I made friends with this girl a few months ago, and now it's starting to feel like she's using me as a substitute for her long-distance boyfriend

I'm not sure if I'm reading too far into things, and if I'm not, I'm not sure if I should feel flattered or uncomfortable.

A few months ago I met this girl (Chloe, for anonymity), a friend of a friend. I had been told about her before. Not really about her on her own, but about how she’s dating a very famous teen actor. Apparently they met at a philosophy camp, and since then it’s been a long distance relationship. I spoke to her briefly, and that was it. She lives a couple towns over, so I didn’t really expect to see her again anytime soon.

Me and the friends of mine who knew Chloe all play some instruments, and one night while out smoking we got talking about forming a band. It turns out they had a band with the girl that kinda fizzled out since they didn’t have a drummer. I told them I knew a few drummers who might be interested, and so it was decided then to reactivate the band thing with me and another friend added into it. 

The second time I met Chloe was supposed to be band practice at my house, and then going to a show in the city later that night, but she showed up way late and missed all the practice. It was a pretty heavy show, and only the second one I had been to at this point, but the pit wasn't crazy violent, and so we spent a ton of time in there, which is a pretty intimate way to get to know someone in my opinion. Between sets, someone mentioned a kid at school with the same first name as her boyfriend, and she perked up and started telling us all about him. She checked her phone and saw he had texted her asking if she wanted to face-time with him and Billie Eilish.

On the ride home, I took the middle seat, and Chloe sat down next to me and stretched her legs across my lap, saying she was gonna be my seatbelt. She really has a thing for getting comfortable in other peoples’ personal space, but usually I don’t mind. As mentioned earlier, she’s pretty into philosophy and stuff, and to a certain extent I am too, and since I was a little high it was pretty interesting conversation in the back of my friends car.

We got home and Chloe cut my hair (I had heard she does it for free, so I asked during the show). My hair is pretty long so I asked her to make it look like Jim Morrison’s. In one of the best compliments ever, she told me she had thought I looked just like him since she first saw me. She followed this up with the less flattering comment that I also looked a lot like her latest ex, and she even thought I was him when she first saw me.

My parents were gone that weekend so we stayed at my house for a while longer. Chloe doesn’t smoke, but she does drink, and one of my friends brought some rum. Chloe and I were talking to each other almost exclusively for the rest of the night, and at points she was leading me around to different rooms in my house to get away from the noise of other people.

I remember her complaining about how she's always the center of attention at social events, and how she feels like she has to manage her time between people. At the time, I thought this was just her ego talking (and I still think it was a little), but over time I would realize that it was also true. She truly has a magnetic personality, and people quite literally follow her around at functions. 

Around 2 AM Chloe decided her parents would be pissed if she stayed any longer, so it was time for the designated driver to make the long drive to and from her house, which was over an hour round-trip. Chloe, not wanting to say goodbye yet, asked if we could all pile back in the car with her for the ride, and so once again I was in the middle with legs as my seatbelt. We talked the whole way back, and then, once we got to her house, sat in the car another half hour or more talking. Eventually, though, she said goodbye and gave us each a big hug.

The band thing continued to develop. We booked some small gigs, and so practice became a rigidly scheduled thing. Most of us are pretty amateur musicians, but Chloe really had the least experience with any instruments, so naturally she became the vocalist. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have an intuitive sense of key or rhythm, but she’s able to recognize when something is off, so she has the ability to learn with some effort. Since most of the original material we were working on then was primarily written by me, it fell upon me to be the one to spend that extra time with her to get down the vocals. Sometimes she would come over and it would just be the two of us in my room. One night, we took a break outside in the yard, and we laid down next to each other talking for awhile, and when we were cold we came back in and laid on my bed. She told me her biggest fear was I would cut my hair short, work a 9-5, and start talking in a more proper way. I thought it was really sweet. I usually think of my self as pretty boring and normal, while she has a very flashy style, so it was nice to hear someone talk about me as this cool, unique person.

I often end up driving Chloe to and from the train station when she comes into town. My car is an old shitty electric with very limited mileage, so that’s as far as I can take her, but she likes public transit, so she doesn’t mind. We found out we have a lot of overlap in music taste, and even listened to the same cheesy stuff as kids, so many of these drives are non-stop karaoke. Once, she said she thought it must be a sign that the lyrics we remember or forget are more or less the same between us. I told her we probably just both remembered the most memorable parts and forgot the most forgettable parts and that it was nothing special. She told me to shut up.

Earlier this week, a mutual favorite artist played in our area and we saw them together. The whole day leading up to it Chloe was texting me, asking if I was excited, planning how to meet up, etc.. We ended up in the standing area, and between openers she would grab my wrist and drag me further into the crowd. We were hoping for some form of a push pit to arise in order for us to get closer to the stage, but it never happened. 

There was a long time before the headliners came out, and Chloe asked me to sit on the ground with her. I couldn’t tell if she felt it, but for me it was a little awkward. All these people were around us, and if you didn’t know any better, it would look like we were dating. As usual, she was a little more physical than the average person. If I made a joke at her expense, she would playfully elbow me, or, once that night, aggressively ruffle up my hair (it wasn’t totally uncommon for her to play with my hair either). She pulled out a sharpie and asked if she could draw on my shoes, and I said yes. She doodled for a bit, then on the top of my left toe box, the biggest canvas she could find, wrote her name in big cursive letters. I called her something like a self-centered narcissist and told her these were the only shoes I had, and that I had to wear them to school. She told me that was the point.

During the show, Chloe asked if she could get on my shoulders for a better view, and I let her up for a bit. After the first chorus of the song they were playing, a guy politely told me we were blocking his view, and, very embarrassed, I put her down. During the last song before the encore, they had some unique visuals, and she asked again for me to carry her on my shoulders. I told her it was “against my egalitarian values”, but she kept insisting. She was jumping up and down trying to get on top of me, and even put me in a playful chokehold, but I didn't cave. She gave me a pout, but calmed down. After a bit though, I told her she could go on my back for part of the song. Both times I put her down, she would give me a really tight hug. She always liked to hug people, and would tell me how good of a hugger I was (which was a first for me), but these times she would really bury her face in my shoulder.

Almost every time I see her she brings her boyfriend up at least once. Not like flexing him as a status symbol or anything, but just in the way people in loving relationships like to talk about how amazing they find their partner. Once, she did say something kind of weird: I was walking her to her train home, and with no prompting, she told me how she was completely loyal to him, and that she would never do anything with anyone else.

She also ends up telling me about her exes, usually with a framing like, "glad I got out of that!". Apparently she had broken up with her current boyfriend briefly, and it was in that period that she had met the ex who’s supposed to look just like me. He usually comes up when she’s telling me how much I remind her of Jim Morrison. She would tell him the same thing, and called him the Lizard King as a kind of pet name. As the story goes, when they broke up he was so distraught he ended up in a facility of some kind (another ex of hers apparently ended up the same way too), and he began to call himself the Lizard King while he was in there. She says I’m a lot cooler though, for what that’s worth.