Facebook:
Joanne Coleman: okay so this game
...New Google Chrome notifications.
He sighed. Let his head fall back onto the pillows. Let his hands briefly fall off the trackpad, hit the mattress of the bed around him.
He... really needed to turn that setting off.
((Jonathan Meyers, continued from Dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo You Have The Time... To Listen To Me Whine?))
Seriously. Getting a Facebook message and trying to figure out a way to respond to it was stressful enough as it was. With that setting on he didn’t even have an excuse to just ignore it for several hours until he finally felt ready to deal with whatever it happened to be. Felt weird to be like that since he had no trouble with replying to stuff on other chat clients unless it was like, someone PMing him to be a massive jerk and stuff, but maybe there was some intrinsic difference between Messenger and Discord that he hadn’t quite figured out yet. Maybe the fact that these were people he knew in real life made the conversations seem way heavier and important than they actually really were.
But… eh. It was from Joanne. There was a 10% chance that it was her chewing him out for something he didn’t even realize he’d done at school today but odds were it was probably normal. Just friends being friends. Nothing to really get all in his head about.
Joanne Coleman
okay so this game
your girl is FINALLY on the glow up took me forever
but i was fighting this big walking crystal its like shit? am i in the all of a sudden SU crossover?
finally figured out that (rip)oste mechanic u told me to try out lol only took me two weeks of game
dude did not even know
swords flying business class like that sound is so satisfying i love the damn audio its crunchy
and going to give me some sort of high blood pressure someday if the food down at Blue’s don’t first
anyways i rescued some girl or something
the lovely Sieglinde, how d’ya do?
her armor is haute + juicy couture shit
girl
power
let me know if ur planning to go on the trip btw?
my family’s still deciding, shits looking bum so far. might not be going
He breathed, felt whatever tightness had built up in his lungs dissipate, fade out. Turned out that it wasn’t the less than ten percent scenario that typically always happened irl anyway. Turned out it was a thing his mind apparently considered a surprise. Sorta just needed to stop freaking out whenever his friends decided to talk to him in a medium he still didn’t have the hang of. Needed to take the message for what it was and laugh along, come up with a response without having to take a million years figuring out the correct words to use. Y’know, like a regular human being. It was supposed to be easy. Talking with her was supposed to be natural.
So he took another breath. Moved his hands up from the trackpad to the keyboard. Let the words come out in the order that they came to his head, for better or worse.
Jonathan Meyers
lol
‘bout time you finally git gud
only right near the end of the game
and yeah, pretty sure i’m going
lily seems down to be free of me for a few days
...Message sent, rather than delivered. Seemed like she wasn’t online at the moment. Also seemed like that was the type of message he’d make super deliberate in order to seem normal and stuff but whatever, he could pretend that he was going to improve on that front in the future, now he was going to do… something, he supposed. Wasn’t really sure quite what. He’d got himself fired up to just hang out and try to shoot the shit with Joanne but now that she didn’t seem to be here he kinda just didn’t really know what to do. Like, maybe he could just go and check Facebook and pretend that that was a valuable use of his time, but-
Actually, you know what? That was what he was going to do. Maybe Joanne would come back soon and it wasn’t as if he could jump back into the game he was playing before (losing a no-death run of MM2 right at the Buebeam trap was an absolutely great way to get you motivated for future attempts, let it be known) so yeah. Maybe he could spend a minute or two checking Facebook. See if there was anything there worth him noticing.
So he put the letter f into the search bar at the top, pressed enter, and found himself at the top of his Facebook home page. He looked at the top, went down, and… yeah, wow, not really a lot here that made his decision worth it. ‘One of the people you’ve never talked to and only friended for posterity made a comment on this only semi-funny post only tagging someone you don’t know!’ ‘Here’s a sponsored trailer for a movie that you’re not gonna watch and is only gonna get a 65 at best on Metacritic!’ ‘Your friends have more of a social life than you, as can be seen by the fact that they’re going to a bunch of events that don’t interest you at all!’ ‘Sixteen of your friends like the page for this fast food restaurant [citation needed] for some reason, let us shove ads for them in your face because of that!’
