❝I know it's hard for you to be friends with a girl without objectifying her - but lucky me, not everyone's you!❞
❝Oh yeah. 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨. The lady goth protest too much.❞
❝𝘿𝙤𝙩𝙝, Gavin. Doth.❞
→ From Van Zandt family disappointment and Grade 8...
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I wanted so badly to talk to someone about what happened with Sean, for someone to understand what this meant, but no one would. No one could know how fractured my friendship with Alex became, or how we almost came to blows in a mall bathroom, or the fact that Jay had managed to pick up two of my friends due to my own issues.
Not that I thought it was about me. Not that I had the ability to save my friends from their shitty lives when I'm dealing with my own shitty life. But...
I could've tried harder. I could've been better. I could've been there for them and things could've been different.
I thought about calling Craig first, then Ellie, then Manny, but I ended up stewing in my emotions all night.
By the time the next day rolled around, I was absolutely miserable to be around. Sullen and moody, quiet in a way I hadn't been in a long time. I didn't even laugh at Toby embarrassing JT in front of Paige.
Jimmy asked how I was doing at lunch and I said fine in the least fine way possible, but he didn't push. Everyone else seemed too involved in their own things to even notice the new member of Jay's crew — everyone aside from me and Emma, that is. There were a lot of things I would never want to have in common with Emma Nelson, but this had to be at the top of the list.
Meanwhile, I was going to be seeing a movie with Jimmy that night, and I couldn't possibly be less prepared.
That short story got a little darker than I anticipated, too, and, the more I thought about it, Freddy vs Jason sounded like the perfect movie to distract myself, but I figured that was off the table.
This was a date. I was going to treat it like a date.
When we got to the mall that night, I took the time to look over my outfit for the date in the reflection of a storefront window. I wasn't too thrilled with it, but I did at least look decent enough. After feeling like I was masquerading as a popular kid at the beach last weekend, I didn't actually bother changing from what I wore to school, still keeping to mostly black. My new hobby was buying any old band tees and modifying them — and sometimes blackmailing JT into fixing the ones I tore up too much.
