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I open the door, and the three of us walk into the apartment.
“Jesus Christ!” I shout, putting my hand to my chest.
“Holy shit, do you want to get yourself killed or something?”
“How the fuck did you even get in here?”
We’re all speaking at once as we discover Tori sitting on the couch.
“You idiots didn’t lock the door,” she says. There are tears in her eyes, and she’s clearly upset.
“What are you talking about? The door was locked just now when we got here,” I say. “I unlocked it myself.”
“I locked it behind me because I didn’t want anyone else to do what I did and let themselves in,” she tells us. There are fresh tears running down her cheeks, and I immediately wonder if something happened between her and Johnny.
While I know it’s terrible to hope that’s the case, Cory thankfully is the dipshit who puts himself out there first.
“What happened?” he asks. “Did you and Johnny break up?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, no, not officially, but I don’t know if he’s the right one for me. I don’t know what to do. We’re on a break right now, but I’m not sure if I should make it a permanent thing. I feel so fucking stupid about everything!”
“Slow down,” I tell her. “You want a soda or something? Tell us everything.”
I nod toward the fridge and Taylor grabs a drink out of it, then passes it along to Tori. Of course, he continues to grab sodas for all of us, and we crack them open as Tori starts to explain to the three of us what happened that afternoon.
“I don’t know if I’m just overreacting or what.” She sniffs. “But I realized today he doesn’t even know who I am.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Just what I said!” she snaps. She then apologizes, “I don’t mean to be so short with you, but it’s what I said. He doesn’t realize I’m the same me I’ve been all this time, which just tells me that he really didn’t see me then, and he doesn’t see me for who I am now.”
“Sounds like you’re going to have to tell us the whole story,” Taylor tells her. “We’re guys, and I don’t want us to fuck this up by not getting where you’re coming from.”
“Sorry,” she says. “So, he and I went out for an ice cream cone after class today. I thought that would be fun since we usually go out for dinner and it’s so loud we don’t have the time to really talk to each other. We’ve been spending so much time together, but I don’t feel like I’ve gotten the chance to really talk to him, you know?”
“I mean, we did notice that you’ve been spending all your time with him,” Cory says.
“But he’s the one who’s always talking. Which I didn’t mind at first. But like, he started to ask me things about myself that made me think he doesn’t realize who I am. Like the other day when we went out on our first date he asked when I moved here,” she said with a sniff. I head to the bathroom and grab a box of tissues, then return.
“Thank you,” she says as she takes it. “So I tell him that I’ve been living here for the past few years, like the entire time we’ve been in college. I told him we had two classes together last year, and I was crushing on him the whole time.”
“What did he say?” Taylor asks.
“He just looked confused and said he doesn’t remember seeing me anywhere,” she says. “Which I guess is fair. I mean, he’s popular, so I’m sure he has a lot of people who tell him that he’s seen them before, and that’s how it goes. But then it got worse. Like, I hoped that I would jostle his memory at some point, but that night he just started talking about himself again and it went by the wayside.”
“You said that there was something today that made you realize he doesn’t know who you are,” I remind her. “What happened today?”
“I’m getting to that,” she says. “It’s been little things that he’s said over the past couple weeks that we’ve been hanging out. Like, more than once I feel like he hasn’t heard me when I’ve said that I’m not new to school. He keeps acting like I just enrolled or transferred from somewhere, and he doesn’t seem to believe me when I tell him that I’ve been here the whole time. Like he even said there was no way I was the one who was sitting next to him in English all year or he would have certainly noticed.”
“So what did you say?” Cory asks.
“I said that it was me. He gave me the strangest look.” She starts sobbing again, and we patiently wait for her to regain control over herself.
I hate that I’m secretly happy to hear how badly Johnny fucked up. I already know I’m going to make sure she sees this as something she can’t look past. Though I do get the impression he did a fine job of fucking it up with her himself. A quick glance at my two best friends tells me they’re feeling the same.
“And I hope you made sure he knew that it was you,” I say.
“Well, the way I saw it, I figured if I told him about that time in the diner, that he would know it was me then. The way he looked at me at the time made me think that he had to know, but now I’m not so sure,” Tori says. “So I straight up asked him if he remembered the girl who was in the diner that time with the food who fell right in front of everyone and landed right on top of the burger. I made sure to include that I was wearing that white shirt, and that everyone was laughing at me, and there was that massive spot on the front of my shirt when I stood up. Like, I wanted to make sure he knew I was talking about that night.”
