How College Student's Smiling Mug Shot Went Viral — and What Her Parents Think (Exclusive)

• University of Georgia student Lily Stewart was arrested on March 8 after speeding twice in a matter of minutes on her way to a party

• She says she's since learned her lesson ("speeding kills") and is tickled by the fact that her smiling mug shot went seriously viral on social media

• “I look like a basic white girl, and I am. ... I think it's hilarious. One of them was like, ‘We know she has a monogram rain jacket’ — which I do”

Plenty of college students get arrested for doing stupid things like, say, speeding on a back road while running late to a party.

But few of them go viral — seriously viral, the kind of viral that gets covered in the national news.

That’s what happened to Lily Stewart, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Georgia who says she is taking her “15 minutes of fame” in stride after the mug shot from her March 8 arrest went boomeranging around the internet, seen by millions.

As booking photos go, it’s not what you’d expect: Stewart is beaming in the picture; she’s wearing pearl earrings. Her blowout, though slightly frazzled from a couple of hours in a jail cell, still cascades around her shoulders.

“Everyone's been asking me, ‘Why'd you smile, why'd you smile?’ I just smile. It was just like an instinct,” she tells PEOPLE. “There were cameras up there. I popped my smile and turned to the side.”

As for the hair, the makeup, here’s the thing you’ve got to understand: Stewart, a member of Alpha Chi Omega, had been on her way to a party down in Milledgeville, Ga.

If you want to get specific, it was actually a "darty" — a day party — that a fraternity was throwing at Georgia College & State University. Stewart wanted to be on time. That’s called being polite. “These are new girls I'm meeting for the first time,” she explains. “I didn't want to hold them up.”

So that’s how she found herself, as she tells it, about halfway through her drive cruising on one of those two-lane roads all too common between Georgia’s cities (“trees on your right and cows on your left,” Stewart says).

Her sunroof was open. She was “blasting Drake” and house music.

“I was having a great time,” she says. And going way too fast: “I'm hitting 85 [mph] in the 55,” she recalls. Then she spotted a Georgia State Patrol car coming the opposite direction. Then she saw the patrolman pull a U-turn. Then she saw his lights.

An incident report reviewed by PEOPLE states that Stewart was actually going 79 mph in a 55-zone. The first speeding ticket the officer gave her wasn’t really the issue. It wasn’t even her first speeding ticket — or her first while driving down from Athens back home to St. Simons Island, she admits. (“This will be my, I think, fourth or fifth.”)

What landed her in lockup and got her that mug shot everyone keeps talking about is what she did next: sped off again, minutes after being stopped.

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Stewart is chatty and candid in retelling the story, if not especially apologetic. She screwed up and knows it; she was being dumb and she’s learned her lesson. More on that below. But the whole thing is still a little ridiculous, she feels. Arrested for speeding?

“I had somewhere to be, girl. I had a darty,” she says. “My ETA was 11:05 a.m. and I was going to get there at 11 and the group was leaving at 11.”

So, yes, she got on the road and revved right back up to 85 mph, but only for maybe 30 seconds before realizing her mistake, she says. It was too late: “He just zooms right up to me and puts his lights back on. And I'm like, ‘Damn it,’ “ she says. (The incident report says she was measured going 84 mph.)

"The arrest of Ms. Stewart was necessary to mitigate the immediate danger posed by her reckless driving," the patrol wrote in the incident report. "Removing her from the roadway served to prevent further violations and potential accidents, ensuring the safety of other motorists."

Soon Stewart was in handcuffs in the back of his cruiser watching her Volvo SUV get towed away.

The officer put on some music. And as he began driving her to jail, one of her favorite songs came up: “Walking on a Dream” — Empire of the Sun’s electronica pop-rock single from 2008, which you’d recognize as soon as you heard the beat kick in, or maybe from the Honda commercial that helped make it famous.

“I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my favorite song,’ “ Stewart remembers saying. “And he's like, ‘No way, me, too.’ And then he turns it up and I start singing.”

“At that point,” she says, “we became friends.”

“I told him, I said, ‘You know what? You might have arrested me, but I'm not going to let this ruin my day.’ And he said, ‘Good, I'm glad this isn't going to ruin your day,’ “ she says. “I was still having a good day. I was still in a good mood.”