Like, really, Zuckerberg? You’d stolen all of Jonathan’s data in a massive breach of privacy which finally gave evidence that corporations were watching everyone Orwell style, and this is what your algorithm thought he wanted to see? Man, if it weren’t for the fact that Messenger was the only chat client the majority of his friends used, he definitely know how long he’d still be on this hell-site.
But whatever. Not as if he really had any better use of his time. There was like, a ton of homework and a couple of assessments he needed to do since it was the patented end-of-year crunch time period (compounded by the fact that they were the final things he had to do in school ever), but, like, those hadn’t ever really counted. Right now was a moment to relax and get his head in gear for actually doing what he was supposed to do and he was going to use that by doing… this. Pretending as if this was fun. Pretending as if this was a worthwhile and fulfilling thing to do.
He scrolled back up. Clicked on his profile and clicked on the activity log so that he could make sure he hadn’t accidentally clicked one of the many clickable things on Facebook that he didn’t intend to click on. Went onto the friends thing to make sure he hadn’t sent any friend requests by accident, and-
People You May Know
Topher Sutherland
...The name took a second for him to remember, he had to admit.
But once a face to accompany it came he decided to click on the name, check out the profile. Wouldn’t actually send a friend request because hahahahahahahahahaha the chance that Topher would actually remember him was close to nothing but there was still maybe worth in seeing whether he’d stopped beating up people on the school playground. Whether those duels at high lunchtime had done much to change his views. Really if his profile showed anything to people with no mutual friends then maybe he could use this as a blast from the past, a way to reminisce among the times when he was six years-
...This conversation had happened seven years ago. All participants were twelve years old at the very best. Jonathan was going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’d all improved since then. If only for his own sake. If only to preserve the very lovely image he had in his head of his elementary school classmates.Brian Cantero no stacks of people care about topher such as his mom and dad
Topher Sutherland shut up negan your and asshole and i hate your sister
Tristan Mallory ↑ The guy above me is gay, and the guy under me is his boyfriend ↓
Alexandra Ásgeirsdóttir Lol Tristan o and topher u only hate me cause i dumped u in front of everyone and then u were so sad that u went and dated blair. and Jack 1 u have a really stupid profile pic 2 im just to get this out of the way i think your a tard 3 y the hell are u even commenenting on mais status she wasnt even talking about u and yes i do no that it comes up on your status but it still dosnt make u have any right to spam her so can u PLEASE shut up and go AWAY!!!!!!
Negan Ásgeirsdóttir Tristen? the "guy""below you isent a guy
Blake Fidler hahahahahaha
Blake Fidler its funny becuse topher and alexandra LOVE!!!! each other so so so very very very MUCH!!!!!!!!!!! fullstop.
Tristan Mallory oy do u have it yet? hurry up so we can play online!
He clicked out of Topher’s page. Went back to his own profile and went through the usual check — made sure he hadn’t accidentally liked anything, made sure he hadn’t accidentally sent a friend request to any of his old classmates. Sorta felt the urge to go back in and check what else Jonathan could see on Topher’s page, but it felt weird to. Wrong to. Like maybe looking over his classmates seven year old FB posts was kinda creepy and socially maladaptive. Not like he’d ever get caught, but still.
...Honestly, he was in the mood to do it. Check out his former classmates. Not many names he could remember that were of interest, but…
But yeah.
Ten years was enough. He supposed it was time he finally checked up on her. He went up to the search bar. Typed in Jennifer Pearce. Pressed enter, clicked the first result that said the person was from Tennessee, and-
Her profile picture hadn’t become properly visible until he had gone onto the profile itself. It was a girl standing in what seemed to be the middle of a street. Her eyes were… blue, if he remembered correctly — he couldn’t see the colour himself, not at this resolution — and her hair was still a light chestnut brown, even if she’d grown it out in the multiple years since he’d last seen her. Body shape wasn’t really clear because only her top half was in the picture, but she seemed to look fairly normal, fairly skinny. She was wearing fairly casual clothes; a white shirt, the faint outline of jeans below…
And she was wearing a red cap with the words ‘Make America Great Again’ emblazoned on white in the front. She was holding a sign up, the words ‘People For a More Secure America’ published in red and italic lettering.
