Two Years in the Making
953 Words
started, as these things always seem to, with another screenshot, and this one cut deeper than the first because it wasn't something Theo had said weeks ago before he knew her, it was Mia's own words, private ones, late night texts she had sent to Priya admitting she might actually be falling for Theo and was terrified of it, the kind of half joking fully honest conversation you only have with the one person you trust completely, and someone had cropped it carefully, just enough to be devastating, paired it with a fake rumor that Theo and Vanessa had hooked up again last week, captioned with something cruel about tragic crushes and messy exes, and Mia read it sitting on her bed with a bowl of cereal going soggy in her lap, her stomach dropping through the floor even though some small steady part of her didn't believe the rumor itself, what she believed without question was that her own private words were now sitting in a group chat with sixty people in it, and that was the part that actually hurt, not the lie about Theo and Vanessa but the fact that someone had reached into something that belonged only to her and Priya and handed it over for entertainment, and when she got back to the room Priya was already sitting on the floor with her phone in her hand and her face pale, swearing on everything that she hadn't sent it, that she would never, and Mia believed her instantly because the horror on Priya's face was too raw to be performance, but someone had gotten those exact words, not paraphrased, not almost right, word for word, and there was only one person who had been close enough recently enough to have access to something like that, and Priya's face changed slowly as she put it together herself, she remembered leaving her phone on the kitchen counter during the one study session where Vanessa had come over to compare notes for the project, and the two of them sat with that realization for a moment, letting it reorganize itself into something sharper and more deliberate than either of them wanted to look at directly, and Mia said quietly that Vanessa had read the most honest thing she'd said in months and turned it into a bit for sixty strangers, and Priya started apologizing for leaving her phone out but Mia stopped her, it wasn't her fault, it was Vanessa's, she had clearly been planning something since that party, nobody just stumbled into a betrayal this specific by accident, and Mia didn't sleep that night, and at seven the next morning she was standing outside Vanessa's door knocking with more force than was strictly necessary, every careful rehearsed version of this conversation she'd practiced in her head completely gone the second the door opened and she saw Vanessa's face already armored and already annoyed, and Mia didn't bother with a greeting, she just said you read my texts, you went through Priya's phone and took the most honest thing I've ever said about being scared to like someone and handed it to sixty strangers like it was entertainment, and Vanessa started to say she didn't know what Mia was talking about but Mia cut her off, said don't, just don't, she genuinely didn't understand what she had done to deserve any of this, she hadn't asked for the seating assignment, hadn't asked to be partnered with her, had done nothing except exist in spaces Vanessa apparently believed belonged only to her, and for a long moment Vanessa said nothing at all, and when she finally spoke her voice had lost the glossy weaponized calm Mia had come to expect, it sounded almost young, almost breakable, and she said Mia hadn't done anything, that was the whole problem, she hadn't done anything and she still got the easy version of everything, the funny roommate, the guy who actually liked her back, the floor that thought she was charming instead of difficult, and Vanessa had spent two years working for any small piece of that and it still slid off her wrong, while Mia just showed up and had it handed to her, and somewhere in there Vanessa admitted that Theo had been the one person who ever made her feel like the interesting one instead of the almost, the one who wasn't measured against someone else's success, and for two quiet years back home that had meant everything to her, and then he simply got bored the way people eventually do, and ended it right before they both ended up at the same school anyway, some cosmic joke neither of them had asked for, and she had watched him fall for Mia so easily, without even trying, and get everything Vanessa had spent two years performing just to almost earn, and she said she had decided to take it away from Mia instead, not because it made sense but because in the moment it felt like the only way to make someone else feel as unsteady as she had felt for years, and she admitted she hadn't actually thought it through, she had seen an opportunity and taken it without considering what it would feel like once it was done, and now it felt worse, she felt worse, and it still wasn't an apology, not really, but it was the first completely true thing Vanessa had said to her since the hallway on move in day, and the two of them stood there in the doorway with the early light doing nothing to soften the wreckage between them, and for the first time since they'd met, neither one of them looked away
- Writer
