sunrise [until dawn]

ii: afterthought

Chris and I both approached the stranger quietly as not to draw attention to ourselves.

"Aha, look who it is," the stranger says, holding Chris' phone.

Chris waits a moment before whispering, "Hey mosey."

The stranger jumps around and gasps, "Oh! Chris, Maggie!"

It was Sam, a girl who I was best friends with a year ago.

"Excuse me, are you my secretary?" Chris asks, snatching the phone from her hand.

"It was buzzing!" She laughs.

"Cool, well thanks for letting me know," Chris glances down at the screen. "I can take it from here."

"How have you both been?" She asks, adjusting her backpack on her shoulders.

"Pretty good," I say, looking over at Chris, who had begun to talk on the phone to who I assume is Ashley. "It's been hard on him, y'know? Me too, but he feels guiltiest out of the both of us. The group kind of deceived him."

"What do you mean?"

"He says that Mike asked him to get Josh really drunk. 'To help his attitude' or something.'" [this isn't canon but this is a fanfic so :)]

"That's awful," Sam sighs. "And how are you?"

I look over at Chris and back at her, "Honestly? I don't really know. I feel like I could've done something instead of just drink my ass off. Then again, I didn't know about the prank, so I couldn't really do much."

Looking down at my feet, I add, "I felt like they didn't like me for the longest time."

It was true. It took me a few months for it to sink in that Hannah and Beth would probably not be coming back, and once it did, thoughts that I pushed from my mind came flooding back.

Did the rest of the group not like me?

Sure, I was friends with Josh and Sam, and Chris was my brother, but I had always thought the rest, Emily, Jess, Mike, Ash, Matt, I thought I was friends with. As weird as it sounded, did they really not consider me part of the group? They hadn't told me about the prank until after it went south (not that i would've done anything they said, but still), none of them had reached out to me to get together and grieve, and none of them had called me to even hang out. It was almost as if I wasn't Maggie; I was just "Chris' sister."

"Hon, what do you mean?"

Tears start collecting in my eyes, and I wipe them with the back of my hand. This was a sensitive subject for me, and I didn't like to think about it unless I had to.

"No one ever reached out to me to ask me how I was, except for the few times you called between classes. No one even called to invite me over or out or even just to talk. It's like I'm an afterthought. Even fucking Josh stopped calling me."

"Well, screw them," she takes me into a hug. "You have me and your big brother."

"Thank you," the words can barely escape my lips before tears come.

I took a few seconds to compose myself, and we headed over to Chris, who was now screaming into the snow. Like his face was in the snow, and he was screaming.

"Chris, what are you doing?"

"Never mind that," he pulls his face from the snow. "Cmon, I found something kind of amazing."

-

Josh: 8/10
Chris: 10/10
Ashley: 5/10
Sam: 9/10
Jess: 2/10
Mike: 5/10
Matt: 4/10
Emily: 1/10

Honest: 9/10
Charitable: 6/10
Funny: 7/10
Brave: 6/10
Romantic: 7/10
Curious: 7/10