Foes & Cons by Carrie Aarons (i am malala young readers edition .txt) 📗

entire senior class, I’d say we’re the two most likely to take over the world before we’re twenty. We have the maturity and intellect to do it, and my move after I found Sawyer’s list is probably my most childish and dramatic reaction ever.

“What was I supposed to say? That I was rustling around his drawers and happened upon this list that pretty much tore me apart. Obviously, he never wanted me to see it. But, he clearly had those feelings. I couldn’t go on with our friendship after that.”

Nate’s expression is growing more concerned, more suspicious. “But Sawyer has no idea why you’re really furious at him? He hasn’t all this time? So you just bulldozed him at that party sophomore year and all of this back and forth pissing contest has been because he has no clue why you murdered your friendship?”

Guilt burns my veins up, because I know what Nate is getting at. It’s something I think about a lot, too. I can blame Sawyer all I want for writing those ugly things about me, but at the end of the day, I’m the one who cast the first stone. I’m the one who was snooping around, the one who became irrational and hurt after reading that list, and never even gave Sawyer the chance to explain himself. I was just as at fault as he was in the wreckage of our friendship.

“Did you guys hear?” Laura rushes into the room as if the school is on fire and we’re not aware.

“Hear what?” I ask, jumping on the chance to get away from this conversation.

Nate glances at me like he knows exactly what I’m trying to do.

“Sawyer and Matt just got into a fight in the cafeteria, and they were pulled off each other bleeding!”

Her words register, but they don’t fully dent my brain. They can’t, because that sentence, that sequence of events, would never happen.

“Nice try.” I laugh, not believing her in the slightest.

“I’m not kidding! There are pictures and video all over everyone’s Instagram story. You have to go look.” She pulls her hot pink-cased iPhone out of her backpack.

Nate is frantically trying to pull up his own app, his silence completely fueled by the need to witness some good gossip.

Before I can even pull up social media, my phone starts to buzz in my hand with an incoming phone call.

Great, I inwardly groan as I see who is calling. As if this last half hour hasn’t had enough turmoil.

My mother would be calling me in the middle of a school day, because how dare she have to remember that her teenage daughter is trying to get an education?

I duck out of the room and into a nearby bathroom without a word to my two best friends, hoping no teacher passes and hears me, and then click to connect the call.

“Hello?” I ask, because for all I know, this could be a butt dial.

“Baby!” My mom’s raspy, toxic positivity voice booms through the other end of the call.

I resist the urge to roll my eyes, get my hopes up, or react in any way. Even if I’m in a bathroom all by lonesome, I’ve come to learn that I need to guard and coach myself when it comes to my mother. Our interactions need to be strategically run from my end, to protect every fragile piece of my heart I have put back together numerous times on her account.

“I’m at school.” My lack of excitement is blatant.

“I just had to call because I’m at this gorgeous retreat in Arizona, and we’re being put up in the most beautiful yurt village. This morning, I saw a cloud shaped like a heart, and I thought immediately of you. I’ll put it on my Instagram so you can see it.” She completely ignores that she’s disturbing me in the middle of a day of learning.

My blood pressure seems to be rising, but I tamp it down, because this is how she gets me. I haven’t heard from her in months, probably about four to be exact. She missed my birthday, my last first day of school, and every milestone leading up to this point. And the first thing she does when she calls me is talk about herself and her retreat. Her biggest means of communication with her own daughter is social media. If there were ever a case study on narcissism, my mother would be patient zero.

She left my father to pursue her own dreams and had no qualms about leaving her little girl behind either. I don’t even remember a time when she was a real staple in my life, or when I depended on her for anything more than the validation and self-loathing a little girl takes on after being abandoned by a parent.

“Great. I have to go.” I want to hurl my phone against the brick bathroom wall I’m looking at.

“But wait, baby, I want to hear about school. How are your college applications going? You still thinking about going into political science?”

And this is how she really gets me. Because just when I’m convinced the only person she cares about is herself, she whips out some piece of knowledge about me to reel me right back in. I think she knows she does it, her manipulation gene is so strong. But she’s my mother, and I want so badly for her to love me, that I break like the straw on that damn camel’s back.

Cautiously, I dip one toe in. “I’ve actually been looking more into colleges, refining my essay. I think it’s definitely going to be political science, maybe with a marketing minor because that might help on some kind of campaign, and—”

“Wait, what’s that?” I can tell she’s talking to someone other than me, someone there with her in person. “Oh, Blair, I have to go. We’re getting mud baths and massages for the next three hours. Can you even imagine how beautiful my skin is going to look?”

“Oh, well—” I