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Not many people knew my story, but these guys did, so my reaction wasn’t strange to them.
“That’s not the worst bit of it,” Sayla whispered.
“Not the worst?” Heidi cried, getting to her feet, and snatching the iPad out of Tony’s hand. “How much worse can it get than that? She lied out of her ass for attention.”
Seeing the grim looks on their faces, I bit out, “Tell me.”
“The host told her if she could do it, they’d help her apologize to you and explain….”
The way Sayla had trailed off had me narrowing my eyes even more. “Finish it.”
“And she’d give you guys your own hour long show to do it on.”
That’s when I lost it. No, I didn’t go around smashing shit up, I was an adult woman who needed control in every aspect of my life, and that would go against the whole ‘control’ ideal. I ranted, I raged, I threw my hands in the air, and I made threats of legal action. All of it was worthless in the grand scheme of things, but it made me feel better.
By the time I’d run out of things to say, I was sitting calmly once more.
“So, it goes without saying I’m not going on any television show. Especially not with that attention whoring twat and with the therapist they said would help us, whose receding hairline could be filled in by a dumper truck.”
Tony took the seat opposite me and passed me a bottle of water. “That goes without saying.”
Looking at me worriedly, Sayla, Evie, and Heidi stood in a semi-circle around us, blocking us from the view of whoever walked by the wall of windows.
“What are you going to do?” Heidi asked, leaning into her sister’s side.
For some reason, that move made me ache to call my sisters, so I made a mental note to do that later. We never went long without at least talking, and a bitch needed her sisters when shit was going down.
I also needed to call Naomi. She’d become a close friend over the last couple of years, our traumatic pasts helping us understand each other, and I missed her. She’d been in a hold-up at the convenience store a week ago, so Carter had taken her to his aunt’s house in Alabama for a break while they looked for the person responsible. Sure, we messaged each other, but I needed a heart-to-heart with my girl.
“Yo,” Tony snapped, clicking his fingers in front of my face. “No checking out at a time like this. We need a plan.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I admitted, lifting a shoulder. I felt powerless, and that wasn’t something that sat well with me. “But I’m not going to be the way that bitch gets more than her fifteen minutes of ‘fame.’”
“What can we do?” Sayla asked, pacing in front of me. “I’m not meant for a life behind bars, so it can’t be anything illegal—”
“I’ve got the girls to think about,” Tony agreed. “Them visiting me in prison at Christmas would be hard to take.”
“I don’t think Alex would like it if I got arrested,” Evie added, saying the obvious, seeing as how he was a cop. “So, why don’t we think up something legal.”
Just hearing my friends' reactions took the tension out of my shoulders. This was loyalty.
“I wouldn’t ever do anything illegal. Can you imagine me behind bars?” I flicked my hair over my shoulders. “To be honest, I don’t even want to think about it anymore. She’s not worth my time and energy and the oxygen we’re wasting.”
All of them stared back at me, their expressions unconvinced. “I did think of something last night that I’d like to do. I have a room at my house filled with products, hairpieces, and wigs that we’ve been given to try, and I feel like they’re going to waste.”
Evie and Sayla immediately began nodding. What’d started out as a channel on YouTube dedicated to showing how to do hairstyles, what products we liked, and even beauty tips and looks had exploded. I loved the hell out of what we did, but the moment TikTok had become a thing, we’d been convinced to expand the channel onto it. Since then, we’d been inundated with stuff to try and had enjoyed ourselves doing challenges, but… I was kind of over it. I wasn’t huge on social media anyway, so each video had been hard for me to do, and it felt like we’d lost track of our purpose.
“I really don’t enjoy the amount of time we spend doing stuff across different platforms. I can’t interact with people in the comments on certain ones because some of them are too nasty, and I struggle to switch off from it. I feel like I’m doing all of this at the expense of my mental health.” I hated having to say it to them, and I’d been putting off doing it, but now the cat was out of the bag.
