A Love Letter • Short Stories [ENG]

A Love Letter

The urban legends that we used to invent were numerous, which is why we used to say in school that when R. was born, he had a Siamese twin who died when they were separated. The guys were the ones who told us about that long scar on R.'s back. They had seen him change in the gym. He was thin and bony, always a bit hunched over and wearing shoes that were too big.

His father had a funeral home, and we spread the word that R. helped him with the corpses after school. He would arrange them, dress them, and apply makeup. We even went so far as to suggest that he didn't stop there, claiming he studied them. To see them naked and to see the effect of cutting into dead flesh. We also said that he had a jar of formaldehyde full of the toes of the deceased at home.

We claimed he brought bad luck, warning the newcomers to stay away from him: one of the guys from the senior year got hit on his scooter two intersections after letting R. cross the pedestrian crossing.

We told stories and passed off as almost certain that R. had slept with the obese girl from the fifth grade, who was another human case from our school, and anyway, if they didn't get each other, who else would take them, those two?

He knew it was us, every time he saw us in the hallway, he pointed those bulging eyes at us and stared at us with a sinister look, sunken cheeks and a scruffy beard.

We forgot about his existence once we started university. Cloisters, corridors, thick books, good-looking assistants: we had other things to think about, such as giving each other advice on how to do our makeup and how to choose the parties to attend. The older guys were much older, you could skip class whenever you wanted, and the professors didn't know us by name. Everything, in proportion, was much better than high school, but it was strange not seeing each other every day. To stay in touch, we used group chats that we had since the last year of high school. We loved writing to each other incessantly, telling each other everything, sending photos and voice messages that lasted a lifetime.

It all ended abruptly; we had a fight at a poorly organized party at some guy's house who was liked by all of us. Each of us had received a personalized invitation and showed up with a clear idea of how the evening would end. He had made a bet with his friends and counted on the fact that alcohol would do the rest. His friends relied on the fact that only one of us would go with him and the others would throw themselves at them out of spite. We had given each other advice on how to dress and how many and what bottles to bring, but unlike what usually happened, each of us had kept our conversations with the guy we were targeting secret from the others, making it quite clear that he was the same for all of us.

Between slammed doors, screams, and spilled glasses, I returned home at dawn the next day, driving in fits and starts with the old sneakers I kept in the trunk of the car so I wouldn't have to drive in heels in emergency situations like that. All the guests stopped to watch us, but not for the reason we were used to. As I removed my makeup in the early morning light, I understood that friendship didn't exist, and I left the chat.

Several months passed, empty compared to the previous ones, but pride was too great, and in the end, someone else willing to be used for a favor, for a ride, for going out, could always be found. It's not that difficult to completely remove a person from your life if you really want to. You just have to be very skilled with the privacy settings on social media, and I thought I was. I didn't know anything about my former friends anymore.

My phone had started vibrating non-stop around 3:00 PM. I imagined it was a call, but I couldn't answer right away. It kept vibrating on the wooden table, and it ended up moving and falling to the floor, and still it continued vibrating from the floor, where the vibrations took on a darker tone.

Wearing a bathrobe, wet hair, and bare feet, I finally picked up the phone from the floor: they were all comments and "likes."

For the first time in several months, there was a new connection between us. We didn't like what we saw, of course, we couldn't know: in recent years, R., in addition to taking over his father's funeral agency, had become quite good with computers.

Every single word exchanged with my former friends in the group chat that we had opened just before the end of high school and used until we had our fight was now online, on a blog, with our full names, our photos.

Vicious comments about classmates and professors, photos of guys and their private parts, tricks we used to pass exams, insults we had thrown at each other when everything ended. The link had been automatically shared from our social media profiles. The blog was titled "A Love Letter." The last "R" was upside down and stood out cruelly in red against the white background.

*****

Maybe you've read this story after reading my fanfiction, and we already know each other. Otherwise, welcome!

I'm trying to experiment and write short original stories that I'll publish as a collection of stories.

Don't hesitate to leave your comments.

See you soon!