Just Revenge

Chapter Thirty-Three: Something Like Forgiveness

With my best friends by my side again, things got considerably better for me. Sort of. I mean, technically, nothing changed. But I felt much better about it all.

I pretty much just avoided the entire group of Them entirely. And, yes, I know that's a ridiculous thing to call them, but I don't have a better name to use, so that's what I'm going with. It hasn't been too hard to avoid them considering they seem to be trying equally as hard to avoid me. Harper, Alex, and Izzy seem to have taken to simply pretending that I don't exist, which our director and pretty much the entire troupe loves since it seems to have ended the feud between Harper and me for good. Diana walks around acting like she thinks I'm about to jump her all the time, which is almost worse, and Cort, Ror, and Max haven't gotten close enough for me to know how they've decided to handle it all. Every time I catch so much as a glance at any of them, it turns into a race of who can move in the opposite direction faster. The only person who seemed to handle it well was Luke. Once again, sort of. He doesn't miss an opportunity to bring up the fact that I'm a lying, manipulative snake in any conversation that we end up in together, but at least he's talking to me. That's not something I ever thought I'd be grateful for, but here we are.

With the summer show over, we had a two week break before auditions for fall show started and I spent every second of that break appreciating the stress free, relaxing downtime with Abbi and Lis.

Fall show auditions came way too quickly for me. Before I knew it, and way before I was ready, the two weeks downtime came to an end and fall show season kicked off. Safely returned to my position as a techie, I was no longer required to be at auditions, but it was always tradition that the head techies hung out during auditions since, if you weren't stressed about trying to land a role, it was mostly just a bunch of theatre kids hanging out together and talking. Plus, Abbi and Lis were auditioning.

I was hanging out in the auditorium lobby, chatting with the kids auditioning when I saw Them walk in. Luke, Aurora, Cortland, Max, and Diana, not the whole gang, but the closest I'd seen them come to the whole group in the last two weeks.

"I'll be back. I'm just gonna head to the bathroom real quick." I muttered out a weak excuse and immediately bolted out the door opposite the one they just entered through. I headed towards our director's classroom to hide out for a while until the line died down and they all got inside the actual auditorium instead of the lobby, but when I reached the classroom, I saw Harper running lines with Alex and Izzy inside. I pivoted immediately and began walking away but stopped in the middle of the hallway.

Where exactly was I going? And what the hell was I doing? I couldn't let one bad summer ruin my favorite place in the world. I straightened my back and held my head high as I started down the hallway, heading back towards the auditorium lobby to reclaim my favorite place.

I made it approximately halfway there before I lost my nerve and bolted into the girls' bathroom instead, rushing into the nearest stall and slamming it shut behind me.

I couldn't do this. I couldn't do this. I could not do this. I couldn't. I just couldn't. This is why I avoid messy. This is the appeal of being the boring one. Boring people don't have to deal with this! I tried to focus on my breathing to calm myself down, but it wasn't working. I leaned against the door and tried to breathe. I felt like crying, but I couldn't even force tears out of my eyes. I couldn't force breath out. I...

"Carmen?"

The voice on the other side of the door was barely audible over the noise in my head.

"Carmen, open the door. Are you okay?"

I don't have any memory of unlocking the door, or opening it, but a second later I fell forward, not caring if I got caught or ended up on the floor.

To my surprise, Cortland caught me before I hit the ground.

"Hey, hey, hey, you're fine. You're okay. You're okay. You're okay" His arms wrapped around me as I sunk to the ground.

"It's fine. It's fine. You're alright. It's fine." I don't know how long we sat there on the bathroom floor. At some point I started sobbing. At some point I stopped. At some point I was able to breathe again. At some point he stopped repeating that mantra back to me.

When I finally felt like the world wasn't totally spinning out of control again, I sat back, leaning against the stall behind me.

Cortland stood up and backed away from me. "You should stand up. You need to pull yourself together and get back to auditions before someone comes looking for you."

I wiped my hair off my face, tying it back into a bun as I stood up from the bathroom floor. "Asshole."

"Whatever." He rolled his eyes, "You better come up with a good excuse for lying on the bathroom floor then."

I ignored him, turning on the bathroom sink and splashing my face with water as he stood there for a second.

Without another word, he walked out of the bathroom. I stared at myself in the mirror, my eyes looked hollow, and my face was pale. I looked like shit and you could definitely tell I'd been crying. Fuck.

As I watched in the mirror, I saw Cortland walk back into the bathroom. He didn't say anything though, he just stood there leaning against the wall of stall doors. It gave me a weird deja vu of the last time he'd found me hunched over a sink in the bathroom. This time I wasn't the victim I'd been back then though, and we both knew it.

I turned off the sink and turned around to face him, waiting for whatever it was he'd come back to say. I knew he had something. He was just gathering the nerve to say it and I figured I owed him at least enough to give him however much time he needed.

"So, you're just planning on not saying anything, then?"

"I mean... I was trying to let you say whatever..."

"Not that." He rolled his eyes, "Max really liked you. Aurora really liked you. Hell, even I really liked you. And you're just not going to say anything?"

"It's not like you guys have been going out of your way to talk to me!"

"We never lied to you. In fact, I have a startling memory of us doing the EXACT opposite of that. We were brutally honest with you the entire time. And you played us. Like we were nothing. And your friends can give us all the excuses they want about how we had it coming, but we NEVER hurt you. You never had any right to come into our lives and fuck with us like that. Never."

"I'm sorry, what? You never hurt me? You guys walk around and treat people like they're subhuman! You, personally, actively try to make all the people around you feel like shit and, worse than that, your friends don't even notice the people around them enough to know they're making people feel like shit. I had every right."

"Oh, yeah?" He stepped forward, "And explain to me what exactly Ror ever did to you? Huh? How do you justify breaking her trust? Or Diana? She's too scared to talk to half of her so-called friends, but she felt comfortable around you. What'd she do that made her deserve that? And Max? He might not have noticed you and maybe that hurt your precious little feelings, but he doesn't even have it in him to be rude to the assholes around him, what did he do that was so rude you had to break his heart?" He stepped closer to me and, for the first time since I'd known him, I saw him truly angry. I thought I'd seen him angry before, but the look in his eyes right now could only be described as rage. "He liked you, Carmen. He really liked you. And you might've accomplished your stupid little goal of getting a petty teenage girl jealous, but you broke my best friend's heart to do it. Your stupid high school feud wasn't worth that." He shook his head, backing up from me, "I hope you're proud of yourself."

"I don't know what to say" my voice was barely a whisper and I was sure he wouldn't hear it, but he stopped walking and turned back around, smirking.

"Don't think too hard about, you're gonna get one, maybe two, words in before he starts yelling at you."

I rolled my eyes, smiling a little in spite of myself, "Oh, yeah?"

He nodded his head, "Yeah. He just wants to know it was real enough for you to make the effort."

His smile faded a bit before he walked out the door, the door shutting with a bang behind him.