jellyfish

part one: bestest of best friends

˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚

lyric prith
sol reyes
viviana jimenez
dominic ortiz

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

ever since i was little, my friends have never really stuck around for long. maybe i'm unlikeable or bad at picking friends, or maybe i was just never surrounded by the right people. but no matter what, best friends always came and went. you can imagine the way that shit affects you, commitment and attachment issues up to your eyelids. and everytime a best friend came and went, i found someone new to stick to. it's like i couldn't survive without having that one person to completely depend on. in middle school i bounced around friend groups until one stuck for a while...until it didnt. when i got into high school, it didn't take too long for me to make friends here and there. but junior year is when i really found my people.

viviana, sol, and dominic. they are my bestest of best friends. we were friends with a senior, alaia, but let's say her loyalty to us was a bit shaken. these people have kept me going when i was so unsure of myself. in a way, they helped me find who i am. i have never experienced such a friendship as ours. our dynamic was complex to say the least. viviana, sol and i are inseparable, like three literal peas in a pod. viviana can be a little spacey most of the time. but we love her way too much to not keep her around. she's a 5'8 sexy latina with the fattest ass i've ever seen and the most contaigious laugh i've ever heard. and sol is like our little cult leader, he thrives off of attention. sol is gay. like very gay. like thirteen inch hair extensions and victoria secret glitter strap thong gay. his full name is solano but no one ever calls him that, in fact it makes him uncomfortable. i like to think that sol is his name because he's a powerful force like the sun but he's stubborn as a mule. and i don't think we could go fifteen minutes without making fun of dominic, dom for short is what we call him. we hate it when other people call him dom, it's kind of only an us thing. it's weird because i knew dom in middle school and we were no where near as close as we are now. he bought me a tripod for my birthday in seventh grade though. he used to be as short as i am, around 4'10, but now he's a 5'10 lean, pale kid with a full head of thick, curly black hair. "i think dom doesn't like icespice because she has a better afro than him" i retorted to which he rolls his eyes at. 

we're super close because of the tv production magnet we're all in at school. we're all kind of nerds for that shit. we smoke weed in class every single morning. our teacher catches us time and time again but we've always persisted. even when he installed sixteen new security cameras in his classroom. for a while i couldn't handle being at school sober and neither could they. we often exchange "can i tap?" text messages throughout the school day in our legendary group chat called Putangas; it has a profile picture of Jesus smoking a blunt. i love how rebellious it makes me feel, especially since i have so much to lose, being officer of the dance team at school, which may be irresponsible... but hey, im a teenager. sue me. 

they make me feel like it's us against the world.

except there could be some bumpy roads sometimes. going into junior year, i couldn't imagine what was to come. you see, here's where it gets complicated.

the summer before junior year was torture, as is every summer for me. when you have a strict, single, working, caribbean mother like mine, you're lucky if you leave the house even twice a month. so i spent nearly every waking (and sleeping) moment on facetime, whether it was just with viviana or just dom or all four of us, sometimes five including alaia. 

over the summer dom glew up a little bit. he had the most horrendous haircut in sophomore year so when he started working out and finally got a much needed trim, it was only natural that i'd find him at least a little bit attractive. what i didn't know is that sol had a crush on him since his freshman year and mine and dom's sophomore year. sol is in a grade below us. and when i say sol's crush on dom was massive, it was massive. like heartpoundingly nervewrackingly massive. and i would geek about dom to viviana over facetime, but it was never anything too serious really. 

my birthday rolled around, september second. and viviana with her big mouth let it slip that i had a little crush on dom. they were sat in the green room of our tv production class (our class had four different rooms, so i was probably off somewhere in another room), they both sat in red armchairs having a mindless, high conversation. when somewhere in there my name made it's way into the topic of discussion. now, obviously i wasn't there and this is all hearsay that was relayed to me many, many months after the fact by viviana, so the validity and details of this anecdotal event could very well be completely false.

"i dont know... lyric has just been so weird lately. like too much." dom said.

"that's just because she likes you... thats why shes being so clingy." viviana slurred a bit.

i imagine vivianas face fell to a shade of ghostly white once she'd actually realized what she had just said. 

dom sat up a bit in his chair, "really? oh... she's just being so extra toward me. ive known her since we were 11 and she wants to act like this now? its too much, shes like...coming on too strong."

and that was that. my fate was sealed in that moment. well..kinda

 obviously i was crushed at the time when the news that dom didnt feel the same way about me, made its way back to me...and right around my birthday too. happy birthday to me i guess. i spent the next couple of months secretly pining after dom and failing at convincing myself to lose feelings for him. then november came, and somehow, someway sol was absolutely positively convinced that dom had feelings for him.

and sol wasn't like completely out of left field for thinking this. but like he also wasn't really right. yea there was some weird tension between them but from an outsiders perspective, it was obvious that sol had feelings for dom and dom wasn't really reciprocating them. but with sol constantly talking in my ear about how much he liked him, i was pretty convinced that dom liked sol too. heartbreak number two. the guy i liked had feelings for my best friend. i had no choice but to step back and forget about my feelings for him. 

i had made mental notes to test that theory and observe the two of them when they were together.

sitting next to each other, extra attention on one another, one on one conversations when we were in group settings. i was really convinced now. and it turned me into a bit of a green eyed monster. 

dom and sol went out with a couple of their other friends, they went to an art museum downtown. apparently dom was being exceptionally flirty with sol but who knows...sol has a bit of a habit of fabricating things in his favor. then december started. and i made a huge mistake that sol would later describe as "changing the entire trajectory of our friendship".

not sure how far im going to continue with this story lmao... i also hate being corny so this is defying every fiber of my moral being rn LMAO.  it's just something that i wanted to record somewhere because theyre memories that i really dont want to forget. :)