Let's Be Friends Part 1

To say I was shocked when I saw the news about you would be a lie. Even though the reporters were saying you were possibly trafficked, I knew that wasn’t it. You were always too weary of that sort of thing. There wasn’t a true crime podcast you hadn’t listened to or unsolved murder you hadn’t given your theories on. Besides, you didn’t like meeting people you had no previous knowledge of. Living in such a small town, you probably got used to knowing everything there was to know about a person before you met them. You wouldn’t have met someone off a dating app or instagram. What happened to you was done by someone close to you.

Part of me wanted to call the information hotline provided underneath your college graduation photo and let them know what I thought of things. I didn’t do that, though. While I hate admitting it, I know the only reason I wanted to do it was to make myself feel important. Maybe I even wanted to be connected to you publicly. Maybe I wanted people to see me and ask, “Didn’t you used to be best friends with that girl who went missing?” Maybe they still will.

It’s doubtful, though. You haven’t talked to me in almost four years. You cut me out of your life completely. Other than your old high school friends, which it doesn’t seem like you still talk to, I doubt anyone in your life knows how close we used to be. It will be your new friends who get all the attention from your disappearance. They will be the ones people feel sad for. No one will feel sad for me. In fact, people would probably think I’m pretty self-absorbed if I try to make the disappearance of an old friend about me.

Which really sucks, because I’m hurting because of your disappearance, too. I never thought I’d see or hear from you again. I never wanted to. I had taken every precaution against hearing about you again. I didn’t expect that the TV would bring you back to me. That also hurts. They’re making you out to be this well mannered, beautiful young woman with a bright future ahead of you. They don’t know how horrible you really are. They don’t know how horrible you were to ME. I wish I could tell them all the messed up shit you’ve said to me over the years, and have that be in the headlines about you. But, again, that would be making your disappearance about me. Also, it would make me look suspicious, because you’ve given me more than enough motivation to make you disappear. It would be best for me to keep my mouth shut.

Still, I need to tell someone how I feel about this. I need someone who will hear me out without thinking that I’m being self-centered. Someone who will care more about the trauma you caused me than your missing person’s case. I think I’ll set an appointment with a therapist in the morning.

Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll tell her about how seeing your picture on the news triggered me and why. She’ll tell me to start from the beginning. “That’s the easiest place to start” is what most people say. They’re right, of course. It is the easiest place to start, and the story only makes sense from the beginning.

You might not know this, I never told you because I never wanted to hurt your feelings the way you liked to hurt mine, but the beginning started way before we met. You probably don’t remember but we had a class together those first nine weeks of freshman year. I sat on the other side of the room with my friends on that first day. The seats were pushed into groups of four and everyone was rushing to sit by their friends or sit alone. You ended up sitting with a girl I never cared enough to know, and Travis Johnson.

Travis and I knew each other our whole lives having gone to school together. I knew a lot about him, which made me really confused when he let you join him at his empty table. He had never shown any interest in girls, and definitely wasn’t a people person. In middle school, I started getting a crush on him and he constantly turned down my efforts. So what did he see in you that made him cool with you being around?

As far as I could tell, you were just a normal girl. You weren’t ugly but you weren’t super pretty, either. Definitely not as pretty as you were in your college graduation picture. The clothes you had on were pretty simple, high waisted skinny jeans, and a very 90’s looking striped crop tee. Very basic and in-trend. I dressed pretty similarly. Hell, we even looked similar. Wavey gold-blond hair and big green eyes. To this day I still don’t know what the difference was, or why it was significant enough for him to accept you and not me.

It was really childish of me, but I couldn’t help but dislike you for it. I was boy crazy and stubborn back then. Once I set my sights on a guy I didn’t stop trying until I had him. Except Travis had never given me a second thought and I had been forced to give up. So seeing you just effortlessly approach him without him protesting your mere existence was a huge hit to my ego. It also reignited my flame for Travis. I thought that maybe he had changed over the summer and was willing to give girls a change this year.

I was so excited when I walked into the last class of the day and saw that Travis was already sitting at a desk. All the ones immediately surrounding him were taken, so I got the closest one to him that I could. He wasn’t talking to anyone, and I have never been shy, so right away I leaned closer to him and said, “Hey Travis.” His only response was to give me a mildly disgusted look. I waited for him to say something, but he just stared at me with that mean look until I gave up and looked away. It was so frustrating.

For weeks after that, I tried really hard to get him to talk to me during the last class of the day. The only reason I didn’t try during the class we shared with him is because I had too many friends in that class that needed my attention. That didn’t mean I was oblivious to him or you. I saw that he had no problems talking to you. It was obvious you liked him, and he clearly liked you, too. It made me so mad, but also really nervous. I felt like if I didn’t get to him soon enough, you were going to take away my chance to be with him.

