The speed at which he yanked his head around to stare at me when I said that answered my question. Someone was giving him a hard time…
“Probably never told you about that, huh?”
He shook his head slowly.
“Okay, grab us some sodas, and I’ll get food on the table. I want to show you something.”
Whether it was my change in tone or what I’d already told him, he didn’t argue. He even grabbed the sour cream. With twenty minutes left on the oven for the rest of the potato skins, I waited for him to sit down before I pulled out my phone.
“It’ll take me a minute to find them, but I know some of them never came down—I just got older and didn’t care. Go ahead and eat.”
It took me a full ten minutes to scroll back far enough to find the posts in my messages. They were way down. I suppose I should have deleted them a long time ago. But I just hadn’t thought about them in years.
“Here we go.” I slid the phone over to him and then picked up a potato skin to eat while he studied the screen. After wiping his hands, he scrolled upward.
“What a bitch,” he finally said, and I bit back a smile.
“She definitely was. It hurt back then. Not that she thought that about me—I mean, I did get to the point where I didn’t care because nothing I said or did would ever change her mind. She hated me because she was jealous. I’d like to offer you a platitude, but the simple fact is—some people just suck.”
“You tried to make her stop?” His expression was so tense.
“Well, the guys did. Pretty sure they would have done the same thing to her if she didn’t, but I didn’t want them to do that. Rachel, on the other hand, roasted her pretty hard and clapped back regularly. It didn’t make Sharon stop. She just kept digging in her little comments and posts. I did break her nose. That shut her down some—I don’t recommend that last part. Largely cause I do like your mom and I don’t want her to actually get mad at my advice.”
He laughed. “I don’t think my stuff is this bad.”
“So show me yours—tell me what’s eating at you. I might not be able to do anything or offer you a platitude, but I have some experience in these areas. I also have a social media guru we can consult if we have to.”
That pulled a real laugh out of him, but then his ears went red. “It’s—it’s not about me. It’s—there’s—there’s a girl I like. I mean, I don’t like her like a girlfriend. I just like her like a friend. But she’s pretty, you know. Only, she doesn’t think she’s pretty. Then some of the guys made some jokes about her in class, and one of the girls posted it. It kind of went from there.”
“That sucks. What did you do?”
He wasn’t looking anywhere but at the table and his shoulders drooped. “I didn’t do anything—I mean, I wanted to slug the guy who made the joke, but Dad says the minute I hit someone, I’ve already lost the argument.”
Depends on the argument. But I didn’t say that aloud.
“I can’t tell the girl what I think of her cause she’ll just run and tell the teacher or anyone else and say I was bullying her—kind of like you said I was with Craig.” He made a face. “It bugs me, I should do something, but I don’t know what.”
“Want an idea?”
He studied me for a moment. “You said what you did, didn’t work. How would that help?”
“Well, I’m not talking about what to do about them—directly. I’m talking about what you can do for—” I raised my brows.
His ears went a little deeper red. “Her name is Emma. Don’t—don’t tell Dad? I mean, I think Mom knows, but Dad always wants to give me good advice, and he’s great and stuff but—”
“Your secret is safe with me.” I held up my pinky. “I swear.”
He hooked his pinky with mine. “Okay—what’s your idea?”
“Send her a message and reach out to her. Being picked on sucks, especially if you think everyone else thinks the same things. It hurts. Maybe you can’t fix it. But you can be her friend.”
For a moment, he just stared at me. “Like—you want me to call her?” You’d have thought I was suggesting he go and egg her house; he was that appalled by the idea. “Girls are weird, Frankie, no offense.”
“Well, none taken, but I thought you liked her.”
“I do,” he said, then took a bite of one of his potato skins. “I just—when you’re nice to a girl, they think you’re into them.”
“And that’s bad?” I pulled one of the potato skins in half so I could dip it into the sour cream.
“I mean—kind of. Maybe.” He made a face. “I don’t know. Girls get weird.”
“Sure, but boys are pretty weird too. You don’t see me judging you for that.” That got a smile out of him, even if it was a little reluctant.
“What would your guys have done?”
“What would they have done, or what would they do?” Because what Archie had wanted to do was destroy them. Course, so had Rachel…
It took him a minute to decide what his answer would be, and three more potato skins disappeared in the meanwhile. Some of the sour left his disposition too. Bad enough to be hungry, but hungry and frustrated? Yeah, that was a recipe for disaster.
I got up and retrieved the next round of potato skins before the timer went off. They’d need a couple of minutes to cool.
“What did they do?” he asked finally.
“They were my friends,” I told him. “They walked me between classes. They stared down the people who stared at me. They shut down the gossip. Jake got into more than one fight—not advising that but Jake’s got a wicked left and right cross, so—he took real exception when people called me names.”
“They were your friends?”
I nodded slowly. “They didn’t care who saw them with me. They didn’t worry about what other people said about them. In fact, I’m pretty sure Archie loved it when they tried to talk about him.” He could really eviscerate people with that talented tongue of his. “Be her friend,” I told him. “As I said, you can worry what other people will think about you, but that’s kind of a shitty way to be about someone you like. Even if you don’t like-like her—you like her enough to care that she’s hurting. So, what are you going to do about it?”
“I should probably send her a message, huh?”
“Might be a good start. Is she in the class you’re behind on?”
He blinked. “I’m not behind cause I don’t know how to do it. I just thought the assignment was stupid.”
“Ask her for help.”
“I don’t need—”
“Maybe not, but it’s an excuse to talk to her, right? It’s a way to pick up the phone and start a conversation. You could start with a text, then work it up from there.”
“Oh,” he said slowly, then blinked at me. “That wouldn’t be so bad…but what if she thinks I’m dumb?”
I had to bite back a smile. “Do you think Ian is dumb?”
“No, he’s brilliant. Great musician.”