At seventeen he had switched to movies, and now, at twenty-five, he already had one Academy Award under his belt and was one of the highest paid actors in the world. He started out on a family sitcom called No More, No Less (hence my Twitter username) and graduated to a string of other highly successful TV shows after that one was finally canceled. Like I said, Chase was an extremely talented actor, easily one of the best in Hollywood, and he’d been in the business since he was four years old. My first thought was creating that list wouldn’t be hard. I was about to turn off my phone when I noticed Chase had tweeted again. I’d seen these flame wars before, and I wasn’t interested in being their target. People with usernames like and started noticing our conversation and, predictably, sent me hate tweets, asking how dare I be mean to Chase, I should die, my mother should have killed herself before I was born, blah, blah, blah. But sometimes it made it impossible to read context. I was anti-emoji, so I appreciated that about him. Was he upset? Amused? Chase never used emojis, unlike his Chasers, who treated them like decorations and their tweets were Christmas trees. With shaking hands, I tweeted him right back. But I was so excited that Chase Covington had actually responded that I couldn’t help myself. That I should come up with something witty and amazing so he’d never forget me. He tweeted pretty regularly and tried to engage with his fan base, but how on earth had he seen what I had written? And responded so quickly? He had like ten million followers on Twitter. My heart froze in my chest, and I might have blacked out for a minute. I went to push D ELETE, and this happened. As I scrolled through the responses, I realized I was the only one who wasn’t heaping praise on him.Īnd it would be only a matter of time before my fellow fans started attacking me. Of the OMG I luv u have my babies! variety.

Every other response was typical of his fangirls, who called themselves Chasers. And apparently I was the only one who thought he was kind of flat in it. The film was a depiction of Caesar Augustus (known to his family as Octavius) as a young man and his rise to power in Rome. In my defense my favorite movie star, Chase Covington, had asked: Do you know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you’ve reacted and said something maybe you shouldn’t have? As soon as I pushed the T WEET button, I regretted it.

#Starstruck by Sariah Wilson