Explanations, Apologies and Realizations
<Glitter in the Air by P!nk begins to play in the background>
Fifteen minutes had passed when Gary came back from the bathroom. His eyes were red and his face looked a bit flushed, but he looked otherwise better (that is to say, more put together) than when he had left.
“We’re pricks.” Yuffie blurted out.
Everyone’s heads swerved in her direction, expressions ranging from surprised to genuinely confused.
“I mean it. We–” She laughed hoarsely. “I’ve spent the past two months thinking back on what I should have done to help Hannah, even though I didn’t do a damn thing to help her! Yeah, I know!” She snapped when she saw Luna about to interject. “I know I was just doing what she asked me to, but I…” Her face crumples. “I shouldn’t have listened to her. Because not doing anything is worse than doing nothing, and if I had ignored it then maybe Bryce wouldn’t have hurt so many people, and maybe Hannah would have gotten the help she needed-”
“And maybe this, and maybe that, all you’re doing is mulling over ‘maybes’!” Alice cut in sharply. “You can drown in ‘maybes’, but you cannot turn back time and fix it! What’s done is done, and mulling over what could have been will drive you mad. Trust me, I speak from experience.”
“You’re not a bad person, Yuffie.” Luna assured her. “You’re just a kid. And being a kid means making stupid mistakes, and being immature, and not recognizing things for what they are until it’s too late.”
“He wrote a book about me*.” Aria blurts out.
Gary frowned. “What?”
“Ezra, he wrote a book about me.” Aria says, face distant as her eyes grew glassy. “I… The night I lost my virginity wasn’t the first time I spent the night at his place.” She begins. “One of the nights I stayed over, I came across his home office. I saw a couple of pieces of written paper, and a small pile of notes he had written about me and my friends.” Licking her lips, she continues, “…Ezra was really interested in what happened to Courtney and Alison–about how they died, and the things that happened before they were killed. I thought that he was just expressing interest in something morbid. I-I never–” She laughed, it was a broken, hoarse sounding thing. “Turns out he was just using me to get information on my friends and fish for material.”
Momo shook her head in horrified disbelief. “That son of a bitch.”
“You wanna know what Ezra called it?” She continues, fists clenching in her lap. “His “breakout hit”? What he called us: Ali, Courtney, Emily, Spencer, Hanna, and me?
“Pretty Little Liars: Mean Girls Gone Bad.”
Sounds like the title of a bad step-sis porno. Flash quipped internally. But, he knew the comment would hit Aria close, so instead he asked her, “Did you confront him about it?”
“Of course, I did*!” Aria replied. “And after a week of sulking, of wondering whether or not I should even meet with him again, I decided to forgive him. He kissed me, I kissed him back-”
“And, that’s when Mike and Hanna walked in on you.” Jack finishes.
“I was so mad at Mike when he told on us.” Aria seethed. “Ezra and I were finally making up and setting things right, but my annoying little brother just had to go sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong, rag on us to everyone and get Ezra fired!”
“Why do you defend him, then?” Yuffie asks her. “If you knew what Mr. Fitz did, about what he thought of you and your friends– how he viewed you and your friends, why did you keep defending him?”
Now, Yuffie wasn’t asking this to be mean; she wasn’t saying it confusedly or accusingly, nor was she trying to interrogate Aria, she genuinely wanted to know why the older girl did the things she did.
“Ezra was the first guy to ever make me feel something.” Aria confessed. “It wasn’t lust, I know what that feels like; but, it wasn’t infatuation either. He… Ezra made me feel things–things that I never felt with other guys. Yeah, I’ve dated casually, but it never went as deep as what went on between me and Ezra. And what I felt–it ran deep, I mean-I wouldn’t have lost my virginity to him if I didn’t feel that way. I-I honestly thought that we had some kind of connection.” Fiddling with her friendship bracelet, she scoffs. “Guess it was just me, huh?”
“You’re allowed to feel things.” Mercury said. “You are allowed to feel things for people, to have an emotional connection with other people. Even if that person happens to be fucked up, your feelings matter.”
“That’s what everyone else has been telling me.” Aria retorted.
“You were taken advantage of.” Gary cut in bluntly. “Your parents and friends are allowed to be worried for you. Yeah, they’re not the smartest people or the best judges of character, but they do give a shit about you and Mike–that’s gotta count for something.”
“Yeah, but you guys are the minority.” Aria snapped. “The majority of the people around me tell me that I’m a horny idiot, a selfish bitch, or make jokes about how the sexually perverse apple didn’t fall that far from the tree.”
“Has it ever occurred to any of you that we’re allowed to be selfish?!” Luna erupts, startling them. “We’re kids! We’re at the age where all we think about is ourselves! Feeling and being selfish is not a sin or a crime! If this is the part where we begin to pour out our emotions and tell the truth about each other, then we should also confess the bad ones alongside the good!
