Work Text:
Author’s Note, Ahead of Works:
It is my sincerest apologies for deviating from the usual content for which you subscribed to my blog. I understand if you choose to scroll past this post and look for the content that you actually care about. However, I feel that this post, in its deviant nature, is necessarily for my mental growth as a human and as an artist drawing upon the emotion of people to create pieces that I think you like.
Breaking Up with a Friend
In 5 Easy Steps
by
Elliotte Frances
Introduction:
I must admit that the title of this blog post is a tiny bit misleading. This is more of a countdown, I think. This post is going to come to you in seven parts: introduction, five separate incidents, and a reflection. I mean, I guess this entire post is a reflection of what happened, but that’s neither here nor there, right?
Recently, my friend Carson Hoover turned into the world’s biggest douche bag. I don’t assign that title very freely, either, because I’m usually a pretty relaxed person. My entire life’s philosophy has been: live and let live. There’s no reason for me to interfere with your life if you’re not interfering with mine. Don’t take from me, I don’t take from you. And, mostly, that’s how it worked out for me.
But then Carson decided he thought… Well… Why don’t I just start the story? Everything that follows will tell how a ten-year friendship with someone who I thought would be my best friend for the rest of my life fell into pieces…
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INCIDENT #1: SILLY DOODLES
revoke (verb): to annul by recalling or taking back
More than once I’ve had the conversation with my friends and family about what a worthless major “art” would be if I pursued it in college. The job pool is limited and highly competitive. If I want to make art a career, it will have to be secondary until it pays the bills. I hate that this is true and it drives me super crazy all the time. Still, I accept that the world is run by money. Carson knew this better than anyone since we are sophomores and are starting to take the college planning business more seriously.
So I’ve been taking a lot of business classes this year so that maybe I can get a business degree with an art minor, figuring that I can do something in marketing. It makes sense and I formulated my plan with my art teachers at the end of my freshmen year. Carson had thought the plan was a good one.
Had.
He had thought it was a good plan. I remember his voice, choked up and dramatic as ever. “Elli, you have it all figured out.”
We had a small project in my “Intro to Marketing” class where we had to make a flyer for this randomly assigned product. I got this super high tech washing machine and I thought it would be neat to make a panel cartoon to market it. I had it all sketched out before I realized I didn’t like the layout, so I had a pile of papers at my table in study hall. Carson was sitting with his science partner, football superstar at our school, and asswad supreme, Kailen Mercer, at the table next to me. When I left to use the restroom, I returned to a conversation that I know was meant to be private.
“Art is so stupid,” Kailen said with his usual drawl. Despite gum being banned, Kailen manages to walk around with chewing tobacco all day without consequence. If I were still chewing my food in the hallway from lunch I’d probably be told to spit it out on the spot. But whatever. I guess his touchdowns and field goals matter more than school rules? What a fantastic message to send to the students.
“Yeah, she’s always drawing stupid shit like that,” Carson laughed. He didn’t even miss a beat.
But neither did I. That’s the thing about being such great friends with people. You don’t pause because they can take it. They know you. “Excuse the hell out of you, Carson McFuckface. Where do you get off insulting my art when you can’t even write Amber’s name in bubble letters on the back of your math notebook.”
“Calm down,” Carson groaned in reply. I knew that groan. He didn’t care and wouldn’t change his mind. “It’s just a bunch of stupid doodles anyway. You’re finished project will be fucking dope, like always.”
I rolled my eyes and faked a laugh, I think. My mind was buzzing with how pissed off I was that he was insulting my work. He knows how much it means to me, silly doodle to the final product, it is all important. It is all special.
I didn’t think much on it after a few days, of course, because everything else was fine. Nothing like that came up again. Well, not for a while, at least.
INCIDENT #2: THAT’S EMBARRASSING
embarrass (verb): to cause, or to cause to experience, a state of self-conscious distress
Listen, we all do embarrassing stuff. People laugh too hard and pee their pants. You wear your shirt inside out, or your underwear backward. Mismatching shoes, smeared make-up, blah, blah, blah. Embarrassing means something different to everyone. And we all deal with embarrassment at some point.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sometimes I find Carson embarrassing. We were on the bus and he was messing around with his new friends on the football team. I was looking at art challenges on my phone, so I don’t know what happened, but the boys were all bouncing around and smacking each other. I got elbowed by Carson at one point and pushed him into the aisle.
“Fucking watch it, dude,” I said, relatively chill. As soon as he grunted and crawled back into the seat, I looked at him and smiled. “What the hell are you guys doing anyway?”
“Farting in our hands and smacking each other,” he said it so proud too, like this was the greatest thing he’s ever done with anyone. I shook my head and made a comment about how disgusting that behavior is and that if farts were cool, people would probably be getting off to it on the Internet.
