Vapid place, vapid people, vapid lives

After a predictably tedious first half to the day, the period that I used to hate above all others rolled around: lunch.

I say ‘used to’ because I had found a degree of comfort recently that I had never really had with lunch before. Since those first couple of times right after she transferred in, Sai and I had been eating lunch together in the abandoned closet room every day without fail. Most days conversation was scarce, and sometimes not a word was spoken at all, but I had come to find that the comfort of silence even extended to shared silence with others, so long as the company was good. And argue though we might, Sai was comfortable company. Most of the time.

“Ahh… what a pain…” I muttered to myself under my breath. This bastard situation was a double pronged sword. Either Sai had seen that the clip was posted and gained attention already, and that knowledge was gonna stay hanging between us the entire time, or only I knew and by not telling her I would be intentionally keeping her in the dark about something she had every right to know about. Neither one made me feel particularly good.

Which really just left one choice. I was gonna have to bring it up. Which also meant that someone who should be involved was gonna end up left out again.

“Sorry Pep…”

“Sorry for what?”

“Eh?” Looking up from the ground, I realised the person in question was standing by my desk, hands behind her back and a suspicious look on her face. “Pep… rare for you to come over this way during lunch.”

“I noticed you looked even more gloomy and sulky than usual, so I decided to magnuminously grace you with my presence.”

“Magnanimously.”

“That’s what I said. Anyway, why are you muttering apologies to me under your breath? You only get all muttery and cryptic when there’s something wrong with you. Or, more wrong than usual.” She hesitated instead of speaking again, glancing around the room to see if anyone was watching, before silently signing “is it about the clip?”

“Kind of,” I responded, keeping my own signs minimal to not draw attention. “Just thinking about how Sai’s gonna react.”

“Well at least we don’t have to worry about that right this second, we still have a few more lessons before club time.”

“Actually I’m gonna be seeing her just now. That’s why I’m dreading it.”

At that, Pep stopped dead. Her expression was a complicated mix of emotions, notably confusion.

“You’re about to go see Sai-chan?”

“Well yeah, I see her every day at about this time.” Apparently that was the wrong answer, cos Pep’s expression completely deflated.

“You and Sai-chan eat lunch together…”

“By happenstance. We both happened to pick the same place to eat on her first few days here, and from that point on we just both kept eating there. It was less like we chose to eat together and more like we just didn’t choose not to.”

“Ever since she transferred in… you never brought it up. Or invited me along.”

“You’re always with Bitchqueen and your other friends at lunch, I figured there was no point. You spend club time with us every day, I just assumed you’d wanna keep lunch for them.”

“I guess that is the way you’d see it.” She muttered under her breath, I didn’t exactly catch what she said.

“Pep?”

“Sorry, nevermind, I was just being silly,” she said, returning to a smile. “Say hi to Sai-chan for me!”

Before I could even respond, she turned away and skipped back to her friends. I took that as my cue to leave, though the guilt that was already building in my stomach certainly was not helped.

I slipped out the door of the classroom and made my way down the ever decrepit halls of the back end of the school, the smell of marijuana and disappointment reaching my nose. The graffiti had somehow gotten worse over the past few weeks, and I had gone from seeing just one or two members of staff in this area to none whatsoever. It well and truly seemed like they had given up entirely. The state of the place was just depressing, it seemed to get worse every time I saw it.

Still, I had somewhere to be. No point standing around taking in the sights of this shitpit.

I put my head down, hoping not to catch the attention of any of the delinquent kids roaming the halls, and made my way towards the abandoned closet room. I briefly considered whether my upcoming conversation with Sai was likely to be more uncomfortable than being harassed by miscreants, but at the very least Sai wouldn’t try to rob me or sell me ket, so on that front at least she was the better choice.

Thankfully all the junkie kids around were too busy shooting up or crashing out to pay me any attention, and before long I was at the door. For the first time since this little tradition started, I actually felt nervous turning the handle.

