You Must Remember This

Chapter 37: 'Til Him

Behrooz knew something was wrong when Tom didn't invite him to his birthday party. Tom paid well—this was a lot of money he was missing out on, and Behrooz certainly wasn't a recipient of the slush fund Alan still spent hours every night cultivating. He had sent a DM on Snapchat just to make sure; Tom opened it, but Behrooz received no response. Perhaps that was some sort of glitch in the software; he tried again through Instagram, with the same result. He even went as far as to send an email, still with nothing.

"Is Tom ghosting you too?" Alan asked knowingly. "He blocked me as well. What a loser."

"Don't call him a loser, I'm sure he's just working through some hard feelings. All of them are."

"All of them?"

"The longer this goes on, the more all my friends hate me. Maybe they weren't ever truly my friends. They say nasty things behind my back and get angry when I don't sympathize with them. Now I know how you feel."

"Hey! I have friends. They're just busy. Or forgetful. Who needs friends when you have a mission like this? It's enough to put some fire in your belly. Everyone needs to make sacrifices."

"You're in denial, Alan. We're all losers here. Frank and Juliet are robbing us blind and making out like bandits, while all we do is clean up their messes. It's not fair."

"I wouldn't go as far as to call it robbery: the fault lies with us for not being sufficiently disciplined studies at the club. No wonder why they don't trust us."

"Call me anti-intellectual, but I don't see why anyone would go to the club if they weren't jockeying to replace Frank once he graduates. But I suppose I can see some positives in this. Are you going on the charity walk tomorrow?" Behrooz rarely volunteered before he joined the student council, but he was starting to like the feeling. It felt good to use his position to help others in ways that did not require a manifesto to understand—it was certainly cliché, he thought, but he knew that one must be the change they wish to see in the world. If anything, when his parents asked him what he did in school that day, he could tell them something they'd be proud of.

Louis had asked him at a party once after Behrooz expressed his distaste for Alan's actions if he was part of the resistance, working to dismantle the club from within. At the very first meeting with Ms. Foster, that night Behrooz had assumed that would be his role. But as it became very clear that nobody else would be afflicted with any pangs of conscience, and that most in the school were happy to live their lives as they always had, fighting would be pointless. Ms. Foster had already told him not to be a sore loser the other day when he was the sole person to argue that maybe it was kind of mean to make Epsilons serve as custodial staff late at night. So at this point, once again, Behrooz had no choice. He did not think it was the right thing to idly stand by as the triumvirate did its thing. But it was also not the right thing to stonewall three people who, to varying degrees, had their own definition of the right thing. It was senior year anyway. Life would go on. He was supposed to relax, chill, and enjoy his time as ruler of the roost.

"What charity walk?" Alan was not told about this—was this proof that Behrooz didn't lie, that he was really being stabbed in the back? "We have plenty of money of our own, why don't we spend that instead?"

"Legal something something, or maybe that's another of Frank's lies. We're raising money for funding underprivileged elementary schools. They need glue and pencils and all the things we take for granted now; I'm sure they don't get French toast for brunch. We hope even the most cold-hearted of people can be persuaded to save the children."

"Nah, I'm not spending my Saturday doing that. Who else is going?"

"John and Beth. They've been surprisingly good friends, at least as far as I can tell, and you know how both of them are a bit strange. I guess this beats a candlelit dinner or something involving sun. We have clouds projected, clouds everywhere. What a great day for my morning constitutional, right?"