I guess Carson’s new friends didn’t think that was a super normal? I don’t know but when we got off of the bus Carson sped away from me. I had to jog to keep up with him. “What hell?”
“Why did you say that shit on the bus? About jacking off to farts?” Carson blurted when the bus when racing past us to the next stop. I was so confused. I make jokes like that all the time, commenting far more explicitly than I probably should.
I told him that it just popped out, the way it always does, with my weird sense of humor. It’s never been a problem before so I didn’t understand why he was so upset now. After I tried to get ahead of him, he slid to the right and started walking through peoples’ yards to get to his house. I was left distraught on the sidewalk.
“That’s embarrassing when you talk like that,” he shouted back at me.
Angry that he suggested that I was too weird for his new friends, I blurted right back at him, stomping my foot and all. “Why? Because I’m supposed to act like a lady! Call me when you get your boxers out of a knot! We’re having lasagna for dinner, by the way!”
That’s how all of our fights go. I didn’t have any reason to think that this would be different. And, really, it wasn’t. He came over for dinner, but he didn’t stay long after, saying that he was tired. Nothing seemed too amiss then either. He gets cranky when he’s tired, and I thought that’s all it was. I didn’t forget it, though, because I tried to watch what I said more often after that.
At the end of the day, Carson is my friend and I don’t want him to feel like he can’t tell me how everything is – we’re supposed to be able to trust each other that way.
INCIDENT #3: I FORGOT OKAY
forget (verb): to omit or neglect unintentionally
Three is such a magic number.
Third time’s a charm.
Threes company, but fours a crowd.
Triangles are the strongest shape in the universe and it has three sides.
And, the most relevant of them all:
Third strike, you’re out.
I guess I should’ve known from the previous two incidents, but it wasn’t until this specific event that I started to question if my friendship with Carson was changing. Mind you, we never discussed the previous things – the insult to my art, the declaration that my humor is embarrassing. We’re teenagers and, to be frank, it’s easier to gloss over things that don’t really matter.
Because I honestly didn’t think that those little things mattered. If I complained and argued and moaned about everything that Carson has ever done to irritate me – fuck. We never would’ve been friends at all. There are things that you learn to live with and learn to love about someone, even if those things suck because they’re a gift. In my mind, Carson was always a gift.
There was a party after the last home basketball game and I guess Carson got invited to it. We had gone to the game together and were sitting at the highest center spot of the bleachers, eating popcorn with chocolate peanuts mixed inside, and complaining about the dull commentating done by the only freshmen willing to spend their evening saying stuff about people running back and forth in a tiny gym. Everything was pretty normal.
Carson drank his soda way too fast and at halftime he disappeared into the bathroom. He took a long time. I didn’t ask questions. He came back, we continued on, only with Carson checking his phone a few times between wisecracks and punching my arm. He kept smiling so I thought maybe it was this girl he’d been talking to online that he liked.
My gut tried to tell me that it was different – it wasn’t the weird smile he gets when she sends a selfie in herself in her underwear. It wasn’t even the smile he gets when she sends kissy face emojis. But I ignored it because – well – because I didn’t want him to bite at me again.
As soon as the game was over, he said he wanted to get home because his parents needed him to take his sister, Claire, to her dance rehearsal in the morning because they both had to work. It was a decent enough lie, I’ll give him that, but I think he forgets that my dad works with his dad and that I’d know if his dad had to work because my dad would have to work too.
My dad didn’t have to work. I knew that before I found him passed out next to my mom on the couch with empty wine glasses on the coffee table. I knew that before I woke to drunk text messages from Carson saying he wished he would’ve invited me to the party – and apology messages after that for not telling me about the party. Apparently he just forgot.
Several pictures of Carson hanging out with his new friends without his shirt on showed up online in the next few days. There was some video footage of him making out with a couple of girls from the cheer squad – the two girls he’d been poking fun at for not being on rhythm with the rest of the cheerleaders during their halftime show. I was understandably confused.
But I replaced that confusion with frustration quickly.
I replied to his texts letter by letter, just to make sure that the hammering headache that he had was ten times worse.
Y
O
U
S
U
C
K
B
U
Y
M
E
A
D
R
I
N
K
T
O
M
O
R
R
O
W
Carson didn’t meet me at the bus stop, which had me worried, but he showed up with sunglasses to my dad’s barbeque that night with two butterscotch lattes in hand. We ended up in my room watching fail videos for the rest of the night. He fell asleep in my lap, swearing he’d never go to another party without me.
I knew he was lying, but I sat there stroking his brown curls off of his forehead anyway.
This was my best friend. I wanted to believe him. Even if I knew I couldn’t.
