A group of friends tries to piece itself back together after losing its glue.
*****
It's a quiet October morning in Palo Alto, California, when the news break out--June Beaumont was...
Rất tiếc! Hình ảnh này không tuân theo hướng dẫn nội dung. Để tiếp tục đăng tải, vui lòng xóa hoặc tải lên một hình ảnh khác.
XENA
It wasn't easy to tell which of us would be the first to snap.
I stayed quiet, my eyes darting between all the people surrounding me, and waited. They all reacted differently to the news regarding June; after all, I doubted any of us expected her to have texted all of us hours before she died. Well . . . almost all of us, which made things even weirder, but I didn't dare to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Out of everyone in this group of friends, one would assume June would try to contact Sofia if she needed help before reaching out to anyone else. The fact that she didn't, the fact that she tried all of us instead, was more than enough to raise several red flags; that, along with June's well-known dislike for phone calls and its contrast with her actions, strengthened my feelings of unease.
Still, it wouldn't help to voice said feelings. I was certain those were shared by the rest of them, and I'd only be making things worse.
Felix was the first to speak up.
"What does this mean?" he questioned, and the ice surrounding us seemed to crack a little bit. Sofia's eyes remained glued to the iridescent screen of her phone, while the rest of us looked up at him when he spoke. Felix seemed to have that effect on the general population, even if there were certain people who were immune to his charm and charisma—Leon, for example. Leon simply pressed his lips together in a thin line. "All of us get cryptic texts, Meridian gets called in the middle of the night—"
"Most of us," Courtney corrected, and Grace huffed, almost imperceptibly.
Grace had the exact opposite effect when compared to Felix; while he helped people feel more at ease whenever he was around, she took great pride in driving everyone away, which, in my opinion, wasn't the correct approach. Courtney had done nothing wrong; if anything, she had only voiced what some of us were thinking, and I didn't think she should be given hell over it.
Maybe that was just me and my peacemaker tendencies to blame. Even so, one would have to be incredibly naïve to ignore the relationship dynamics that had always existed in our group. For example, Grace always sided with Christina in public and vice versa, even if they were in the wrong, and no amount of concrete, factual evidence would ever be able to change that. She also tended to stand up for Sofia, as though she needed it, whereas Leon occupied the opposite stance.
It got sort of unnerving at times, how Sofia and Leon never seemed to agree on anything. Even now, after June had just died and we needed to be on the same side and provide support to our friends, they refused to look at each other, and stood as far away from one another as the circle we had formed allowed them to.