“Our age demographic isn’t divided into saints and sinners,” She continues. “we’re still growing! We’re still adapting to the hell that is adolescence and post-puberty bullshit! It’s not our job nor is it our responsibility for adults to expect that we act walk, talk and think like them because we aren’t them! Not yet! I still want to savor what little time I have left to just go with the flow, and be a kid! And, it’s hypocritical for our peers to expect the same of us when they’re probably going through the very same bullshit!”
“Yeah, but that’s not what they want.” Momo states.
“Fuck them then!” Luna scoffs. “You all look at me and wonder why I don’t consign myself to one particular group or clique, well this is why! I know who I am-what I am, and the last thing I need is for false friends to tell me otherwise and make me conform or turn me into someone they want me to be! Bad enough I have to get the same concerns from my teachers and hypersensitive parents who don’t know a damn thing about me, I don’t need that from people who claim to be my friends!”
“I’m of the opinion that when you grow up, your heart dies.*” Flash states. “At least, in my experience.”
“How do you figure?” Mercury asks him.
“When you’re young–when you’re a kid, you wear your heart on your sleeve.” The jock explains, half to himself, half to the people around him. “That’s how we all operate when we’re that young, ‘cause we’re growing, we’re learning and trying to figure stuff out on our own.
“And then something happens that make us less open, less bright, so we begin to build up walls. For some people it’s gradual, it comes slowly. But for people like me and Gary, we build up our walls because we need to. Physical exposure is one thing, emotional exposure–where all of your shit is laid bare–it’s terrifying.” He paused, tounge jutting out breifly to lick his lips. “I guess that’s why adults don’t express themselves as easily as kids do.
“But we’re not kids anymore, but we’re not adults yet so I guess that leaves us somewhere in the middle.”
“Being in the middle isn’t always a good thing.” Yuffie states. “It’s like, you’re halfway there, yet you’re too tired to keep going; but at the same time, you know you’ve come too far and you can’t quit or it’ll make all of your previous efforts all for naught.”
“As one of three legal adults in this library,” Alice cuts in. “I can assure you all that adulthood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“What are we gonna do on Monday then?” Aria asks. “If today is all we have with each other, if today is all we have to just relax and not worry about what everyone else thinks, then what’ll happen to us on Monday?”
“I don’t know.” Luna confesses, slumping against the wall. “And, I don’t know whether or not to think that that’s a good thing.”
“Not knowing what’ll happen on Monday is a good thing?” Gary scoffs.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” She muses. “At least, we can take comfort in the fact that we’re suffering together.”
They flinched upon hearing a sharp whimper, turning just in time to see Gary’s face crumple and pull his knees to his chest, burying his face in his crossed arms.
He couldn’t take it anymore – tears escaped his eyes and slid down his cheeks, dripping onto his knees and soaking into the fabric of his pants.
Guess Luna had been right about the emotions thing; truth be told, Gary had never really let himself feel this way before, about… everything really. He had just pushed it to the back of his mind, ignoring it because there were more important things to focus on. But, now he was being forced to accept the reality that he would never be with his sister until after high school unless it was in a public setting, and that he had lost whatever love he might have had from his “parents” after he came out. Like they told him, having no son was better than having a queer son.
“Am I broken?” He heard himself whisper.
“No, you’re just fucked up.” Alice said, a bittersweet smile on her face. “But, it’s like Luna said, it’s not like you’re the only one.”
And that was it, wasn’t it?
They were all just broken pieces of their upbringings and circumstances shoved together into some semblance of functioning human beings.
And, if you sat back and actually thought about it, wasn’t that how everybody existed?
Nobody was whole.
Nobody went untouched by the hands of grief or pain.
Some people were just, better at hiding it than others.
Granted, Gary was better at hiding it now than he had been way back when, but give him a break. He’d been suppressing these emotions for the past month and a half now. Sue him.
Everyone just sat in silence as Gary sniffled and wiped his eyes. They all knew how hard it was to have your walls–walls you spent years of blood, sweat and tears building up–torn down by a few choice words.
That kind of vulnerability – that kind of exposure, no matter how few people there were in the room with you, it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. So, they chose to sit in silence.
After all, it’s the things we don’t say that makes the most impact.
Luna was the first to speak up, asking them, “Do you know what I did to end up in detention?”
Jack frowned. “Not really.”
“Yeah, what did you do to get detention?” Mercury asks.
“Nothing,” She giggled. “I was just bored.”
The others were full on laughing now; except they were laughing with each other instead of at another person.
It was a good feeling (brief though it was). And, the past, their future, or whatever, was forgotten for the time being…