And there was… a pit in his stomach that had rapidly opened up from under him, gravity pulling him down into the deep, dark depths below. He’d known after a point that putting her on a pedestal would only lead to disappointment when or if he eventually met her again, he knew that it’d been ten years and that it’d be impossible for her to not have changed since puberty but it still felt like a betrayal, as if the image of Jennifer that Jonathan had in his head was tainted now. He’d known what she’d been like before, he’d known that they’d done… whatever eight year olds did, but what she seemed to be now was going to corrupt it and change the good memories and make them bad memories in retrospect. Something he should have expected.
But maybe she wasn’t actually like that. He didn’t know. The profile picture in itself was more than enough to provide a safe assumption that Jennifer had become the type of person Jonathan detested but hey, assumptions made an ass out of everybody or something, he didn’t know.
Theoretically, there was no way he’d know for sure unless he found out. Got to see… more of the public face she showed others. Which putting it that way gave him a lot more fears of what she was actually like, but he digressed. Got back to the overall point, which was the button at the bottom right corner of her cover image (a blank picture of the countryside), inviting Jonathan to attempt to try and add her as a friend.
And he had to pause. Genuinely think about that for a bit. Because there was a disposition somewhere in his head trying to tempt him into pressing the button but there was another thing — a shoulder angel, maybe — telling him not to, placing the consequences as pictures in front of his eyes. Because the whole point of doing this sort of stuff was not to get caught, not to leave any evidence that you were going total creepo on someone else’s Facebook profile. Because maybe Jennifer wouldn’t recognize him after ten years, would only see him as a total creep that she’d unfriend and block immediately. Because maybe she was what she seemed to be and he’d be forced to befriend and have to directly do what he did with bullies to someone who was a friend. Who had been a friend.
But maybe those consequences weren’t what they seemed. The first disposition — the shoulder devil — counterargued, told him that maybe the bad things he was envisioning were just in his head, weren’t actually going to happen. Because people connected with old friends all the time — that was probably one of Facebook’s main uses before Zuckerberg went evil and started selling people’s souls for his own pocket. Because Jennifer had seen Jonathan as a friend back then, and she’d seen him as one good enough that maybe she’d remember him ten years later. Because the whole point of going up against bullies back then and the whole point of him going to rallies today was for him to try and talk to people. Try and show them that they were doing the wrong thing. If he balked now then that meant he was betraying himself, letting that behaviour continue, make sure nothing became better in America.
His mouse was doing a sideways figure eight, with the ‘Add Friend’ button in the centre. He couldn’t really decide whether doing this would be a good idea or not, but… maybe it was a good idea for him to do it. Get more friends. Reconnect with his past, a little bit. Be a little bit better of a person. The mouse stopped. Stayed on the button. He breathed, took a second, and-
Joanne Coleman
i BEEN git gud >:)
and fuck its almost the end already? damn i was only thinking my obsession would drag on another month
yalld have to drag me outta the house for grad pics
but like first off im feeling lily there. if my bros could get out of the house or at least my hair one day maaaan
srs tho
gonna miss you if u go
but itll give me time to finish up this gamer girl shit with yall gone i guess
u me and jiji should do weekend camping or something when yall get back
His mouse moved from the button right back to his profile. He checked the activity log, made sure that he hadn’t clicked on anything by accident. Went to the Find Friends section, made sure he hadn’t sent any friend requests to anyone. Once he’d seen that he hadn’t accidentally friended anyone he let his body decompress, went up to the search bar to put the letter m in, and sent himself to Messenger, figured out a response to Joanne.
