Saturday, November 19th

64.)

I slept. I literally had to. My body wouldn't let me stay awake anymore, and I was incredibly dehydrated after crying so much. I woke up around five in the morning, but I didn't get out of bed. I didn't get out of bed for most of the morning, actually. I just laid there, ruminating on what Blossom said.

That afternoon, I showed up at Lin's place with a lot of leftover cream puffs. My mom said my croquembouche was "literally divine". Lin was getting some second-rate ones, but she had the food palette of a garbage disposal. She didn't care if something was bad or good: she'd eat it anyway.

Lin was sitting at her desk with a spread of papers laid out in front of her; some of them were clearly homework and study material, while others looked like hand-drawn diagrams of positions and maps and the like.

"Hey~"

She didn't look up from her papers immediately.

"I brought lunch in the form of pastries," I said, setting the bag down on her desk. She took a few minutes before looking up at me, satisfied with whatever she was doing.

"I thought we were going out to lunch?" Lin asked, peering into the bag.

"Well, a lunch for tomorrow I guess? Or dinner, for you." Honestly, I didn't know what our concrete plans were; I just hadn't spent a day with Lin in a while.

"Pastries make excellent raiding food. They're small and bite sized, and won't set the kitchen on fire during a phase transition."

Thoughtfully, she added, "You gotta each 'em with chopsticks though so they don't get your fingers all sticky and gross. Nobody wants a sticky controller."

"Is everything about video games with you?" I sighed. I barely understood her references sometimes.

"Sorry," Lin laughed. "I was on a roll. I'll tone it down."

Lin closed the binder she had on her desk and got to her feet. She was a little shorter than me and a lot thinner. Sometimes I wished I had her body, small and cute. She stepped past me and slipped on her flats, then pulled her coat out of the closet. I guess we were going out to lunch after all.

"There's a food truck on South and 8th that sells tacos but the taco shell is made out of garlic bread and everyone on the school Discord says it's incredible so let's check it out."

Lin was easily swayed by social recommendations, and she was actually proud of that fact. It meant she didn't miss out on stuff.

"Alright, I guess." Garlic bread tacos... I hadn't made garlic bread in a while. I wondered if I could make them thin enough to be taco shells.

Lin drove. Unlike me, Lin had a car. I brought my mom's car today, but the back seat was crowded with clothes my mom still hadn't dropped off at Goodwill. It would have only taken a few seconds to clean out the passenger seat, but Lin made for an annoying passenger sometimes. She fiddled with everything.

We probably could have walked to the food truck, which was just off campus, but the weather app said it was 20 degrees. That was a little too cold for a walk.

"Garlic bread tacos is such a weird concept, it's like… at the store, I saw pizza bao? And like my brain is REELING because is that appropriation? Fusion? And garlic bread tacos feel like the same thing."

It was cold out, and the line for the food truck was lengthy, and Lin was bouncing from foot to foot to keep warm.

"You can wait in the car if you want," I told her. One perk of being a fat girl: the cold didn't bother me half as much as it bothered Lin. But Lin was stubborn too.

"I'm fiiiiiine," Lin said with a hand wave, still shifting side to side.

She looked like she was doing a potty dance. I imagined, however briefly, my best friend wetting her tight blue jeans right there in the middle of the sidewalk. College kids would giggle and she would blush so deeply. I'd probably recommend...

I really shouldn't daydream about my friends like that. But I daydreamed about Blossom like that all the time, didn't I? I guess it felt different when you knew your friend was into it.

But that started my mind on the whole Blossom thing. A part of me - like a background app on my phone or something - was still processing what she said to me yesterday. I brought it to the foreground.

"Hey, Lin?" I asked, zipping my coat all the way up to my chin. "Do you think I'm... like... too hard on myself?"

"Yes. Absolutely. You're harder on yourself than my parents are on me, and they call me fat anytime I see them, sooo... that should tell you something."

It wasn't really the content of the answer that mattered here; it was the immediacy. Not even a pause. Not even a hesitation.

"Right, but... I dunno. If I screw something up, I should be held accountable for that, right?" Sure, I was hard on myself. But there's a difference between "hard" and "too hard."

"Right, but what's accountability here? Is it just to punish yourself for a mistake, or is it to do a better job next time?"

"Well... I dunno." I pouted a bit, crossing my arms. "Aren't consequences there to like... make sure you do better next time? If there weren't consequences, then nobody would do better..."

"Right, but like... it's like if you tell someone with an addiction problem how mad you are at them for falling off the wagon. It won't make them less likely to fall off in the future, will it? It'll just make them hide it from you better. Holding yourself accountable is one thing, but punishing yourself? Couldn't you be using that energy to make things right, instead of making it worse?"