INCIDENT #4: BE THE REAL ME
real (adjective): existing as fact; actual rather than imaginary
The worst thing for a friend to find is a status that passive-aggressively attacks you.
“my new years goal is to be the real me and to stop being held back by the people around me – heres to a new carsonnnn”
I kept going back to that status update. The only person that Carson hung out with was me over Christmas break – and I knew it, too, because Carson was staying with us while his folks went on a cruise. His sister was with their cousins.
He didn’t go anywhere without me, except to run back home for things he forgot when he packed. So when I saw that post with him asleep at the foot of my bed – it took everything in me not to kick him in the face.
Thankfully, it took more than everything in me to cry quiet enough not to wake up him. I was glad when I woke up later in the day and he wasn’t in my room. I locked my door and cried even more.
What had I done wrong? What had I done to him? Why did he think he couldn’t be his true self around me?
Why wasn’t our friendship real anymore?
INCIDENT #5: DELIVERED, SEEN, IGNORED
ignore (verb): to refrain from noticing or recognizing
The time between Christmas break and Spring break was really awkward. Carson and I were going through our schedules just the same as we’d been doing for ten years, but his friends were more present and I was less involved. At times it felt like I was a ghost in his story. Other times, things felt almost the same.
We spent many nights curled up on the couch of his basement in silence, watching movies we loved without ever addressing the change in our dynamic. He spent more time nodding and checking his texts, and I spent more time looking at colleges and planning a future for myself that included art. When we did talk to each other without distractions, we didn’t make eye contact as often.
In no time, it was almost like we were strangers stuck on the same path.
On the second day of Spring break, though, I sent a message telling Carson that I wanted to talk to him about the way things had been. I felt that everything was awkward and strained between us. Friendships break for less serious things that what was going ignored at the time, that he meant more to me than a few hurt feelings. Carson got the message. It said delivered.
He even looked at the message. Yet, he didn’t reply right away. Three days passed before I got a message back from him telling me that the reason everything felt weird was that I had become a total piece of garbage friend. Apparently, I was holding him back from the things he loved to do and that I was such a dork about art that it was embarrassing how out of touch with the social norms I was. Those words left me gutted, breathless, and floored.
Hours passed where I couldn’t even cry because I couldn’t believe what I had read. There’s no way he sent this while he was sober. Then again, maybe that was the point. Maybe – maybe he waited until he was drunk to start expressing himself. A part of him might have actually cared earlier in the school year, but because we hadn’t addressed what was happening, whatever friendship we had was gone.
The Carson Hoover I knew was gone.
So I told him that it was okay that he felt that way. He assured me that he regretted spending any time with me over Christmas break and that he regretted even pretending to be my friend this school year at all. It was just message after message about how much he just regretted me. I was a mistake. Our friendship was a mistake.
I didn’t know how to respond at first, but the words came to me as the seconds turned to minutes, and the minutes turned to hours. It was probably going to look dumb, I had decided, but I needed to say my piece. Carson needed to know that I didn’t give two fucks about what he regretted because, at the end of the day, I was the victim of his self-absorbed spiral downward.
So the last words I ever said to my best friend were these:
My only regret is giving you four chances to prove what a giant piece of shit friend you are, but I really hope that you’re happy now. I know I’m happy to finally move on.
REFLECTION:
As the reader, you don’t know this – but it’s been three months since I sent those last words to Carson. I didn’t want to rush into posting something about what happened. There was the worry that it would blow up, or blow out of proportion. A dozen things held me back from opening up about this shitty thing.
Carson came up to me a few days ago, having just gotten grounded for getting caught drinking at a party. They called the parents of every kid that they recognized from the pictures and videos on his phone, and they knew them because they’re involved with everything in town all year round. If there was ever a set of parents you didn’t want to find out about your wrongdoings – it was the Hoovers.
Naturally, Carson’s friendships with the popular kids quickly dissolved. The real Carson was left bare-naked in a sea of nobody when he arrived at school. He came up to me during lunch, asking if I minded if he sat with me for the afternoon. “I can’t eat lunch in the bathroom one more time or I’ll be sick.”
I let him sit there, but only because my new friend was coming back from a dentist appointment with milkshakes. His name is Thomas and I can’t believe we never bonded before this Spring break incident. He hadn’t had the courage to come to hang out with me because he thought Carson and I were an item, I guess. It gave me a laugh. He thought Carson would be weird about it.
“Who gives a fuck if he’s weird about it? You’re not his friend,” I had said to him with a smile.
And I’m pretty sure angels sung and bells in heaven rang because I shit you not – he replied in the best way possible: “Good, I don’t want to be.”
Thomas is a much better friend that Carson was when we went our separate ways.
And you know what?
I deserve it.