Summer of '07

Old Friend

Chapter 2

January 2019

~TRAVIS~

"Who's he?" Jenny asks me as we simultaneously look at the same picture of me and another guy posing for the camera.

"Nobody," I quickly reply, wanting to move away from that subject as soon as possible, but as I turn to the next page over, I find a whole other collection of pictures of just me and the same guy. Surely he wasn't "nobody" if he and I were in nearly every single picture together and Jenny knew that, obviously.

"Are you sure about that? He's in almost all of your pictures?" Jenny asks, scanning through the loads of pictures I had of me and him from 2005.

"He was just uh... an old friend," I say, using the term "friend" loosely.

"You guys look like you were best friends," she says, flipping through more of the pages that featured me and him all the way up until the summer of 2007.

"We were..." I reply coldly.

"So what happened?" No one is more fucking nosy than Jenny is, I swear.

"We just... stopped being friends by senior year."

"Do you know what happened to him?"

"No. I never saw him after graduation so I have no idea where he is now, or what he's doing."

The very last picture of us together was taken at summer camp. Joining us in the picture was a girl with brown hair and pale skin. "She's pretty," Jenny comments as she notices the girl in the picture... if only she knew how much this girl affected my overall high school experience. "Who was she?"

"Just a girl we met from summer camp. She was... weird."

"Oh was she?" Jenny chuckles, flipping to the next page and finding nothing but blank sheets. "You have no pictures from senior year? No prom? No graduation? Why not?"

"I didn't go to prom or graduation... both seemed like such a waste of time. They just mailed me my diploma and that was the end of it. Fuck the ceremony, I had better things to do." Yeah, like crying my eyes out in my room and spending all day and night in my bed wallowing in depression.

"Wow, okay," she says, shutting the book and placing it on the coffee table. "So what happened with your friend? You guys looked really close."

"We were... for about three years. Then after that it all went to shit. We grew apart and... ya know how that goes," I explain to her, without really explaining to her what actually went down, simply because I don't want to talk about it. I know it was twelve years ago, but for some reason it still makes me uncomfortable to really talk about.

"Yeah... I'm sorry about that... have you tried looking him up on Instagram? Just to see what he looks like now?" she asks me, and of course my immediate answer to that question is a straight-up no.

"No, never. He hates me so why would I..."

"Let me see your phone," she says, quickly snatching my phone out of my hand after I've unlocked it. I peer over the side of her shoulder and see her opening up the Instagram application on my phone. "What's his name?"

"You're gonna look him up?" I roll my eyes in annoyance. Is this really necessary?

"Yes, tell me his name."

"Elijah..." I say as if the name burns my tongue to say out loud. "Elijah Radford."

After typing his name into the search engine, she selects the first profile she sees with the name I told her and shows me the profile pic, being the only picture I can even see since his account is private. Fucking hate those private accounts. "Is this him?"