Surely, she was just busy with real life stuff. IRL over RP was the mantra of our people, and one I ascribed to religiously like any polite person. That was what I told myself for a while, but once a week passed, I grew a terrible hole of despair within my stomach, heart. hell, any essential organ that could bring me pain now.
I hadn’t been on talking terms with dropsgum for long, nor had I paid much attention to her considering the size of the Group we shared before we properly met, but we were mutually aware of each other’s existence enough to know basic information. For one, I saw her as one of the most active chatters in the out-of-character channels of any RP we shared. She never went a day without saying something, whether it was posting about her character, gushing over someone else’s, or sharing some meme from her social media feeds.
This must’ve meant something bad—but what?
“Stop pushing your dinner around, or it’s going to get cold,” my mother snapped at me when I pushed my chunk of salmon around for the hundredth time. Maybe the thousandth. Or ten thousand, while we’re at it. The salmon was currently at war with the Mexican rice that occupied the other half of my plate, in all its bright orange goodness. The army versus the giant: who will win?
Ugh, I know what will. The dread that overpowered my desire to eat.
“Not hungry?” my father said, with eyes that angled towards my dish. Out of spite, I spooned some of the rice and fish in my mouth and he frowned.
“Mhpf, mhf!”
“Hey, no talking with food in your mouth!” My mother glared at me.
“Shorry.”
It wasn’t until the beginning of April that I received a sign of life. I peeked on my phone during a free class day in Art (luckily the teacher didn’t care enough about art to monitor what we did during his secret nap times) to see that dropsgum was online. She hadn’t replied to me, but I was afraid to wait, and sent her a quick message.
TowersFall: you good
TowersFall: srry too blunt
TowersFall: hope ur okay
Hope you’re okay? Hope you’re okay? Couldn’t I think of anything less stupid? I hit my head against the table—bad idea, since it not only attracted concerned looks from classmates who already thought I was an anti-social loner, but also gave me a headache.
A few seconds later, she began to type. I threw my head up and waited with rapt attention.
dropsgum: Guess so!
dropsgum: Sorry for the silence, I got trapped on this big family vacation
dropsgum: We were overseas and my phone has weird issues w wifi + no international data plaaaan ( ╥ω╥ )
bI’m really really sorry for dropping off like that when we were so hype abt our ideas!! I swear i would’ve said smth if i’d known
TowersFall: im just happy youre fine
TowersFall: so it was just a vacation?
dropsgum: Yup! haha
dropsgum: Anyways u busy? I need a favor
dropsgum: I wanna vc right now
Wait—Voice call? Hearing her voice? Right now? I’ve joined my fair share of voice calls myself when I was sure my parents were asleep, but I’d never seen her on any of them. I’ve been curious since we’ve been talking more, but…
TowersFall: huh?
TowersFall: uh
I raised my hand. A futile effort, considering the old man that was our teacher was out cold in his chair. I instead got out of my seat and snatched the bathroom pass off of his desk before heading towards the door.
TowersFall: yeah im free
TowersFall: did something bad happen?
dropsgum: Uhhhh no??? I just finally got a new mic and i really really REALLY wanna test it!! And since youre like at the top of my dms these days might as well lmao
TowersFall: sure sure
TowersFall: be warned im on my phone rn and the mic is kinda scuffed so
dropsgum: Ooooh, didn’t catch you at a bad time did i?
TowersFall: its fine really
TowersFall: im literally doing jack and shit
TowersFall: so jack shit that theyre both drunk and watching bad romance movies. jack is contemplating his recent divorce through the haze of avoidance
dropsgum: Looooool („ಡωಡ„)
dropsgum: Alright just give me a minute!
I found a private place to sit—a bench by a small garden at the back of my school. Since it was dead in the middle of class time, not a soul was about, and I wanted to keep it that way. If a teacher walked in on me, though, I was sure I could BS an excuse about taking an important family call. Just in case, I kept the volume low.
All I could do was wait. After a couple minutes, a call notification hit my screen—in seconds I hit the green button and pressed my phone to my ear.
Silence.
Did I have to break the ice first?
“…’Ello?” I said. Shit, I swore I could hear a crack.
“Uhm…HI!” she said, and whatever crack I might’ve had was much better than the piercing shriek at the end of her words.
If anything, she spoke the way I imagined she would. High-pitched, if almost unnaturally so. I know it’s a trend for girls to pitch their voices up, but that applies to private calls too!?
“You don’t have to blow my ears out,” I grumbled.
“Sorry! Sorry, I think I leaned in too close to my mic—sorry again."
“And you don’t need to apologize so much either! Geez, now I feel like the bad guy.”
“Wellllll, maybe you are!”
“What’d I do wrong!?”
“Aw, I’m just messing with you,” she said and laughed. It sounded a little…off, but I didn’t want to bring that up. I’m not here to judge her voice, especially when she’d gone through all these lengths to talk to me, not to mention how this must be new territory for her. Even someone as stuck-up as me could be considerate. Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t even pin it down myself what bothered me.
“I know,” I said. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
She didn’t reply for a while, long enough for me to worry that I’d offended her, until an odd, garbled sound came through her microphone.
“You good?”
“Yes! Yes, I am, it’s just…it’s nice to meet you too.”
I couldn’t help the blossoming feelings of joy in my chest. I was surely smiling on instinct—it may be cheesy to say this about a girl I’ve only been talking to for a bit, but who wouldn’t smile when talking to someone as cheerful as her?
“Anyways,” she continued, “I was thinking it’d be fun to VC more often now that I have this new mic! It might make planning easier for our new RP—“
“Sounds great! I—“
“Especially since I posted the site last night to—oh, sorry, I cut you off!”
My heart felt as though it stopped.
“You…what did you post?” I said.
“Yeah! I looked at the document you sent, did some edits and additions, and started sending it around! I figured we could advertise and start getting some feedback early before we open applications.”
“But—that wasn’t done!” I yelled. I noticed a teacher coming around the back of a building, and scampered to hide behind a tree before she could see me. Though my voice may be lowered to a whisper with her around, I refused to let my anger be snuffed so easily!
“What kind of additions?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was a big deal…I thought the ‘involvement of the nations’ idea you had might’ve cluttered things, so I decided that the goddess could be testing them and we can have the world’s treatment towards Fleshlings as a backdrop! I mean, like, it just sounds cooler.”
“What!? But that’s the most interesting part about our world! How could it just be a backdrop?”
“I thought cool stuff like gods and goddesses were more interesting!”
“That doesn’t give you the right to change things around as you’d like! This is our RP!”
“It’s not like that means we get to go with all your ideas just because I made a little mistake and rushed ahead!”
“I wasn’t saying that! All I want is for you to delete what you sent around so we can rework this!”
“But!…But, I worked really hard on it…”
I clenched my jaw. “We made it together. We were gonna run this RP together too, but if you want to go ahead and do your own thing, then do it. Just leave me out of it.”
In a fit of anger, I pulled my phone away and pressed the end call button. I saw I had a notification already from her DMs, but I refused to even look at them as I shoved my phone into my pocket.
Class was almost over anyways—I didn’t want to get in trouble too.
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