It All Started With Him

:: 7 :: Two Addicts, Addicted to Two Different Things

The silence is choking. The darkness of ephemeral life eats away every single thing you touch. The text of Anna saying "we're not friends anymore" to the argument between Wes and myself.

I should move forward, and start thinking about what I want and need instead. Instead of that, the fight and reconciliation between us crumbled into the end of a relationship with another needle.

****

My phone pinged with a text from someone. My energy level is low and I don't want to check it. I do anyway.

It's from Anna. So much for her and the we're not talking anymore speech and her dramatics from yesterday. I don't anticipate answering her. Then finally I decimated the thought and answered her back.

Me: I thought we weren't talking anymore

Anna: yes, but I really need to talk to you. Can I get a ride to school? I'll buy pizza after school!!

How Anna could always get me to cave in at the noun of pizza. A weakness that her and I have shared together since childhood. That and watching horror movies that no one has possibly seen before. With this thought I think sure. Why not?

"What's your emergency?" I ask as she opens the door and I'm immediately greeted by whatever metal band is screaming out of her headphones. My immediate thought is to start counting down until she says whatever it is that she needs to talk to me about.

"Okay?" She then takes a deep sigh before starting again as soon as she ditches her headphones, placing them on the backseat of the jeep. "So there's this girl who is in my chemistry class," her opening line for how she wants this to go.

"There's lots of girls in your chemistry class," I say as I realize this may not be the reaction she wanted to hear. Though, I was a little curious about which girl she was talking about. "We're a coeducational school, not an all gender school," I addressed, hoping that it sound more dramatic than the initial comment.

"That's not the point," she tells me as an edgy pop song plays in the background of our conversation. "Point is," she adds as she rolls her eyes at me with a wide grin.

"You discovered that you have a crush?" I asked more of a statement than a question. She goes quiet, as though she's afraid of answering that. Maybe this is new territory for her and she doesn't know how to answer such an important thing.

"I don't know where she stands on genderqueer people being treated differently," Anna says to me, her genderqueer status coming into light for the first time since she became aware of where she stood on the spectrum.

"Ask her about it?" My words came out harder than they should have been. She'd been happy to tell me about this, and this is how I react instead.

"This is exactly why I didn't want to tell you," she half yelled at me, her anger rising and honestly in this situation I wouldn't have blamed her. She had full throttle and told me we weren't friends anymore and here we are. "I at least know about my crush," she added as I parked the jeep and the sound of a student riding a motorbike buzzed by.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked as I took the keys out of the ignition switch. Neither one of us looked at each other.

"I figured out how my crush works while you keep eyeing stoner jocks in the hallway," she tells me coldly before sliding out of the jeep and into the crowded hallway of the school.

****

Had she been right about this crush thing? I couldn't even deny that I had been eyeing a certain stoner in the hallway. Had she known about Wes and I longer than she had thought? I justI'mwasn't going to bring that up socially. Instead I send a text as she's in one of her classes.