Gaslighter

29

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

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2022

          I spent the walk to campus and the lecture hall mostly in a daze, my brain failing to properly register and process whatever Savannah was saying.

          Under different circumstances, guilt would be crawling all over me like tiny little spiders, but I couldn't feel bad for ignoring her mindless blabbering when I had much more pressing matters to worry about. Did that make me a terrible friend? Indeed it did, and yet my obsessive brain always found a way of somehow excusing my distance—she'd been worse to me before, with Paul, the frat party, Ingrid, not telling me about the investigation, gaslighting me; the list went on for several more miles—so I was certain she'd have to understand my distance.

          I didn't care about whatever she was saying. That was the short, quick, easy way to explain. I didn't expect her to understand such frivolities didn't mean a damn thing to me, not when I was going through a crisis, and I wasn't sure what to make of all of it. If she hadn't noticed a thing, was it because I'd gotten that good at pretending to be fine and impassive, or was it because she, too, didn't care about what I was going through enough to see I wasn't, in fact, okay?

          In the end, did it even matter? Would this friendship matter to me in just a couple of months, when I was so, so close to getting everything I wanted?

          The ring on my finger seemed to weigh at least ten times its actual weight and, even though I kept that hand hidden inside my coat's pocket, I still feared it was too exposed, like everyone around me could see through fabric. Realistically, I knew I was being ridiculous and paranoid, the regular state of my emotional health at that point, and years had passed since I'd last walked through campus with a target on my back, but that was the thing about anxiety. It wasn't ever meant to be a pleasant experience, regardless of how hard it attempted to fool me into believing it was just looking out for me and my well-being. It wanted to prepare me for and protect me from any lurking dangers, but it ceased being helpful the moment it had rendered me unable to function properly. There was nothing adaptive about trying to get through a mundane task, such as attending a lecture or shopping for groceries, while my chest threatened to explode and my whole body shook from cold sweats.

          That, for whatever reason, was something Savannah noticed in particular—at least that was why I assumed we'd stopped walking, with her grabbing my arm to halt me in place. She pulled me back, too, and the whiplash nearly made me fall flat on my back, pathetically stumbling over my own feet. To make matters worse, it was only then that I realized how badly I was shaking, like I couldn't even control such a small aspect of my body.

          "I know you and I know when you don't want to talk to me—or to anyone, for that matter—but I can't pretend like I can't see what's going on with you," she told me.

          My heartbeat exploded like thunder in my ears, aware that the present conversation could take a turn for the worst faster than I could break free from her grip, regardless of how much smaller than me she was. After that conversation at the apartment, my suspicions had grown even stronger, which meant I had to tread carefully through this interaction and not give anything away just in case; I was always cautious regardless, possibly even pathologically so, but all those coincidences shouldn't be ignored with how frequent and close together they'd turned out to be. Maybe I really had been worrying about the wrong best friend.

          Whatever she wanted to tell me, if it was about Chase, was far from being her business, and I couldn't even begin to tell her how much of a hypocrite she'd be after actively pursuing an older man, no matter what she'd told Ingrid, and for pushing me towards Paul in the first place. She was the reason I'd gone to that speakeasy in the first place, and I knew she resented me for having gotten an advisee position with Chase over her, something I'd since stopped feeling bad about. I'd worked twice as hard as her, busted my ass to prove I was more than my last name, and it wasn't my fault she saw me as competition over something as trivial as that. She wasn't more deserving of the position than I was, even with all her attempts at sabotaging me and gloating about her grades. I could no longer bring myself to care or feel guilty about throwing her under the bus when I was so damn certain she would've done the same thing.