked at McDonald’s by day and “raced bikes with the boys” at night. You once told a guy you had a scar from laying down your motorcycle at 60 mph. You actually got it tripping over your mom’s friend’s cat.

Alyssa was an indie film actress. You said you’d just wrapped a short about a woman grieving something she can’t name. (She can’t name it because you never wrote the script.) You cried on cue at a bonfire to sell it. You practiced for weeks in the mirror. Someone told you you had “Juliette Binoche energy.” You nodded solemnly, then later frantically searched: Juliette Binoche… who??

And then there was Kayla, the mysterious one who never offered details. She wore boots that hurt and answered questions with riddles.

“What do you do?”
“I disappear.”

“What does that even mean?”
“You tell me.”

Kayla got offered free weed and two internships. You left with neither and got lost on the subway home.

People think nerds can’t lie well. And usually, they’re kinda right. But you weren’t lying to impress, you were lying to escape. To try on a different kind of power, see what it might feel like to be looked at like you belonged, like you mattered.

And you did pull it off. Kind of. For a few minutes, a few hours, maybe a whole night. But they never stayed, because even in costume, *you* didn’t believe you were worth knowing.

The irony, of course, is that the real you, the one writing bad poetry at 2am, annotating books like love letters, falling in love with anyone who said “ubiquitous,” was always the most interesting one in the room.

You just hadn’t met people who spoke your language yet. But you would.
You stopped lying eventually. Not because you got caught (you definitely did, and more than once) but because you got tired. Tired of playing dress-up. Tired of disappearing. Tired of watching someone else get credit for your spark.

Now when someone asks what you do, you say, without shame, “I’m a software engineer. And sometimes I write.” No accent, no character sheet, nothing.
Sometimes people look bored when you say it. But sometimes they stay anyway.

Which, I think, means you won.

Style score: 73%