52. and if they call me a...

                                    

                                              
The inside of my lower lip was caught between my teeth as I stared up at the tendrils of ivy spread across the russet brown bricks of the school, barely even drifting in the cool early autumn breeze coming in from the north, and tried to steel my nerves to be as unflappable as those vines that like were like a namesake to me while my grip tightened around the strap of my backpack over my one shoulder. 
The sunrise had stained the horizon a light shade of pink, and I reminded myself that this wasn't necessarily a bad omen, pushing aside that idiom about sailors and their scorn because there really wasn't a reason for that scorn to be directed toward me. After all, it wasn't like it was me who hooked up with someone in the dugout at the homecoming game just a couple of weeks after my girlfriend died. 
I was just the one who blasted it all over Instagram until my mom overheard the whispers in the young adult section of the bookstore and walked over to find me mid-transaction with a customer with a grip around my arm that told me she knew about the photo even before she asked someone else to take over and dragged me into the backroom. 
There, she demanded that I bring up my Instagram account on my phone and I watched with my arms crossed anxiously over my chest while she scrolled through all the comments, the messages sent to my profile—including the ones from the news outlets and tabloids, gossip YouTube channels, and fans wondering if the pictures might have been AI generated—before she made me delete the picture, not that it accomplished much since it had been circulating on the internet for so long, screenshots and receipts saved to too many profiles to ever really be deleted, but that wasn't something my mom totally understood. 
It wasn't lost on her, though, that the account that was supposed to be private had almost ten thousand followers by that point. It took me most of the night, but I managed to save my Instagram account from my mother's trigger finger, but my phone was once again confiscated for the weekend, given back me to me only a few minutes ago in the school parking lot when my mom dropped me off and warned me that I was on very thin ice, which translated to absolute silence on the subject matter at hand. No responses to the DMs that I had a sneaking suspicion she made my sister delete before she headed back to college last night or gossiping at school about the status of Blane and Thea's relationship, or their hookup at the homecoming. 
In fact, she wanted me to apologize to both of them for ever taking their picture in such a compromising position and then posting it all over social media, and I made a few noncommittal noises because that was definitely not something I planned on doing. She, like my sister, felt that I was being too theatrical about the whole thing, that she understood that I was disappointed that Blane's grief didn't look the way I felt it should've but that I was probably too young to understand how complex death could be, we were both just kids dealing with stuff she claimed even adults had trouble navigating. 
And I nodded, smiling thoughtfully at her because I didn't want her to realize just how irritated it made me that she was using the same voice she did as mayor whenever she was attempting to placate disgruntled taxpayers about something as miniscule as potholes downtown, just as empty as the promises to pave them, except this was bigger than that. It was the potential murder of one of my best friends and I seemed to be the only one who thought it was possible. 
Outside of the internet anyway.
Reddit, at least, was still on my side. 
I reminded myself of the comments I had read before my phone was tragically removed from my custody earlier that weekend while I straightened my spine, braced myself with a deep inhale I felt straining against my rib bones down to my bottom of my lungs, and forced the soles of my feet to stride hopefully somewhat confidently down the sidewalk toward the front entrance of the school.