The Marina Gossip page was pretty tame for a moment. Just speculations about who was dating who and who might've been a republican or might've been crushing on a teacher. But on Tuesday night one post gained a lot of popularity. It read:
Sarai Clarke got a train ran on her by 5 of the football players.
Sarai was tagged but convientally the players who drove the train weren't mentioned. I clicked on her profile which was public with 3 posts each of which were of her in different wigs. All styled perfectly, with no edge or baby hair left behind. In her highlights I could see she had stories of her styling her wigs and I was about to click the follow button but I remembered we were "fighting," last week and I did call her wig stale. I oddly did feel bad for her, especially when I went to the comments and saw a bunch of guys commenting laughing emojis and stupid shit like "Ran over and ran through," or "knew she was a ho from the get-go." There were only about three comments defending Sarai, which was surprising since most of the girls in our school all wore pussy hats on the women's march or reposted activists' posts. One comment that caught my eye was "If you actually believe this, you're mad weird and immature and your mamma should've aborted your ass," by cleobabbbyy. I clicked on her profile and realized she was the ice spice wannabe and the girl I flicked a few times last Monday. I went back to the post and debated commenting in support of Sarai but I didn't know what to say. After five deleted attempts I commented, "this page is weird and so are all of you in the comments." ]
The next morning as I was getting ready for school I opened up my phone to Instagram where I had one new notification. It was from Sarai, she had liked my comment on the gossip page. I was going to follow her, but Harper's pink buggy appeared in my window and I quickly pocketed my phone before running out the apartment like I was in a Disney channel original movie.
Harper was playing her usual Phoebe Bridges and seeing her nodding along I remembered what her friends were saying about her.
"Your friends know," I said after she was driving for a little awhile.
She turned down her music. I thought her happy expression would last a little longer but her face lost all of it's levity. "Know what," she asked sternly.
"You're gay," I said saying the words nice and slow.
Harper's face seemed to lose just a tad of it's harshness but I could hardly tell as she focused on the road. "Which friends?" Fuck, I forgot Harper was a social butterfly and she had friends in every club and organization. If she was in Mean girls she would have probably been able to sit at every single one of the tables.
"Your soccer friends."
Harper nodded. "They must've saw my Megan Fox shrine in my locker." The sterness that shocked me minutes ago was gone and Harper just shrugged.
"You're not mad or worried?"
She shrugged again and it made me think of Vince. "I guess it was bond to happen plus I've been hooking up with Sadie on the team so I guess I'm not too surprised." She made the turn into the school parking lot before gliding into her usual parking space. We would be hopping out the car at this point but I was processing what Harper had just told me. I didn't really know which player Sadie was, but I didn't really need to know, that wasn't the important information here, what was important was my best friend was hooking up, passing milestones and she didn't even seem that excited to tell me about it. We had a whole sleepover talking about queefing and she left that out?
I turned around to face her. "Really?"
Harper's cheeks got a little redder. "Yup, I was going to try to tell you after the third hook up but you know what the hell, uhh it's amazing."
