Watching You: Part 1 – Chapter 3 – Four G

She made friends the way some people catch a cold.

Fast, and without seeming to notice it happening to her.

By the start of senior year she had four of them, more or less permanently attached –  the kind of group that moves through a hallway together like they’ve rehearsed it, laughing at things that stopped being funny two minutes earlier because none of them wanted to be the first to stop.

I knew all four of them well enough to know they weren’t who she thought they were.

One lied to her mother as easily as she breathed.

One ruined another girl’s reputation because she was bored one week and needed something to do with it.

One was kind only when people were watching, and stopped being anything at all the second they weren’t.

One was…Bree.

She trusted all of them.

I want to be honest about what I felt watching it, because I think honesty is the only interesting thing I have to offer you.

I wasn’t jealous, exactly.

What I felt was closer to relief, and I didn’t understand it myself for a long time – relief that she had four girls around her constantly, because four girls around her constantly meant nobody else could get close enough to try anything.

Not everyone gets to approach a girl like that.

A crowd does that job whether it means to or not.

Bree had a crush on me that started the year before and never fully went away, not for lack of me discouraging it.

I used that.

There’d been a party in the fall, somebody’s older brother’s basement, one of those nights that runs on cheap vodka and other people’s bad decisions.

A game got started.

The kind where somebody says a name and a dare in the same breath and everyone laughs like it’s not actually a request.

Someone said Bree’s name.

Someone said mine.

I kissed her because it cost me nothing and it bought me a year of access I hadn’t had to work for. 

Bree turned red and wouldn’t look at anyone for ten minutes.

I watched over her shoulder the whole time.

Not because of Bree.

Because the girl I actually cared about was sitting six feet away, laughing at something, completely unaware she was the reason any of it had happened at all.

Bree sat next to her every day at lunch after that, and Bree liked when I came by the table, and coming by the table for Bree let me sit close enough to watch the girl who actually mattered without either of them understanding what I was doing there.

I never gave Bree anything back for it. Just enough attention to keep the door open, and not one ounce more.

I’m not proud of that. I’m not ashamed of it either. I want to be clear about that too.

There’s one lunch I still think about.

She laughed so hard at something one afternoon that milk came out of her nose, right there at the table, and the whole group lost it, and she laughed hardest of all at herself.

Then she apologized. To everyone. For the mess.

Nobody else at that table would’ve apologized for that.

She did, immediately, before she’d even finished wiping it up, like laughing too hard was something that needed forgiving.

I added it to the list.

By the end of that year I knew more about her circle than any of them knew about each other, and none of them had the faintest idea I’d been collecting it.

People think obsession starts with wanting someone.

It doesn’t. It starts with paying attention longer than anyone else is willing to.

She still hadn’t spoken to me directly.

Not once.

That changed three days later.