Melanie Moreno sidles up to the bar at Los Angeles’s Garage on Motor and decides on a Guinness. As she waits for the two-part pour to settle, Moreno — wearing distressed jeans, a silky black camisole, and a stack of jangling bracelets — scans the team pennants decorating the walls. The Garage isn’t strictly a Philadelphia sports bar, but it’s a known watering hole for Eagles expats; as a card-carrying Birds fan, Moreno feels right at home. “If you were born in Philly, you must be an Eagles fan,” she declares. “You must bleed green.” Moreno recently posted an Instagram carousel captioned “the harder you party the longer you live,” but she tells me she prefers hanging out at bars over the club. “I love how intimate it is,” she says.
It’s noon on a Thursday and the Garage is relatively empty, with only a few elder bros politely sipping Coors. Moreno welcomes the peace. In the six weeks since Love Island USA concluded its season-eight run on Peacock, Moreno, who placed third alongside Sincere Rhea, has gone from juggling three jobs to managing 5.2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. The other week, she heard someone call her name at a Malibu mall. “Then everybody looked. I saw the whole mall run up to me,” she says, still bewildered. “To be fair, I had the pink hair,” she points out, referring to the cotton-candy-hued wig she started wearing shortly after the show ended.
