“I really wish I didn’t take summer classes, you know?” Bethany remarked with a sigh, taking a sip of the water already served. She was the sort of person who would complain about the health problems with carbonated drinks yet consume an unhealthy amount of sugar each week. I didn’t really judge her for that, only when she bugged me about ordering a Diet Coke with my meals.
Today, I didn’t care. She told me it was awful for my health, and silently, I said good because I felt content with going out from this world for drinking too much soda. It was a better way to die than being murdered, after all.
“That’s your problem,” Jenna laughed, waving away at Bethany with a shake of her head. Of the four friends, Jenna was the one who thrived on gossip, but if it was something uninteresting, she didn’t care to hear for your problems, nor would she do anything about it. Definitely not someone to confide in.
The restaurant’s lighting was a bit dim, casting subtle shadows over the room, walls red and tables black, and all around were families and couples and friends, chatting away with meals being served and meals being finished. Everyone around me was living, their lives thriving and flying by, and maybe some of them felt as empty as I but played it well otherwise, but there was no telling if I was alone in this restaurant with my hollow, guilt ridden body, chipping away with the passing days.
I didn’t want to come to this dinner with my friends, but now, I didn’t want to leave. Leaving meant returning to the apartment, and in an hour or two, he would be home. Or maybe he wouldn’t if he had “other plans,” but I didn’t allow myself to dwell on that any further and tuned back into the pointless drivel of a conversation my friends were having.
“I feel like we’re a bunch of middle aged mothers meeting up after not seeing each other for years and having a nice catch up dinner together,” Bethany said. “My mom does that about every five years, and they all pretend they still give a shit.”
“Maybe they do,” Lauren suggested, finished her tending to the brown locks at the sides of her round face, pushing them aside from her rosy cheeks. She seemed, for once, to have not gone tanning this summer. Good. “I haven’t spoken with my friend from middle school since eighth grade, but I always genuinely wonder what she’s up to whenever the thought comes up.”
“Well, you’re sentimental, and you remember the weirdest things,” Jenna said with a roll of her big, brown eyes. “Like that one time you remembered me getting stuck in a tree in the second grade. I literally do not recall such a thing ever happening.”
That had to have been a lie. Jenna cried for hours during and hours after. I had been there, too, being childhood friends with the two, and every time someone brought it up- even the day following- she would deny its existence, claiming “amnesia” for the longest time.
I always seemed to remember the little things about others. Myself? After my grandmother died when I was fourteen, I started to blur out the past of my childhood, memories with her and my parents staying aside, only the important things keeping their place.
“Hey, Eleanor,” Bethany called, waving her hand frantically in front of my eyes, forcing me to flinch back and blink a few times. I turned to her and furrowed my brows.
“What did you do that for?” I asked.
“You were totally spacing out again. This isn’t chemistry class, so please stay with us here,” Bethany implored.
“Sorry,” I murmured. “I’m just really tired.” It was a blatant lie, and it was far overused. The last few weeks, I had used the same thing, claiming to have “worked too much.”
I quit my job two weeks ago.
“Jesus, you really should get a better summer job if all you do is glaze over and stare from the pure exhaustion,” Lauren remarked, leaning forward from the seat across from me. “How are things, other than that, anyways? With Jonathon?”
I winced, and Lauren’s perfectly trimmed and arched brows twitched at that, picking up on my display, and in that moment, I decided to why not try and trust these three friends? Who would believe it anyways?
“Jonathon is a murderer,” I said flatly, keeping my voice to a tone so dull and stark that it seemed too real for any sort of joke. “I watched him kill two women through their windows, and now, I’m just overridden with guilt from not saying anything about it.”
They all went cold and silent, their eyes- brown, blue, and black- staring at me, blinking as the seconds passed, and I glanced between all three of them, keeping the dull neutrality of my flat lined mouth, and finally, Jenna spoke.
“Shit, Eleanor,” she emitted, laughing through her nose. “That joke almost sounds real, and that look in your eyes… God, you should be an actress.”
Oh you have no idea how close I am to being something of the sort, I thought. The irony of it hit me hard in the face, and I wished so much that they wouldn’t find such a thing so out there because it wasn’t, and I could only keep this in so long. If he was put in jail, would I be free?
Not from the guilt. Not ever from that. But from him? It was possible, but there was no proof, and given my history with therapists and such, they might write me off as making it up, but I was never one to visit for any sort of things, just a little chemical imbalance making my world dull and my brain long for death.
An actress? Sure, I could try to play at that.