Being in a cell — searched, shoe-less, without her purse, ogled by male inmates like “some rib-eye steak” — was less fun. Stewart says she was arrested on suspicion of speeding in excess of the maximum limits.

The officer, she says, “probably was trying to teach me a lesson because I did speed the second time and I didn't listen to the ticket the first time.”

Once her paperwork was processed, she paid her $440 bond with her credit card, had her booking photo taken and then she was free to go. That’s when she called her parents, George and Michelle.

“This is how I said it: I was like, ‘Dad, think of the absolute worst thing I could possibly do,’ “ Stewart says. “And he was like, ‘Hmmm spend a bunch of money on my card and make me go broke.’ And I was like, ‘No, not that.’ And he was like, ‘Well, then, you didn't get in trouble with the law–’ And I was like, ‘Ding, ding, ding.’ And then he laughed and he was like, ‘You got arrested?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ “

Her father only thought it was funny until he heard that she’d been speeding.

“Lily,” he told her, “I couldn't even think of something more stupid.”

Her mom was more blunt, though not as angry: “I want to thump you upside the head.”

In passing, Stewart’s mother asked about her mug shot. Booking photos are often widely circulated online in Georgia, by social media pages and local news outlets. “I hope you looked pretty,” Stewart’s mom said.

And that was that. Stewart returned to Athens rather than continue on to her party. She went back to class after the weekend.

Her mug shot started to spread on social media, first locally and then more broadly — from account to account, growing like by like. By the time St. Patrick’s Day weekend came around, Stewart was getting recognized around Athens. “But to me, it was all just a UGA thing,” she says. “I never knew that other people knew about it.”

This week, Stewart got written up by The New York Post and got calls from TMZ and Inside Edition, she says. After all that, speaking with PEOPLE, she sounds like she’s enjoying the phenomenon — the compliments, the jokes — and knows it’s fleeting. She gets what happened, though it remains a bit mystifying being meme’d.

“I mean, it's just a mug shot,” she says.

But for a few days, at least, it’s also been more than that. Along with the thousands of new followers she’s gotten (of course “it's all men,” she says) and the swipes at people who perceive her to be entitled are a lot of funny punchlines.

For example: “Oh, she was speeding because there was a sale at Lululemon." Or another: “She was speeding to get the last pumpkin spice latte of the season.”

“I look like a basic white girl, and I am,” Stewart says, adding, “I think it's hilarious. One of them was like, ‘We know she has a monogram rain jacket’ — which I do.”

Although, for the record, “There are some beautiful mug shots. I don't think mine's particularly stunning,” she says. “I actually think it's a bad photo of me. If you see me in person, I don't really look the same as I do in that mug shot. I don't think it's a great photo of me.”

Morgan County Sheriff Tyler Hooks shares Stewart’s surprise at how much notice her mug shot got. But that doesn’t make her arrest less serious: “As fast as she was alleged to have been going, she could have hurt herself or someone else,” he says. “So hopefully she just learned her lesson.”

As for the speeding issue, Stewart says her attorney “got it taken care of.” (The prosecutor’s office didn’t return PEOPLE’s email and call for comment.)

“She had her pedal to the metal a little bit too much, but you shouldn't put someone in jail for that," says Cory Dueger, who knows Stewart’s family well and runs Rise 2 Stardom, through which he manages Stewart’s sister Amelia’s modeling career.

Stewart is taking a defensive driving course and completing 20 hours of community service as well as writing a paper about the dangers of her lead foot, she says: “I'm going to say that speeding kills.” However …

“If you do get caught speeding, maybe get arrested for it,” she adds, “maybe you'll go viral and get some Instagram followers.”

When this all dies down, Stewart will still be working on her accounting degree. “I like school. I like college life. I'm a real people person,” she says.

“Honestly, I don't really think this will change my life,” she says. Next week, it’ll be someone else having their moment, making their own headlines.

But Stewart does tease this: “One day, I'm going to go on The Bachelor, so maybe expect me then. … If it's a good-looking guy, obviously.”

Read the original article on People