I ate a slice of cold, leftover pizza, which settled like cardboard in my stomach, and then collapsed into bed, sleeping twelve hours straight. When I woke, it was dark and I fumbled for my phone to see what time it was: 8:19 P.M. stared back at me. So did nine missed calls and countless text messages.
Pepper. Emerson. Suzanne. Mom. My sister even. No Logan, though, and pain that shouldn’t be there sliced my chest.
I started scrolling through the texts. One from Em caught my attention because it was all in caps. GO CHECK YOUR FB PAGE!!
My heart slid into a faster rhythm as I jumped over to Facebook on my phone. I didn’t regularly visit my page. Given that I wasn’t very active, I didn’t get a lot of interaction there.
As soon as my wall popped up a strangled sound ripped from my throat. There I was in my blue dress, handcuffed beside Logan and being led from the dean of students’ house. There were multiple pictures for all the world to see. Well, all my world, anyway. All my followers.
Friends, fellow students I slightly knew but whose friend requests I had obligatorily accepted, were LOLing and OMGing all over my wall. I was getting dancing and laughing emoticons and things like:
WTG!
High-five!
You dirty girl!
Didn’t know you had it in you!
Crazy biatch, why didn’t you invite me to the party?
I know who I want to party with!
Who’s the hottie with you???
As fast as I could I deleted all the posts and then I sat there in the dark, heart hammering so hard I thought I might pass out.
What were the odds that any family member saw it?
I wasn’t an asthmatic, but right then I thought I needed an inhaler.
With a trembling hand, I lifted my phone back up and stared at my missed calls. Four from my mother. One from my sister. Their voicemails were there, beckoning.
Why, oh, why had I taken a nap? If I had been awake I could have deleted the posts as soon as they appeared and no one would have likely seen them. At least no one in Muskogee, Alabama.
You still don’t know anyone from home saw them.
Mom called me a lot. She liked to keep tabs on me. And today was a Sunday. She always called on a Sunday. Even multiple times.
My thumb hovered over my phone, inching closer to the play feature of my voicemail.
Suddenly a sharp rap on the door had me squeaking and my phone flying. I jumped to my feet and turned for the bedside lamp, stubbing my toe.
“Motherfucker!” I grabbed my toe, feeling my shattered nail against my palm. At that moment I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for the profanity. My throbbing toe . . . and the last twenty-fours warranted it.
Tears spilled from my eyes that were only partly due to pain.
Another knock sounded.
“Coming!” I flipped on the lamp and limped to the door, blinking back my tears and swiping at my cheeks.
Expecting to see Emerson or Pepper or Suzanne there and totally ready for someone to talk me off the ledge, I pulled the door open.
The impeccably coiffed woman staring back at me pushed me off that ledge.
“Georgia. Good of you to answer the door. I don’t imagine ‘motherfucker’ was the greeting you intended for me.”
“You heard that?” I said numbly.