Guilty Pleasure

6. Obvious

We were sitting at our regular table at the cafeteria during lunchtime the next Wednesday, and Annie was laughing.

She’d been giggling at her phone all throughout lunch, and wouldn’t tell us who she was texting that was being amusing enough to get her to react in said way. I had my suspicions – she and James had been getting increasingly close with time – but we couldn’t know for sure. Her engrossment with her phone had gotten to the point where it was downright ridiculous. Her food was untouched, and she’d barely said a word to any of us since she’d sat down.

Iris was apparently thinking the same as I was. “Earth to Annie. Who are you texting anyway that’s so interesting?”

“Huh?” She looked up as though she’d just realized we’d been sitting around her all along.

“Is it James?” Meredith waggled her eyebrows.

“Oh, you’re asking who I’m talking to? It’s not James. It’s Ben.” She looked down and promptly returned to texting, another giggle escaping her mouth. Already it was as if we hadn’t spoken.

While Iris and Meredith brushed it off and started debating over whether Ryan Gosling was cuter than Channing Tatum, my mind was still reeling over what Annie had said. Ben was the person she’d been texting all this time? He was the one that had been making her laugh and forget about our existence?

As Annie laughed again, it all crashed down on me. Of course. It surprised me that it had taken so long for me to notice – I was so used to these kinds of situations that it was borderline unhealthy. Yet I’d clearly been too dense to see it until now, even though the obvious had been staring at me in the face right from the start.

Ben had been talking to me to get close to Annie.

I felt a pang of something I failed to recognize in my chest, even though I knew it was ridiculous to feel shocked. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Guys often felt intimidated by Annie – the best word to describe her was radiant. She was confident, outgoing, alluring, and knew she was beautiful. So in order to get to her, guys often used me. I was definitely not intimidating, - I couldn’t be further from it – and because I spent the majority of my time with Annie it usually didn’t take long before both parties had started flirting and I was all but forgotten. 

I should feel happy for Annie. From what I knew about him, Ben seemed to be a far more decent guy than James was, and with what I worried about Annie, I knew a guy like Ben was exactly what she needed. Yet for some reason, I couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed. I tried to brush it off as wishing I was as confident around guys in general as Annie was, but I couldn’t help checking my phone every couple of seconds and feeling a slight pang in my stomach every time I saw no new message had popped up.

I spent the rest of the day feeling as though it was a dream. I was there but I wasn’t present; half the time I had no idea what any of my friends or teachers was talking about. All I wanted was to go home, crawl into my bed, and take a long, undisturbed nap.

“Elle.”

A nap actually sounds amazing right now, I thought, yawning as I gathered the last of my materials from my locker. I was finally feeling the exhaustion catch up to me – this whole week I’d been staying up until ungodly hours of the night on my phone, texting Ben.

So he could talk to Annie.

That thought made me slam my locker shut with a little more force than would have been necessary.

“Elle!”

“Huh?”

I turned to see a slightly annoyed-looking Iris standing behind me, looking like she had been waiting for me to answer a question I hadn’t heard for a while now. I managed to grin at her sheepishly.