Of course, when I opened the door, it was clear I was the only one who felt that way. There she was, sat eating her lunch as calm and content as can be, just as she always was. For a moment I almost felt stupid for feeling worried, even though I knew I had yet to actually face the problem.

“Are… you planning to take a seat any time soon?” she said, cocking her head slightly as I stood stock still in the door. Realising I probably looked like a bit of a pillock, I wordlessly stepped in, closed the door and took my usual seat. “You’re late. What kept you?”

“Pep stopped me for a moment to talk about something.”

“Judging by the look on your face, I don’t imagine it was a pleasant topic of conversation?”

“Well the conversation was about you. I’ll let you be the judge of how unpleasant that is.”

Sai momentarily stopped eating and furrowed her brow at me, as if trying to decipher whether I was joking or not. Seemingly judging that I was being genuine, she turned her gaze back to her food and spoke again between mouthfuls.

“Might I ask what conversation centred around me could leave you with such a foul expression?”

“That’s…” I hesitated, but I knew I couldn’t beat around the bush. I had to get to the heart of the matter. “...you don’t use social media at all, do you?”

“Of course not. A vapid place for vapid people to flaunt their vapid lives. I imagine you have just as little interest in it as myself, no?”

“Well, you’re not wrong there, I don’t use it myself, but Yaki does. Yesterday she happened upon a clip that showed Pep’s face, and after watching it I realised it was of our conversation over yesterday’s chess match.”

She noticeably stiffened, seemingly out of both concern and confusion.

“How can that be? Only you and I were in the room and we certainly weren’t… recording…” as the realisation set in, she let out an exasperated sigh. “...Peppi’s stream.”

“...yeah. Y’know how she was acting all cagey when she got back to the computer? Turns out she had forgotten to turn her stream off.”

“...how many have seen this clip?”

“When last I checked, a few thousand, but it was still rising. Could honestly be ten thousand by the end of the day.”

“Ten thou- lord above…” she put her hand to her forehead, though I was unsure if it was stress or exasperation I saw on her face.

That reaction told me what I had already suspected: Sai shared my discomfort in a private conversation being seen by the public. Especially by such a large and growing number. Even if the details of the conversation weren’t necessarily secretive, to have interlopers eavesdrop on a personal dialogue like that was an invasion of privacy no matter which way you spin it.

“Don’t be too harsh on Pep for it, alright? She’s new to all this, she made an easy mistake at an emotionally draining moment and it spiralled out of her control,” I said, hoping to ease some of the tension

“Worry not, I hold no scorn for Peppi over this incident. An honest mistake, one that anyone could make. It’s those who openly share and spread other people’s private moments who catch my ire.”

“Yeah, we’re pretty much on the same page there.” Even if it could be argued that the clip was fair game since the stream was public, it should have been pretty clear to anyone who joined that it wasn’t intended to be. Whoever recorded and posted the clip was the reason we were in this whole mess. “Still, the blame game doesn’t matter as much as choosing our next steps.”

“Next steps? To what do you refer?”

“Well, the clip links back to Pep’s twitch channel. If she streams again, all the attention from the clip is gonna come to her, which is inevitably gonna mean people demanding to hear from us too.”

“Oh, seven hells…” at this point she had stopped eating entirely simply continuing to grow more and more exasperated. “So our options are… what, exactly? Expose ourselves to the public despite our own shared misgivings, or force Peppi to face the rabid cruelty of internet users on her own?”

“That’s… about the half of it, yeah.”

“Christ almighty…” she seemed to sit in contemplation for a second, staring out into space silently, an intense look on her face. After a deafeningly quiet few seconds, she sighed and spoke again. “I suppose there’s hardly a point discussing this without the person in question present, is there?”

“Agreed, we’ll have to talk about it later in club. Honestly, I was originally planning to wait until then to tell you anyway, but it didn’t feel right hiding it from you.”

“Certainly, I would rather know than not, so on that front I thank you. Still, I cannot say this conversation had helped my appetite.”

“You and me both, sister.” 

The rest of lunch break that day passed in heavy silence.