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It was always Social Suicide. Like, always.
Leave it to Josh to invent something this awful, taking all the worst parts of truth or dare and mashing them together with the worst parts of being the first person to fall asleep at a slumber party and then, just for good measure, sprinkling on a fine dusting of the paranoia that came with someone swiping when you were trying to show them a picture on your phone’s camera roll…
“Wait,” Ashley said, her stomach plunging with the knowledge she’d opened her mouth a moment too late, “I take it back, I’ll do your dare! I’ll do it, I’ll do it!” She grabbed for her phone and—
“Shoulda thought about that before, so now…” Chris paused after tapping her phone, his eyebrows bunching together in a moment of confusion. “Am…am I your lockscreen?”
Well crap.
She could feel Sam’s eyes burning a hole straight through her, but that was just too bad, because oh, this was…this was not the time. Dropping her face into her hands, Ashley let out a low groan. She hadn’t really meant for it to be an answer one way or another, more like the kind of noise a small mammal made when letting its fellows know it had gotten its leg caught in a snare.
“I-I-I’m not seeing things, right?” Chris asked, and damn it, he was laughing. They were nervous laughs, sure, but they were still laughs. Good, great, she hoped all of them were getting a real hoot out of this. “Like, this is me, isn’t it?”
“Sure looks like it,” Josh remarked, ninety percent of his face taken up by his usual shit-eating grin when Ashley finally found it in herself to lift her head again. “I mean, to be fair, it’s not really that special of a gesture…here, check it.” He grabbed his phone up from the pile on the table, swiping to wake it up. “You’re also my lockscreen, see, isn’t that cute?” Josh flashed her a quick glimpse of his phone and the (horrendous) selfie of the four of them showing on the screen. “Here’s the best part though, because of how everyone’s positioned, every time I get a notification, it cuts yours and Ash’s heads off.”
“Hilarious,” Sam said, voice perfectly flat despite the grin still curling the corners of her mouth. She rested her chin on one of her hands, her eyes never having left Ashley’s face, and though she was only seeing her out of her periphery, she had a good idea there was probably also some eyebrow movement going on.
Eyebrow movement that she was not about to acknowledge, thank you very much.
“Will you just give me my phone back?” Ashley groaned, reaching one of her hands out across the table towards Chris. She waggled her fingers, paused, then waggled them a bit more frantically, though—shock of shocks—he showed no sign of handing it over. “I’ll do your stupid dare, just—”
“Well hey now,” Josh cut in, batting her hand away easily, “Let’s not be hasty. I know I for one would very much like to get to the bottom of this here mystery we’re presented with.”
“Myst—there’s no mystery, you meathead, it just…it…” Whoop, and there it was. The burning. Starting at her cheeks and spreading to her ears, her nose, her forehead, her neck, everywhere it could to make her embarrassment that much more obvious. After stuttering for another few seconds, she threw her hands to her sides, fingers flared, “It is what it is, okay?!”
“It is…what it is…” Josh repeated in that tone of his—that freaking tone!
“Oh shush!”
Sam hummed a quiet little noise before leaning over towards Chris’s side of the table, peeking over his shoulder. There was no question about the eyebrow movements just then. No, they were…they were moving, all right.
Fantastic. That was just what she needed: for Sam to start picking up on Josh’s habits.
From there, Sam raised her shoulders in an innocent shrug, pursing her lips in an expression she was sure was supposed to be thoughtful. “You know…” she said slowly, sinking back into her seat only to pick her own phone up and absently spin it on one of its corners. “I actually have to agree with Josh here—” What a surprise. “—I do think there’s a mystery here. Not a big one, maybe, but a mystery nonetheless.”
She didn’t need to sit here and take this from her! Or from any of them!
So, face burning, she half-stood from her seat, stretching across the Washingtons’ kitchen island so she could grab at her phone more effectively. “There’s nothing mysterious about it, oh my God, what’s the big deal about a girl, like…” She pressed her lips tight to her teeth as she weighed her options, and she must’ve had some kinda death wish, because she went and said it, despite knowing exactly what kind of fresh hell it would bring down on her head. “…having a picture of her boyfriend on her phone.”
