Three
I manage to hold off checking my phone until I’m parked along the curb in front of my house. I kill the engine and hunch over the too-bright light of my screen as my car descends into darkness. I check Paisley’s handle across every platform we use. Nothing.
I move on to Opal. Nothing. She even has a post of her in her bedroom with the caption AM I THE PRETTIEST PRISONER? with a poll attached. I ignore the poll, despite my usual instinct to always reply to the little games she posts.
I move on to Harlow. Nothing but a selfie of her showing off her tan skin in the golden hour light and the video of us all at lunch today, everyone tagged like usual. Right now, though, I can’t help but notice the order in which we’re all tagged, how our names stack. Always me at the bottom.
There’s no hard evidence to support what Beck said, but I just know she was telling me the truth. I can feel it. I could feel it from the moment we stepped into the diner earlier. Do my friends even like me?
I didn’t do anything different, yet they excluded me now.
In fact, they made a whole intricate plan to exclude me.
The second this gets to everyone in our grade, they’re going to look like grade-A assholes.
And it’s not like we’re even popular. Our love language is making fun of each other’s nerdy interests.
My horror obsession. Opal’s cultlike buy-in to almond mom health advice.
Harlow’s insistence on buying everything she owns vintage, even when that means she’s incurred permanent foot damage from old shoes, and her saying she’s going to get a tattoo of a luxury laundry detergent logo.
Paisley’s weird older parents and their outrageous life advice.
Paisley is beautiful, yes, but her parents are an actress who hasn’t had a huge hit since the ’80s and a financial advisor.
There are people at our school who are the children of A-list actors, directors, and producers.
None of my friends are the richest, most popular, or sports champions; a move like this if you’re not that popular is just cruel.
So, it must’ve seemed really fucking worth it to them to exclude me from the group.
And where do we even go from there? Do I pretend I didn’t talk to Beck? Am I being quietly shut out of the group? What…
I try to inhale, but my breath catches in my swollen throat.
What did I do to them?
The world tilts under my seat as I sink into the steering wheel, wheezing and staining my shorts with teardrops.
This can’t be real. I’ve had anxious thoughts about social rejection, but therapists and my parents always said those are irrational.
They would never really happen. But my so-called friends didn’t invite me.
They teamed up to lie to me. I have such a hard time making friends, reading their emotional cues.
I thought I understood them. I thought we were all nerds who loved movies and needed one another. When did they move on without me?
Someone knocks on my window.
I slam my head back on my seat, flailing for a weapon I won’t find.
My dad stands outside the car door. I wipe the tearstains away as I get out of the car.
“You planning on sleeping in there?” Dad asks, breaking into a smile.
Still, I see the way his lips, nearly covered by his facial hair, wobble.
Dad’s the parent who’s good at getting smiles.
Carnivals, arcades, and playing make-believe, cheering the loudest at Owen’s baseball games and hanging my art on his side of the office he shares with Mom.
But when it comes to anything less than joy, he’s at odds.
“No, sorry,” I say, rubbing my eyes just in case a stray tear fell. “I’m coming inside.”
My dad’s fumbling would be acceptable if my mom were any better.
She’s a neurosurgeon, more versed in how the brain works than bothering to figure out how to fix the self-doubt and occasional self-loathing thoughts that have a stranglehold on me and my brothers.
She pays for therapy, sure, but to actually say I hear you; you don’t deserve that; you’re a great person? Not quite in her vocabulary.
I don’t elaborate for my dad. By the time I realize I should or it’d be weird, we’re already inside.
In the living room, my brothers play video games next to each other, silent.
Owen is on his Xbox playing some zombie game, and our thirteen-year-old brother Liam is playing on his Switch.
The jury’s still out on how Liam’s and my relationship will turn out beyond him only asking to hang out with me so I can help him with his math homework.
But Owen and I have always been more…complicated.
As siblings born barely ten months apart who both got the wavy honey-brown hair, freckles across our noses, and brains that store too much information, I think people wanted us to be glued at the hip.
Best friend siblings. When we were kids, we were.
I followed him around like a lost puppy, loving the music, movies, and girls he loved.
But at some point in middle school, he stopped liking it.
The last time we had a serious conversation was when I comforted him after his latest girlfriend broke up with him at the start of his junior year.
Over a year now. We grew apart, I guess.
I hate that we even have that memory. It gives me too much hope.
Dad clears his throat. “If something’s upsetting you, kid, let me know.”
Liam looks up, frowning. A pity look from a middle schooler.
“I’m okay,” I reply.
Now, Owen’s eyes fall on me barely a moment before returning to his game.
“There’s always tomorrow for things to get better,” Dad says. I give a nod; for someone who wants to be a writer, he mostly sticks to parenting cliches. “I’ll be in my office working on my screenplay.”
