ʟɪɢʜᴛ ꜱᴘᴇᴇᴅ | 𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣 𝙟𝙖𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙧

𝙏𝙀𝙀𝙏𝙃

018, 𝙏𝙀𝙀𝙏𝙃 

.⋆𐙚 🍒

I'VE NEVER BEEN GOOD AT MAKING FRIENDS.

Not because I didn't want to make them—but because I forgot how.

There was a time, a long time ago, when I was louder. Brighter. The kind of kid who talked too much in class and laughed too hard at her own jokes. I used to dance around the living room in mismatched socks, sing along to every song in every movie, raise my hand even when I wasn't sure I had the right answer. I think I wanted the world to see me. To know I was there.

But my mother made sure that didn't last long.

"You're being dramatic."
"Do you ever stop talking?"
"No one likes a girl who's always trying to be the center of attention."

I heard it enough times that I started to believe it. That I was annoying. Embarrassing. Too much.

It didn't help that home was already too loud. Mom and Dad fought like it was the only way they knew how to love each other—screaming matches that rattled the walls, accusations that only made things worse, silence that stretched for days. I used to lie awake in bed, listening to the yelling, waiting for the front door to slam. I'd fall asleep wondering which of them left this time. Wondering if they'd come back.

After a while, I stopped trying to be heard.

I shrank. Learned to keep my voice low. How to bottle up my emotions. How to be quiet in a way that didn't invite questions—let the teachers think I was just a bit awkward.

I remember when I transferred schools in the middle of fifth grade and sat alone in the cafeteria, day after day, with a cherry jam sandwich I'd packed myself because my mom was too busy at the hospital and my dad never bothered to notice I didn't have food. I would pretend to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, even though I'd already read it twice before. Sometimes I turned the pages too quickly, hoping it would look convincing. Hoping it would look like I wasn't waiting for someone to finally talk to me.

That's when Hitch found me.

She walked up to me one Tuesday—wearing glittery heart clips in her hair and bubblegum lip gloss smeared just slightly outside the lines—and said, "Your handwriting's pretty. You should write my name like that on my notebook." Then she handed me a pink gel pen, one of the sparkly ones with a fluffy ball on the end, and sat beside me like I wasn't the weird new girl and she wasn't the most popular girl in our grade.

The next day, she brought two cupcakes and gave me the one with more frosting. The day after that, she taught me how to make bracelets out of rubber bands and made us matching ones. Pink and green. I still have mine on my bookshelf—though now the colors are faded, and it's stretched out beyond repair.

And just like that, I wasn't alone anymore.

Hitch was always the kind of girl who moved through the world like a sunbeam—golden, undeniable, impossible not to follow. She knew how to make people laugh, how to spin stories out of thin air, how to walk into a room and become the center of attention without ever trying. I used to watch her from the edge of every moment, never quite knowing how to exist in that kind of brightness.

But she pulled me into it anyway. Every time.

"This is Y/N," she'd say, her arm hooked through mine, introducing me to people I'd never speak to again. "She's cool. You'll like her." She said it with so much certainty that sometimes, just for a second, I believed it too.