Alice is popular, boys love her, and even girls love her. And so does her best friend, Irene.
....friends to lovers angst with the pressure from overbearing parents to self discovery
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It's been a couple of hours since the incident. Irene asked her mom to pick her up before work, her excuse was she wanted to help clean jewelry at her mother's store and that she didn't want to spend all day doing it. Her mother obliged, of course, and was there before Alice even woke up. Alice slept on the bathroom floor. Irene found her in there when she started cleaning everything. She put the vodka back and texted Alice about it, warning her about how her mother could find it. And that was it, they didn't talk since. Though, her mother was awfully suspicious when Irene started gathering all the rings and sorting them into different categories for how she needs to clean them.
"Why did you ask me to pick you up, last I remembered, Alice has her license," Irene's mother says, organizing jewelry in display cases.
Irene wants to tune her out, act like she can't hear her. But making an enemy out of her own mother sounds like hell if anything. "She was sleeping in too late, she always does," Irene says, which is true. But Irene knows Alice would've driven her home at 5 am if she asked.
Irene's mom makes a sound in acknowledgment, "Why did you want to leave so early, you hate cleaning on weekends," True, again.
"Well uh, I kinda need to earn some money. I'm saving up for something," Irene lies, fully this time.
"Save up? Save up for what?" Her mother questions.
Irene looks behind her at her mother whos not even organizing anymore. Irene prays that a customer would just walk in. "A new -" Irene thinks for a second, "A new laptop," She says, making eye contact with her mom now.
"What's wrong with the one you have now?" She asks. Why does she keep asking questions?
Irene turns back around to what she was doing before, "Well, the one I have now is pretty old and college is basically only a couple of months from now so... It's better to save, just in case," It's a good thing that Irene turned around or else her mother would've known she was lying.
Her mother is silent for a moment, and Irene feels as if she got away cleanly, "You look tired, Irene," She says as if she bought nothing Irene had just said.
Irene is tired, she can barely even stay awake right now, as she looks over the rings she notices she organized them all wrong. "I'm fine."
"Irene, don't lie to me, you were falling asleep on the way here-"
That's it. "Oh yeah!? That's a lot coming from the person who forced me to study until midnight for school. Do you know how tired I was then?!" Irene's spun around to look at her mom again, she doesn't know why she's yelling. She just knows she's fed up, she's tired, hungry, sad, stressed, and feels like she's going to have a panic attack.
"Irene stop yelling there are customers-"
"And now! Now I have to go back home and study even more because I'm not good enough! I'm not good enough for college, I'm not good enough for school, and I'm not good enough for you!" Irene feels hot tears spill from her eyes, again. Everything feels like one-hundred again, and Irene doesn't even know how she got here, to begin with. She doesn't know who to trust anymore, she doesn't want to be alone either.