"I don't make things worse..." Did I? I screwed up my whole weekend with Blossom, and she wasn't even mad about it. She was upset that I didn't talk to her on the way home. I was upset... I didn't want to talk... why get mad about that? Because I was selfish, and I didn't do what she wanted? Ugh, it felt like such a double standard! Ruining our weekend is fine, but ruining our car ride home isn't?!

"So like, picture this: I loan you my car. You crash it. You're in hospital, injuries not too bad, but like. Bad enough. And I come to visit you. Do you... a) apologize that it happened, and offer to help me with replacing it any way you can once you're better, or b) tell me what an awful friend and how nobody should ever trust you and how you don't deserve to be my friend?"

It was a wordy narrative, but Lin was pretty sure they both knew which answer Amy would snap to.

"The first one?" I mean, I'd be mad at myself, sure. I might think some of those other things, but I wouldn't say them. I'd apologize and try to make it right because I screwed up.

"And did you pick A or B last time you hung out with your ex-bully?"

"Neither..." Though, to be fair, it was maybe a little closer to B. I saw Lin's point. But wait– "Also, I didn't say this had anything to do with Blossom!"

"Mhm, but you answered anyway. Funny how that works, right?"

Lin winked as she stepped up to the food van and placed her order for two spaghetti and meatball garlic bread tacos, then looked to Amy for her to order.

I got the same thing. I was still thinking about what Lin had said, and I wasn't able to shelve that thought process long enough to figure out what I wanted. When we both got our food, we made our way back to her car and cranked the heat. I sat in the passenger seat, just like in Blossom's car, and unwrapped my taco.

"So I'm sometimes too hard on myself," I relented. "But I don't make it anyone else's problem. I don't go blabbing about how much I suck to other people." I took a bite and made a sound of intense satisfaction. It was a lot like the sound I made when I wore a diaper and I squeezed my thighs together. "I hate how delicious this is..."

"Right? This is sin incarnate and I love it."

Lin took a careful bite - because this bitch be saucy - and when she swallowed she got back on topic.

"You don't have room in your head for anything else when something goes wrong. Your instinct is to punish yourself rather than to work on a solution."

I could see how that might be a problem. But that still begged the question: "How do you know all this? We never fight." Probably because Lin was a really laid back person and didn't have much preference for anything.

"Because we're friends, and friends notice things about each other. I'm sure your little ex-bully friend has started to notice stuff about you too. And I'm sure you've noticed a lot about me."

I did notice a lot about her. I knew that she often didn't start fights or engage in arguments because it was just easier to let them fizzle out. I knew that she put her feet on me on the sofa when she wanted to feel close, but she never put her head on my shoulder or held my hand. I knew that she would make reckless decisions when something made her feel uncertain because she didn't like sitting in the moment. So why was it weird that she noticed stuff about me? Was it because I didn't notice that stuff about me? I wonder if Lin knew the stuff I knew about her...

"I don't know how to not get in my head about it," I finally said, because... well, I wish I didn't have to. I didn't want to shut Blossom out like that. But what else could I do?

"We process stuff differently when we think it, say it, write it, and read it. You're totally stuck on the 'think it' so your perception of feelings is all like... one-dimensional, because of that."

Lin shrugged her shoulders.

"So I'm supposed to talk about it?" I asked. "Isn't putting all those feelings on other people exactly what I'm not supposed to do? I thought I was trying to avoid situation B, not strive for it."

"The problem is that you don't know what to do with those feelings, so you just stuff it deep down like nasty dishes at the bottom of the sink. And eventually you gotta clean that sink, but you wait until you're overwhelmed by it and then you resist doing it next time. But if you'd just kept up with it from the start, it wouldn't be overwhelming. Talk about your feelings when you're having them."

"I really don't see how that helps anyone," I sighed. I picked off a piece of the taco shell and turned it over in my hand. It was kind of like pita bread, but crispy on the outside. I could probably make it myself.

"Well, what you're doing right now sure doesn't help anyone either, so I don't think you've got much to lose by trusting your best friend." Lin took a bite of her taco.

"I am helping," I said a little defensively. "If I bitched about my problems all the time, I'm just putting that stuff on other people. Nobody else is responsible for my problems."

"Sure, that's a nice concept in theory - but you pay taxes and those taxes pay for other people's healthcare; you're not an island, none of us are. We're all responsible for each other, that's basic society. Friendship goes a step further and says not only are we responsible, but we take joy in helping."

"Mm..." I didn't like Lin sometimes. She took AP Psych in high school, and she delivered information with such unparalleled disinterest that it was hard to blame her for it. She'd make a good therapist, if she wasn't so invested in computer science.

"You'll either do it or you won't, but at least understanding that what you're doing right now isn't working should be seen as a minimum goal."

Lin tore into an individually wrapped moist towelette and began to clean the garlic and butter and spaghetti sauce from her fingers.

"You gonna finish that?" Lin asked, pointing to the other taco in my lap.

"Nah," I sighed, "I'm not as hungry as I thought."