Well that did it. It bought her enough of a distraction to successfully nab her phone out of Chris’s hand before squirreling it away in the pocket of her hoodie and plopping down into her chair again. Then, at least for a moment, she felt Sam’s and Josh’s attention shift to Chris instead of her, and okay, maybe she would’ve normally felt bad for doing something like that, dragging him under the bus with her, but hey, he’d been laughing about it too, so like…
Served him right.
Sam was the first to break the silence, deliberately chewing on every sound of the word “Boyfriend,” as she said it aloud, pronouncing it like the name of some exotic breed of salamander.
“The mystery deepens,” Josh added, clearly trying to keep his voice a low drone but failing miserably as the laughter began to burble up to the surface.
“Hey, c’mon, it’s…hey.” She didn’t need to look his way to know just by the sound of his voice that someone’s giggle-fest had pulled a 180. Lo and behold, when she looked back up from jamming her phone into her pocket, Chris’s face was as red as hers. He held one of his hands up to block Josh from his view (not that it was doing much good), and the look he shot her was one that was trying very, very valiantly to be betrayal…but was a whole lot closer to the same dorky, doofy, stupid glee she’d felt when saying the b-word. “You guys…are…assholes.”
Never one to be outdone, Josh reeled back. “We’re the assholes? Oh, we’re the assholes? You hearing this, Sammy? We’re the assholes.”
“I’m hearing it.”
“You two go from cha cha sliding every which way around each other for…how many years?”
With a sniff, Sam pretended to count on her fingers. “A lot.”
“Thank you—a lot of years, most of the years, if I may be so bold, and then one day, out of the blue, you let us find out through a shitty party game that you’re suddenly using words like ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ to—”
Ashley pulled her lower lip into her mouth and bounced her teeth against it a time or two. Then she decided to tug him that much further under the bus after all. “To be fair,” she interrupted, raising a scholarly pointer finger, “There has been no usage of the word ‘girlfriend’ as of yet.”
Again Sam and Josh both whirled on Chris, and again she watched his face flash colors never before known to man.
“Cochise,” Josh began reproachfully.
“Yet!” he stammered, actively shoving Josh’s chair farther from his. “I—th—yet! I didn’t realize this was a-a-a fucking timed exercise, I—”
Sam clucked her tongue and shook her head like a scornful parent, folding her arms across her chest. “Wow,” she sighed, “I expected so much better from you. If I’m being honest? I’m a little disappointed.”
“Don’t y—ugh.” There was a low thud as Chris put his head down onto the table, clamping his arms protectively over it. “Hate you guys. Oh my God, I hate you guys.”
She couldn’t help it, Ashley had to laugh. Her face was still burning up seven ways from Sunday, but that didn’t stop her from giggling, all of her insides having felt full of butterflies and soda bubbles since her phone had been taken. “I think…” she said, once the worst of the laughing had passed, “…that maybe we should just agree once and for all that this is a stupid, dumb, pointless game that we should never, ever play again…”
“Oh come on!”
“Because it’s stupid. And dumb. And also pointless. Did I mention that already?”
“My house, my game. Now please, while we’re all gathered here today, dearly beloved…” Josh took a moment to swipe his arm across the table, sending the other phones (namely his and Chris’s) both clattering to the floor so that he had more room to obnoxiously lean himself towards her. “Someone had better start talking about what in the world you two were getting up to on my couch earlier that necessitates a title change from ‘friend’ to ‘boyfriend’ post-fucking-haste.”
That was when Chris found it in himself to lift his head up. “Know what? No, actually, I think maybe we should revisit why in the fuck you made your lockscreen a picture that only cuts off mine and Ash’s heads when someone texts you. I think that’s what we need to like, really dive into, because honestly man, that’s—”
Josh set one of his hands on the back of Chris’s head and gently—oh so gently—pushed it back down onto the table again. With his other hand he pointed to Ashley, raised an eyebrow, and simply said, “Explain.”
And partially because she hated Josh’s stupid (dumb, pointless) game, partially because it was what he and Sam both deserved for always poking fun at them, Ashley smiled, leaned over the table closer to Josh, and smiling sweetly as could be, said the one thing she knew would frustrate him the most. “Aw man, I would, but like…it’s not your turn, is it?”