Dad: a public school history teacher by day, screenwriter by night, father in the pockets in between. Dad rubs my back as he passes, but his touch burns with the memory of how Paisley did the exact same thing just hours ago. It already feels like another lifetime.
I consider planting myself on the couch and working on one of my Winona Ryder-flavored fan art projects while my brothers play video games. But the sadness feels like a bad case of food poisoning, rolling in and out of my body in waves. It’s nothing I’d want either of them to see.
I head to my room, the farthest down the hall and away from the living room.
Our cat, Aemond, regrettably named by Owen because our sweet rescue is missing an eye, is sleeping on my bed.
I drop down next to him and pull up Beetlejuice on my computer.
My brain always slows down fastest watching something I love.
I just have to survive tonight. This sucks, but everything will hurt a little less in the morning. Watching Winona movies always helps.
But I can’t focus on the laptop screen. I itch for my phone.
Muscle memory would take me to all our social media apps, to our text group chat.
I pull up the chat chain between me and Paisley instead.
I’ve ignored so many tiny slights in the past. Technically, I have no idea if Paisley, Harlow, and Opal are done with me as a friend.
Maybe they’re not done and expect me to just lie down and take this.
Hell, they might not even know Beck told me and will act innocent come school on Monday.
I could swallow this all down and look forward to having Halloween plans involving my special interest. I could accept the scraps.
But at the same time, what would happen if I were head-on about this? Is there a chance they’d respect me more and things would change?
That would be pretty incredible. It’s what I wanted to do since Paisley disappeared into the diner bathroom earlier tonight. I owe it to myself to break the pattern.
I type up the message before I realize what I’m doing.
ME: hey what the fuck? i know you went on the camping trip without me
I send the message before I can regret it, exhaling for the first time since my fingertips touched my screen on that chat.
And three dots show up. My heart lodges itself in my throat. I force myself to keep the chat open despite every instinct to chuck my phone out the window and never speak to anyone ever again.
Then nothing.
Anxiety rippling under my skin, I set my phone face down as far away from me as I can.
God, why did I do that? What if this was all some huge misunderstanding and that text is what gets me ostracized?
My throat tightens up as I barely watch Barbara and Adam sit in the cosmic waiting room that gave me the most nightmares as a kid.
I dig my fingertips into my sheets, feel how soft they’ve become with their years of washings.
My room smells like the vanilla candle I’ve nearly burned down to the wick.
I have to stay grounded. I can’t let this emotional spiral win, but I’m losing my grip.
My eyes are seeing the images on my computer screen, but they’re not processing as a movie.
I turn my phone over and my breath hitches.
There’s a text from Paisley.
PAISLEY: im doing you a favor we’re all gonna die out here
My face heats. What the fuck? What kind of a response is that?
I always overthink my messages. Am I coming across as nice enough, peppy enough, go-with-the-flow enough? If I send one risky text, that’s all I’ll send for the next month. But clearly one of my best friends can’t be bothered to do that.
Now, my fingers fly across my screen composing my second text in less than ten seconds.
Only for Paisley’s message to disappear before I can send my reply. MESSAGE UNSENT left under my callout. Something less familiar replaces the sadness and humiliation. Something that burns its way through my chest and stays blooming. My breath comes out ragged as I try to figure out a next move.
She’s playing games. They just put me through emotional hell and now they’re playing games.
I can imagine it too, Harlow and Opal giggling as they look over Paisley’s shoulder as she types.
I bet they’re drunk or high and realized they don’t know how to entertain themselves without their phones.
So they used the only service left to rub this in my face.
What assholes they are. The phrase repeats like the echo of an old bell through a building. They’re such fucking assholes. It’s time to face the facts: They’re my best friends, but I can’t stand them.
Why am I putting up with this bullshit? Would being friendless for the rest of junior and senior years really be that much worse than having to deal with this?
I’m only at this school as a means to an end for college.
There’s only one hour a day I have to be social, and senior year I’ll be able to go home during that time.
For the first time since I first started noticing my friends treating me differently, it actually feels good to imagine life without them.
But it’s more than that. I’m ready to feel better, but I’m more ready, right now, for them to feel as shitty as I do.
I’m not going to let them just get away with it this time.
No more lying down and taking it. I’m ready to bite before I disappear from their lives.
I want them to hear exactly what they’ve done to me, so if they have an ounce of empathy somewhere underneath all that narcissism, they’ll remember this for the rest of their lives.
I already texted Paisley. I can do something that scares me more.
I have to see them. I’m not going to be some punching bag from behind a screen. If they want to excommunicate me from the friend group, they can do it to my face.