Jonathan Meyers
i’ll miss you too
hope that you will eventually be able to come since it’d probably be cool to be able to hang with friends and stuff there
but i’d be down to camp at soe point
watch the three of us slowly devolve as we each independently realize that we have no idea what to do in the outdoors
but yeah really i’m cool with that if you and jiji are cool with that
it’d seem fun
And there was another breath out, as the messages went to ‘delivered.’ He sunk his head back into the pillow, let himself look at the ceiling for a little bit. Maybe he could go back to where he’d just been and do what he’d been about to do, but… he didn’t know. Now with the hindsight of what’d probably been a minute at most maybe it was best that he hadn’t actually sent that request. Maybe the safe option was the right option, or something like that. No way of telling for sure, but-
There were two knocks on the door on the other end of the room from him before it opened. He saw a young lady — twenty-five this year — in the frame, looking into the room. Her dark brown hair was in a long ponytail, and her normally green eyes were obscured by the light in the hallway behind them, unseeable from the distance Jonathan was at. He sat up as soon as she came in, placed his computer on his left, where he was far less likely to accidentally push it off the bed.
“Hey,” Lily said. “I need to talk to you about something.”
“...Alright,” Jonathan said, pushing his body off the bed and hitting the small space of floor to his right with his feet. “Outside?”
“Yeah.”
They moved. Didn’t go far, though. As soon as he was out of his room and into the light of the hallway the both of them stopped, faced each other. Jonathan had to stop himself from leaning on the cream plaster wall to his left. Lily didn’t tend to get annoyed at him all that much despite the shit he tended to do, but leaning on the walls (or anything else, really) was generally a paddlin’. Not something he’d do while she was around.
“I got a call from KidCentral today,” she said.
“Um, alright,” Jonathan said, doing his best to not let the name bother him too much. “What’d they want to say about me?”
“They got a call from your birth mother the other day.” She looked to the side, for a moment, brought her hand up and roughed it through her hair. “She expressed interest in seeing you.”
...He paused, gulped. Stayed silent, for a few moments. Tried to sift his way through all the new thoughts that had started rushing through his head the moment Lily dropped the news. The moment Lily brought up… that consideration.
Five seconds in and he realized that he couldn’t quite get himself to shut up. He decided to focus on the conversation, hoped that that would be an effective distracting tool.
“Okay,” he said. It took a few moments for him to fully be capable of eye-to-eye contact with the closest person he had to a mother figure. “So, um, will I?”
“Depends. If you decide you wanna, they’ll hook you two up with one another, arrange a meeting. Even if you explicitly say no, the option’s still open for you, if you want.”
That hadn’t really helped to overpower all the everything. The opposite had happened, in all actuality. The conversation had been effectively drowned out by Jonathan’s thoughts.
“Alright.”
“...So, do you want to? I can give you, um, everything you need.”
And it was like before, with the Facebook page, with his cursor on the ‘Add Friend’ button. He hadn’t known what option to choose and his head was going off like two dueling wildfires, competing for his attention and tempting him to make their fire be the one he chose to jump into and burn himself in. Everything felt so less clear than it had been earlier — none of the reasons going through his head sense, none of them were even worth putting into focus or giving particular attention to — and no matter how hard he tried to control it, hose the thoughts down into a shape he could manage, it was still messy.
So it was probably best he let the thoughts keep flowing, for a bit. Make his decisions once they eventually settled.
“I’ll… think about it,” he said to Lily. “Will, um, get to you later.”
“Alright,” Lily said, smiling. “I’ll give you time to let you do that.”
“Thanks,” he said, taking a step to his right, towards the familiar and very comfortable darkness that was his bedroom. The laptop on the bed shone white light at the far wall. Produced the aura of a spooky ghost, or something. It was really just getting a message back from Joanne so it wasn’t really the most appropriate metaphor, but maybe it was, in a way. Tonight had been… pretty spooky, in a way. It was right in front of him, threatening to do whatever ghosts did to people when they fell into their opaque translucent arms. It was there, floating, haunting the residence of his mind until he was able to send it, himself to a better place.
And maybe getting back onto the bed, getting back to talking would get him on the right path for doing that. Maybe talking to his friends about this would be a good idea, help him deduce what the best thing to do was.
Maybe help him put out the fires, given how he apparently wasn’t able to do it himself.
((Jonathan Meyers, continued elsewhere))