The Timeline

1.

January 28, 2013:

Claire had two problems: Fabian's 18th birthday and how to tell Fabian that she did not want to attend his 18th birthday.

Granted, telling one of her best friends - a member of the Core Four - that she did not want to attend his 18th birthday party, which he had spent so long planning for, would've inevitably lead to the end of their decade-long friendship.

It was not because Fabian wasn't an understanding little soul, the sweetest Claire had ever met, literally: had she told him she could not attend, Fabian would've gotten immediately worried, asking after her well-being, then her immediate family's, her extended family's and whomever else you could have in mind. Fabian was just like that. If anything, he would've postponed his birthday party to offer his help, see if he could do anything for her - one of his best friends - and for the other people (mind you, Fabian had never met at least half of Claire's extended family).

Once established that no one was experiencing life endangering situations, was not close to experiencing them, everything was actually fine, Fabian would've moved on to inquire about Claire's real reasonings, and that Claire couldn't tell him. Fabian was the sweetest most understanding person she knew, but there was a limit to everything, and she just knew that, had she said exactly why she couldn't leave the house, Fabian would've had a moment of silence on the other side of the phone, then mumble something like "of course", then hung up on her, then proceed to ghost her forever. In that order. And she could not go through that. She already had too much drama to oversee, for one gloomy afternoon.

Lying inside of her bedroom - the one she had moved into the moment her older sister had finally moved out of the house, when she had gotten married 6 years prior - Claire let out a gigantic (and probably exaggerated) huff at the rather unfortunate situation she had decided to get herself into. She was lying on top of her bedroom, her favorite light blue quilt under her, upside down, her legs propped against the headboard, her feet touching the wall behind the headboard.

She had discarded her phone somewhere, on the floor, a couple moments earlier, because she reckoned that if she stared at it too long she would've suffered some severe eye damage — and the last thing she needed her parents to nag her about was her eye problems caused by electronic devices they did not understand properly and used while holding them at least a meter away from their faces. Truly, if Claire could get a nickel for each time she had had to explain to the both of them what a GIF was and why it was not a virus waiting for them to click on it to infect their phone she would've probably... It was not much, in fact, but she could've probably afforded a one-on-one session with a therapist.

That would've helped her to calm the fuck down, and not check her phone for the one hundredth time in less than ten minutes - really, who the fuck even checked their phone THAT much -

PING!

Claire shot upright in bed, at the sound of her phone lighting up with a new notification.

Forgetting the way she had just been thinking of how ridicolous people were, she wormed her way out of bed, ending up tangled in the quilt (a favorite of hers, but also an old one of hers) and falling with a loud thump and an even louder "OUCH!" on the fake parquet. She ignored the pain in her tailbone and, deciding to untangle herself from the quilt later on, she dragged herself to her phone, grabbed it, unlocked it and went to the notifs.

She couldn't check the notifications from the preview page because she had made them invisible on it, having caught her older brother sneaking up on them earlier the previous year, being a total creep.

Still, she was full of anticipation as she opened WhatsApp, even held her breath in because maybe, just maybe—

She let it out, disappointed, because that was not the notification she had been waiting for. In fact, it was just David, another one of her best friends, CEO and co-founder of the Core Four, writing to her: