Super Embarrassing Past You’ll Never Live Down! 💖

Ever have a dream where you’re dead tired in the dream? And then wake up only to find that, somehow, you’re still tired?

That’s kind of how trekking through the woods to save Snowball felt: just when you thought the exhaustion was over, you realized it was only just beginning.

“When the path splits in two, take a left. Then, when you see a big fallen branch, turn left off the trail and into the bushes.” Fence was reading aloud from the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 as we went, using the kidnapper’s jagged hand to lead the way to the hideout. Now that the map was gone, the directions written in the entries was the only way we’d be able to find it.

The problem was that each step of these stupid directions was one part necessary navigational information, nine parts embarrassing anecdote about, you guessed, me.

Whoever this kidnapper was, they seemed to have certain questionable tastes. Certain questionable tastes highly and suspiciously reminiscent of their victim’s.

“You’ll know the branch immediately cause it’ll have a weird heart-shaped knot in it," Fence read. "The heart looked kind of like one of the ones on my love’s underwear the day Snowball used her clothes-only x-ray machine on him during the school-wide assembly. Everyone laughed and the video went viral all over the internet, but I thought he looked so… so… I’m blushing so hard I can’t even write it. <3 To think he’d wear the tighty whities I gifted him so soon. Rest assured, my love: you’ll never have to wear your sister’s underwear because you ran out of clean pairs of your own again! Not on my watch!”

“Ugggghghghghghghg, just kill me. Just kill me now.”

Unlike during our first attempt to find the hideout, Fence was the one leading the way this time. I had lapsed about a half step back, face planted firmly in my hands. I didn’t want anyone to see me right now. Not even my best friend out of his peripheral vision while his nose was buried in that stupid book.

Oops. Sorry. I mean stupid Super Secret Love Diary 💖.

“Would it kill you to cut some of the details out?” I asked. It was less a question and more a plea. Or maybe “sad begging routine” is the more appropriate phrase. I looked back. The entrance to the woods was still in sight. We still had a long way to go. How much longer was I going to be forced to war flashback to my cringiest moments?

“No can do, dude.” Fence responded in the negative, just like he had the other twenty or so times I had already asked. “The stuff about you is so entwined with the instructions it would be too hard to separate them out.”

“Ugh. Just my luck.”

I had to wonder though: just who was this person who had written the entries in the sharp and pointy handwriting? They obviously weren’t Snowball. But the further we went, the more clear it became to me that they went to our school, and that they knew stuff about me that they should have had no way of knowing. Stuff that only me and Snowball should know.

“Now,” Fence recited, “the next stretch of woods is pretty long, so it’s time to run. Which reminds me: my love looked so cute and adorable that time he was running on that fake track that Snowball made in PE that one time! He was just so lovable that the whole class couldn’t help but laugh and call him names for the rest of the day!”

Oh god. “Hey, can we stop? I think I need to dig a hole and bury myself.”

“Come on, dude. It’s not that ba-pfftt… not that b-b-bad-pffftt… hahaha! I remember that! It was hilarious!”

“Ok, ok, I get it, alright? You’re enjoying this. Fine. Whatever. Lap it up. Schadenfreude your heart out.” Was schadenfreude a verb? More importantly, did I even care at this point? Nope. All I wanted was to get this over with as quick as possible so I could go home and try — and likely fail, but at least try — to re-bury my shame where it belonged: in the darkest corners of my memory, never to be spoken of ever again, hopefully. “At least there’s one silver lining. Nobody else is here to hear any of this.”

“Huh? What are you talking about dude? You’re live right now.”

“Well, duh. Of course I’m alive. At least until I die of embarrassment from all the stuff you’re reading.”

“No, no, dude. Not ‘alive.’ Live. As in: streaming right now. Why do you think I have my phone out?”

I had been wondering about that, actually. This whole time Fence had had the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 in one hand and his phone in the other.

“Wait. Streaming? You’re streaming this? To who?”

“The entire school, dude. Duh.”

“The entire what?!”

“The entire school. We’re live on their official channel. Principal Pid asked me to do this before we left. But I kinda forgot until just now. Haha. Sorry, Principal Pid.” He smiled awkwardly at his phone as the awful, stomach-plummeting words left his mouth.

As if to confirm my worst nightmare, Fence’s phone returned a notification chime, indicating someone had responded in the stream chat. To me, that cute little sound effect was like the tolling of my social death knell.

“Principal Pid says it’s alright, dude. I’m not in trouble as long as I keep the stream going for the rest of the journey. Lucky me. Haha.”

“Y-yeah, lucky you. Haha… Why are we supposed to be streaming this again?” With how my deck was usually stacked, I figured there was nothing I could even do to stop this at this point, but I figured I might as well try my hand. Maybe if nobody had a decent answer up their sleeve, we’d all realize how pointless this was. And then me and Fence could cut the stream, go home, and let the actual professionals deal with the kidnapping case.

Not in the cards.

“Principal Pid said this might be a good opportunity to share some instructional how-to-save-your-friends-and-classmates-if-they-ever-get-kidnapped content with everyone at school.”

“Huh. Well, odd decision aside, at least he has some faith in our ability to actually find and save Sno—”

“He said our actions would serve as a perfect example of what not to do.”

“Seriously?! Principal Pid, you—!” I stopped myself before I could start swearing profusely at the one man with the power to make this day worse for me than it already was. “No, wait. Just be cool. Be calm.” I took some deep breaths, then continued. “The real issue here is what you were saying before. How this is being streamed to the entire school.”

“Yep. And tuning in is an extra-credit assignment open to everyone too.”

“Except you and me, I guess. The irony.”

“Actually, I’m logged in too, obviously, cause I’m the one streaming. The only one it’s closed off to is you, dude.”

“And how is that supposed to be fair?! Principal Pid, you can go—! …Phew. Cool it. Just calm down. Calm.” When I thought about it, there was no need to have an aneurysm over this. Why was that? Well: “It’s a Friday afternoon, right? How many people could really be watching? Everyone’s probably already off in weekend mode. No way they’d actually tune in, right?”

“About that, dude…”

“What? How many people are watching right now? Three? Four maybe? Eight or nine?” That was the highest I was ready to ballpark it. Sounded about right to me, day and time taken into account.

“962, dude…”

“That’s the entire student body, practically!”

“I know, dude. Isn’t it awesome? Even some of the teachers are watching. We’re like school-wide stars now, dude.”

“Yeah, maybe you are! I’m more like the school-wide laughing stock! The village idiot!” Except replace ‘village’ with something much, much worse: American public high school.

“Yeah. I feel you, dude.” Fence’s smile flipped upside down then, and he nodded along in apparent understanding of my current plight. Finally, some sympathy.

“Thanks. Does this mean we can stop streaming now?”

“Stop streaming? What, are you nuts, dude? I need that extra credit, and bad.”

Sigh. Of course, right?

To be continued!