Letters to Elle

09 | Big Fat Lies

Guys, please excuse all the spelling mistakes in my chapters. Something got screwed up with the document that I have LtE saved in, and for some reason it doesn't put those squiggly lines beneath errors anymore. :( So yeah, please don't think I'm illiterate! I just type really fast (like 100-130wpm, depending on how many mistakes I correct/ignore), and that's why there are so many mistakes. And sometimes my fingers slip and press the wrong key.

I swear I'm not illiterate, ahaha. I just don't proofread.

                        NINE

                        BIG FAT LIES

                                    ♡♡♡

Picking up Elle’s cellphone, I turn it on. The white Apple symbol comes onto the formerly black screen, and I feel like a horrible person for doing this.

            Even though Elle is gone, and she’s probably the person who left the phone for me to find, I feel like I’m committing a crime. Looking through her phone—her personal files—just seems so . . . wrong. I feel like I’m invading her privacy. I feel like a criminal about to commit his first crime.

            The second her lock screen comes up, I have to choke back a sob. It’s a picture of Elle, Jer, and I. We’re in her backyard in our bathing suits, running through the sprinklers. I remember the day so clearly that it hurts.

            “Come on, guys,” Elle calls, motioning Jer and I over to where she stands right in front of the sprinker. “We need to capture this moment.”

            I look over at Jer at just the right time to see him rolling his eyes. Elle is always trying to “capture the moment” with Jer and I, and everyone knows that Jer hates his picture being taken. Jer and I have agreed that Elle always wants to “capture the moment” just to piss Jer off. I don’t mind having my picture taken, but Jer absolutely despises it.

            "Elle," Jeremy complains, "you always want to 'capture the moment'. Every single time we have a 'moment', you want to capture it." Jer makes a face similar to disgust. "Aren't you ever tired to capturing the moment?"

            Elle smirks. "No."

            "Don't you ever run out of memory on your damn phone?"

            Again, Elle smirks. But this time she also laughs. "No."

            Jer groans, but he still loses the argument. In the end, we capture the moment.

            Our smiles are painted onto our faces as if they're fake. But they're not; they're very real. Even Jer who hates his face is smiling in the picture, his face a perfect example of true, pure happiness. Elle did that to him. She made him happy. And there was even a time when I made him happy, too, but that time has come and gone. Now I just stress him out and make him wish that he never involved himself with me.

            "Times have definitely changed," I murmur to no one but myself.

            Unlocking the screen is maybe the most nerve-wracking thing I've done all day. When I actually get into her phone, what am I going to find? And I going to find some secret message just waiting to be read? Is it sitting there, just waiting for me to discover it and do something about it?

            Maybe, maybe not. Most likely the latter.

            And the latter it is, because the second the phone unlocks, I see just the regular home screen from Apple, the one that Elle was so obsessive about. I'm the type of person who likes to move their apps around and rearrange them to my particular settings, but Elle couldn't do that. Because of her OCD, she had to keep her phone at factory settings. The only reason she was able to change her lock screen picture without freaking out was because Jer and I made her. We told her if she changed it to the factory setting, we'd just change it back. Surprisingly, she believed us.