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I
t was a kind of meditation, pressing the little red phone icon on the bottom right corner of the screen with numb expectancy as message after message popped up, and message after message faded away. Shannon apparently didn’t have anything better to do today than to text me repeatedly at 7:05 in the morning. She was more hard-core clingy than a boyfriend. And going through Hunter, I knew what that meant. I had dated Hunter for a month last year before I fully admitted he was clingy, but it took me another five to get rid of him. So I was done with my share of those relationships. Today I sat on the curb and watched almost incredulously as my phone vibrated 54 times in one minute, with a marvelous 100% accuracy of being from Shannon. I vaguely glared at the red icon, challenging it to make our friendship fade away just as quickly as those deleted messages. I. Tap. Don’t. Tap. Like. Tap. Clingy. Tap. People!!!! Tap tap tap tap tap. I didn’t manage to delete the last text, but I held down on the icon anyways, shoving my phone into my back pocket as I took off running, unaware that the phone gave one last pathetic shudder before shutting down.


M

y name is Eve Mansion. And yes, as many people have asked, I do live in a mansion. My dad’s from France, and my mom’s Japanese, and they got jobs as ambassadors to Italy. So they’re pretty rich. But I’ve seen the other kids in my neighborhood, the Heights, and how they act, and I’m pretty sure I never acted the way they did—all stuck-up and materialistic. I was mostly down-to-earth, and I loved animals, especially furry ones. I had a six year old Papillon dog named Samson, and a nine month old albino bunny named Rockie. Shannon Locke also lived in my neighborhood. She didn’t live in a mansion, but she was fairly well off. We both played the trumpet, and call me conceited but I knew I was better than her. But her parents were the types that love their kids to death, so they kept telling her she was just as good as I was. She had it in her shallow head that we were rivals or something. That was one of the many reasons I hated having her in my life.

She also sat, by some inconvenient stroke of luck, directly to the left of me in about a third of all my classes. This morning I had Physics first period, which was among the 33% that was Shannon-terrorized. I stalled in the bathroom before class, knowing that Mr. Demers would be late anyways, living on the shady side of Rome which I had jokingly christened “the spaghetto” a few years ago, causing everyone to call it that at Bohemia Manor High. I adjusted my mascara for a few minutes, but then I stopped and peered into the mirror. A small, lean girl with straight black hair and hazel eyes gazed searchingly back at me. I saw no one special, no one to obsess over every second of the day, no one to call at every hall passing and snatch for every project before the teacher even said whether or not they could choose partners.
And yet Shannon did see that. I wanted so badly to get rid of her, yet every time I suggested that I could maybe sit with someone else during lunch, her green eyes would narrow and her button nose would scrunch up. The first time I confronted her was in the middle of freshman year, when she was in line waiting for the rubber which the cafeteria claimed were a hot dog and some gummies. We’d been “friends” for a few months now, and already she was driving me insane.

“Hey, Shannon,” I began.

“Oh wow, hi Eve!” she blubbered. “Oh my gosh, I was looking for you everywhere! You know I missed you so much!”

Anyone else would be flattered, but I guess I was just weird that way, because my answer was, “It’s been like an hour. We just had English together.” She shook her dirty blonde curls.

“No, but it’s felt like longer! You know, we should totally hang out this afternoon.” Not that we hadn’t hung out yesterday afternoon or anything.

That was when I started. “You know, about that. I think we should find some other friends, and kind of make a friend circle, so that we can hang as a group, you know,” but she cut me off.

“No,” she admonished, “that would totally, like, ruin our friendship! I can’t believe you would suggest something like that! We got something special going on!” And she pranced off, waving that piece of rubber wedged between two slabs of brick which the cafeteria insisted was a hot dog.

And so it continued. Later on Shannon started reading magazines, the ones with women laying across the hoods of cars and men with intricate watches and four o’clock shadows posing for musky perfumes. Her personality grew: she now added attitude to what was before only adoring yet annoying attachment. My every statement was accompanied with a laugh and a mocking repeat, and when I glanced her way, she’d set her hands on her hips and c*** her head like she was all-mighty and she questioned how I dared find offense in her words. But when I stopped replying to her messages, she would poke me the next day with her sparkly pink pencil until I acknowledged her existence, thinking it just a cute gesture of best friend closeness.

But today I was hyped. I knew we had a major test in Physics today, and, being the high school teens we were, half the kids would inevitably be unprepared. I also knew from experience that Shannon would be among those kids—sophomore year she couldn’t make the lacrosse team because her grades were too low, and I was widely ridiculed for being friends with her, which was yet another reason to disassociate myself from her. But today, when she sat next to me, and when I caught her glancing at my paper, she herself would provide the perfect excuse to finally ditch her for some calmer and classier kids. My shoulders relaxed even as I thought of it.

And so it was with a smirk on my face that I flipped my hair, shouldered my backpack, and sauntered into class, with my phone safely in the back pocket of my boyfriend jeans.

Mr. Demers was setting down his coffee mug as I opened the door. I scanned the room and saw Hunter’s uncombed bush of curly brown hair among his circle of jock friends; his eyebrows jauntily set over his innocent blue eyes knitted together with concentration as he nearly inhaled his paper in the attempt to desperately memorize some last crucial formula. I am so glad I got over him, I thought. But my eyes glazed over them, and I realized that Shannon wasn’t there. The seat next to me remained stubbornly empty as Mr. Demers passed out the tests.

Twenty minutes later, I was up stretching my legs and handing my test back to Mr. Demers, and the desk to the left of mine still mirrored my blank stare. I slid back into my seat and flipped open my phone. “Ms. Mansion,” Mr. Demers called my name with a pleasant frown on his face. I recoiled, but I took it out again a minute later and he overlooked me this time, as I knew he would.

The phone loaded at an unusually slow pace, even for its bad days. “Damn it phone,” I muttered, “Why won’t you load faster?” I shook the phone in frustration, and it groaned back as it vibrated to signify its reluctant completion. It hesitated for a second longer, before turning to my home screen as if it sensed my growing irritation. But still, something was blocking me from viewing Shannon’s texts, as I had to select them three times before I could finally view them.
The screen glowed and I read: Unread message sent from Shannon Locke. After a few painstaking moments, a small message popped up on the screen—Shannon’s last text that I hadn’t managed to delete. My eyes narrowed into slits and then widened as I read:
Forget it.
We’re through.