My Wonderful Disaster

The thing about lupus is that it makes you a liar. I'm fine becomes your whole personality. You say it so many times it stops feeling like a lie and starts feeling like a survival skill. Like if you say it enough, confidently enough, your body might actually believe you. My body has never once believed me. I woke up at 6:47am to my joints doing what they do — which is remind me, first thing, before I've even had a chance to exist for five minutes, that they are in charge and I am simply a passenger. Knees. Wrists. That specific spot on my left shoulder that flares up like clockwork whenever I'm stressed or tired or breathing. The butterfly rash was already burning across my cheeks before I even sat up, red and angry and impossible to hide. I stared at the ceiling for four minutes. The math never changes. How much energy do I have versus how much today is going to take. The answer is always the same. The answer is never enough. Mom was already downstairs. I could hear her — the click of her heels on the kitchen tiles in that specific rhythm that meant she was in a mood before 7am. Click. Click. Pause. Click click. I'd learned to read her footsteps the way other kids learned to read weather. You hear the pause and you already know. I filed it away. Got up anyway. Because the alternative was worse. I pulled on my biggest hoodie — the grey one that swallowed me whole — and looked at myself in the mirror for exactly two seconds. Two seconds was always enough to look at myself. ... Westbrook High smelled like floor wax and resignation. Three years of walking through those front doors and my body still did the thing — shoulders up, head down, make yourself small, become part of the wall. It wasn't even conscious anymore. It was just what happened when I crossed the threshold. Some deep animal instinct that had learned, the hard way, that visibility was dangerous. Head down. Hood up. Get to class. Survive. It worked most days. I should have known — the way my joints were screaming, the way Mom's heels had paused three times this morning instead of two — I should have known today was not most days. My phone buzzed at 11:43am. I was walking to the cafeteria, tray in hand, head down, doing everything right. I almost didn't look. I should not have looked. It was a notification. Group chat — the whole year, one of those massive ones nobody ever muted because missing something was worse than the noise. The message was from a number I didn't recognise. It was a video. My stomach dropped before my brain caught up. The thumbnail was grainy, taken from a distance, through what looked like a gap in some lockers. But I knew those lockers. I knew that hallway. And I knew the girl in the video — hunched shoulders, grey hoodie, curls escaping a messy bun — standing outside the history classroom talking to a boy who looked uncomfortable in the specific way boys look when they don't know how to escape a conversation. David Chen. Three weeks ago. I'd worked up the nerve over an entire month. Had rehearsed it in my bathroom mirror until the words felt smooth. Had told myself it didn't matter if he said no, that I just needed to say it once, get it out of my system — The video had sound. I could hear myself. Tinny and small through my phone speaker but unmistakably, horrifyingly me. I just — "I like you. I've liked you for a while and I know that's probably weird to hear but I just wanted to say it." David in the video looked at the floor. Said something I couldn't hear. Walked away. Me in the video stood there for a long moment. Then the notification exploded. Forty replies. Sixty. A hundred, climbing so fast the screen was just a blur of names and laughing emojis and oh my gods and someone — multiple someones — had already screenshotted it, were already — I walked into the cafeteria. And the whole room already knew. I felt it before I saw it — that shift in atmosphere, heads turning, the particular quality of silence that isn't really silence at all but anticipation. Like everyone had been waiting. Jade was standing up from her table. Of course it was Jade. It was always Jade. Pretty in that deliberate weaponised way, phone already in hand, smile already sharpened into something that had never once wished me well. “Mavis!" she called, and her voice carried, because of course it did, because the universe has a sense of humour and none of it is funny. "We were literally just talking about you." I kept walking. We saw the video." A ripple of laughter from her table. From the tables around her. Spreading out like something contagious. "Honestly though? Brave. Shooting your shot like that. Too bad David literally ran away —" “He didn't run —" the words came out before I could stop them, stupid, giving her something to work with — "He basically sprinted, babe." More laughter. Louder. "But okay. Whatever helps. She was walking toward me now. Slow. Deliberate. Taking her time because she had all of it and I had none . "And then we found your diary," she said, pulling it out from behind her back like a magic trick, and my stomach turned completely over because I'd told myself it was in lost and found, I'd told myself — She opened it. "Dear diary," she read, and the cafeteria was going properly quiet now, that horrible spreading hush that meant every single person was choosing this over their lunch, "I counted today. Seventeen steps from my locker to his. I've memorised his schedule without meaning to. I know that's not normal. I know girls like me aren't supposed to want things like this. But I look at him and I just — I want to be someone he could see." My tray was shaking. Or my hands were shaking. Hard to tell. "Girls like me," Jade repeated, looking up with wide eyes, mock thoughtful. "What do you think she means by that?" She looked me over — slow, deliberate, top to bottom — taking in the hoodie, the rash crawling up my neck above my collar, the state of me. Her nose wrinkled. "Oh. Right." Someone laughed. Someone said the rash is actually so bad today and someone else said she actually thought she had a chance and it was all blurring together now, a wall of sound — I looked at David without meaning to. He was three tables away. His friends were elbowing him, laughing, showing him the video on someone's phone. He glanced up. Our eyes met for exactly one second. He chuckled. Not cruelly. Not even meanly. Just — quietly. Like I was a mildly amusing thing that had appeared briefly in his peripheral vision. Like I didn't quite register as a real person who could be hurt by a sound. I looked away. "Don't be embarrassed," Jade said softly, close enough now that I could smell her perfume. "It's actually adorable. In like a sad, delusional little way." And then the cold hit. Priya, from behind me, tilted her entire bottle of fruit punch over my head.