After almost two months of watching you two flirt from across the room, I had enough. When I went to the class I had with just Travis, I walked right up to his desk and refused to move until he spoke to me like he spoke to you.

“What?” He finally said after an intense staredown.

“Do you like that girl you sit with in health class?” I asked. He looked really confused like everyone who was in that class didn’t already know you liked each other.

“Emma?” He asked.

“I don’t know her name. Whichever one is the one that looks like me. Do you like her?” I tried to keep my annoyance out of my voice. There was no reason to let him think I cared about it.

“Her name is Emma, and she doesn’t look like you. But no, I don’t like her like that. Why do you care?” He asked.

“I don’t care.” I assured him. “It’s just you guys flirt every day, which is weird because you’ve never talked to girls like that before. I was just curious.”

“Sure.” He said, and looked down at the blank sheets of paper on his desk, signaling the end of the conversation. It was enough for me to feel better about the situation for a while. When I saw you two talking in class it was easier for me to see that he WAS rejecting your advances. There was more annoyance in his features than there was interest. Not to mention, I had finally got my foot in the door. If I could pry it open like you had, he’d probably talk to me just as much as he did you.

And he did. It was just a lot slower going. Whenever I approached him in English, he wouldn’t dismiss me right away. Instead, he let me say whatever it was I planned to say, acknowledged it, and then went to his work. When we had to work in groups, he reluctantly joined my group. It wasn’t until we had our first group project in Health that I realized my efforts weren’t outdoing yours.

I told my friends I was going to ask him to join us, and they all thought it was weird. When I got to where your desks were all pushed together, the three of you looked up at me as if I was some deep sea creature you had never seen before. It didn’t bother me, though.

“Travis, do you want to work in our group?” I asked.

“Uh, no. I’m already working with them.” He gestured to you and your friend. Then, as if it were rehearsed, you all turned away from me. I walked away and as I did, I heard you ask, “What was that about?”

It made me really angry for some reason. I know you didn’t mean it in a rude way, you were just curious. But even you could admit that it sounds really snotty.

In English that day, I went up to Travis and said, “That was kind of rude of you earlier.”

“What was?” He asked.

“Blowing me off like that when I asked you to work with us. I thought we were friends.”

“I didn’t realize we were friends.” He said. His tone was flat. I don’t think he was trying to hurt my feelings, but he did. I didn’t let him know that, though.

“Well, I won't make the mistake of thinking that again.” I said with a shrug and walked back to my seat. I thought he would feel bad and tell me that he really did think of me as a friend, and that he didn’t know I thought we were. He never approached me, though.

When that nine weeks finally ended, I was excited. Not only did I not have to watch you and Travis flirt anymore, you two were getting split up before you had the chance to get together.

Except, that didn’t end up being true. Turns out that just because that class was only nine weeks long doesn’t mean that was all it took to get the credit for it. The second half of health class is physical education. So instead of you two getting split up, you were actually being put into a space where you’d be able to talk more freely without getting in trouble for it. Not only that, but I had to be there to witness it.

For two weeks I watched as you took full advantage of there being no rules in the gym. You flirted, had private conversations in the corner, and sometimes I’d even see you guys sneak out to the track field for God knows what reasons. Two weeks of that was all my ego could handle.

Every time I had asked Travis to give me details about you two, he said there was nothing to it. So finally I just went straight to you.

You seemed confused when I asked you to talk to me alone for a minute, but thankfully you didn’t object.

“Are you and Travis dating?” I asked, just wanting to get straight to the point. You frowned.

“No. I really like him, though.” You said. Instantly, I was relieved. Something about the way you said it sounded like you didn’t think there was even a chance. I was so overjoyed that I felt a little bad for you.

“Well, you guys would be really cute together.” I said, wanting you to feel less bad about the situation. You smiled and thanked me.

After I realized you weren’t horrible to talk to, I realized we could probably be friends. Maybe we’d get close enough for me to tell you I liked Travis, and you would stop going after him. For the following weeks I went out of my way to talk to you during gym. I spent every moment I could, effectively diminishing the amount of alone time you were spending with him. I thought that I had done a pretty good job of getting between the two of you.

During English, I was able to talk to Travis about you two, seeing as I managed to sneak my way into your group. He still didn’t offer much, only saying that you were cool to talk to. But he would only talk to me for more than a minute if we were talking about you. So that’s all we ever talked about.

I shouldn’t have been surprised or hurt the day you came to me and told me that Travis had asked you out. I was, though. Somehow, despite all my efforts, you two still got together. It was even worse because by then, I really did think of you as a really good friend. I had to pretend I was happy and even excited for you, even though I really wasn’t. I felt bad for feeling that way, too, because you had only ever shown me kindness. If I had known what you would do over the next couple years, I wouldn’t have felt so bad.