The cupid’s bow of my lips widened and curved, carving a smile from my face, and I laughed. “You guys looked so serious,” I remarked, keeping a playful edge to my voice. God, did it feel so forced, but from the equally startled but amused looks on their faces, they didn’t notice. Perhaps it was better that way. To keep it all inside.
“It’s like that one time you convinced your lateness to Algebra was all because someone slashed your tires. Priceless!” Lauren said, downing the rest of her iced tea. All of us had given her the lemons that came with our drinks, and she squeezed them all dry into that iced tea. I could only imagine how sour it tasted.
“I just-” I began. I stopped myself midway, realizing the flatness to my tone returning, and I coughed and took a sip of water, pretending that was the problem of it all. “I just wanted to go hiking during lunch...and Algebra,” I continued, shrugging. It felt so forced, and the smile didn’t meet my eyes. Bethany raised a brow, but I averted from her gaze.
“Oh! That reminds me,” Lauren said before she curved and bent around to the back of her chair, digging through the purple leather purse hanging on the edge. She dug through it with her long, fake, manicured nails and pulled out her phone. “I,” she said as she began to scroll through it, “am going hiking with my roommate because she’s really into birds or something, and I was wondering if you would like to come with.”
She spoke slowly as she scrambled through messages, and with the end of her words, her phone spun around, glowing its screen in my face. Upon it were messages from her roommate- one she was keeping for sophomore year of college- and just as she said, it all spoke of a hiking trip next weekend.
I had always loved hiking, finding it my true hobby. My grandmother got me into it, taking me in the woods behind her home, and I loved how calm and beautiful the world around me was. The soft crunch of fallen autumn leaves, the drone of cicadas in the summer, the strange silence of a snowy winter woods. Climbing and walking, viewing and listening. I loved it all.
It’d been three months since I last bothered with it, and now, it seemed like too much work, and the reward of it felt almost non-existent, not even there anymore. What was the point?
“I’ll pass,” I sighed. Lauren’s eyes shot wide and she dropped her phone in the middle of the table, letting it clatter against the table, rocking the silverware in a rattle, and Bethany hissed at her, but she merely stared.
“Eleanor Raider, doesn’t want to explore and raid the forests of our great United States? What the hell?” she uttered, reaching for her phone and shoving it back into her purse. “Why not?”
She’d gotten my name wrong, again, and on purpose, but each time I corrected her, she always persisted just to bug me. It wasn’t worth it anymore, and I couldn’t care less at this point.
It was pronounced Rye-der, not Ray-der.
“I’m...just not up for it,” I admitted. No lie came to me quick enough, and from the increasing knit in Bethany’s brows, I started to worry she was catching on. She knew about the last time I had this sort of problem, and Jenna did, too, but she seemed to brush it aside, pretending it wasn’t a real thing.
Maybe she just didn’t care, or maybe she didn’t know what to say. She struggled showing her empathy quite often, even if it was still there. I still felt bitter about it, however. That didn’t give her an excuse to ignore the problems at hands and the struggles I went through. Supportive friend? Fuck off.
Bethany opened her mouth to speak, but before a single utterance could escape, the waitress arrived with the food, and Lauren clapped her hands together in a playful prayer, thanking the God she didn’t believe in for the meal arriving. I could hear her stomach quietly growling throughout the time since I had arrived, and I silently thanked God, too, as the sound was growing on my nerves, suddenly angering me. Everything was becoming too loud, an irritating ring burning in my eardrums.
So, we ate, and Jenna brought up all this pathetic gossip and spoke about people we graduated with and what had become of their lives- some successful and others not so much- and I let my mind wander through most of it, nodding along as the others did, pretending to listen to it.
Already, my meal was incorrect. I’d ordered a BLT sandwich without mayonnaise, and of course, they did not take off the mayo. The world hated me, and I was starting to hate it right back. Each and every time I tried something- I made an effort to feel whole- the damn world threw it back in my face. It was just shitty mayo, but it felt like I’d been slapped in the face.
I only ate half of it as not to revive that crease in Bethany’s brow and that concerned glare in her eyes, and I was filled with the immense desire to leave- to go home and sleep because I was just far too tired to sit here and play pretend any longer- and the immense desire for it to last forever.
I didn’t want to go home. Not when Jonathon would be there.
On the way home, I thought back to the problems that struck me in high school. My grandmother’s passing unleashed a gradual storm, and a year after that, when she ditched me, it was at its worst. I was fortunate to have Bethany and Lauren for support, and even Jenna’s ignoring it all. I didn’t like talking about it, and that was the only part that I could thank her for, but her lack of concern arouse questions of her loyalty.
Now, everything I worried about then was nothing.
As long as I had this guilt filling the void, I found the future fading further, a dense fog blocking out any sight of it- if it even existed.
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