This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/orangeplr on 2024-11-12 23:02:53+00:00.

Emma was an extrovert.

But she hadn’t always been one. 

I suppose it’s my fault we drifted apart, in the end. The truth was, I fell for all that bullshit: I listened to that voice, the sneering one that nipped at the back of my ears with its sharp incisors, the one that asked, why is your only friend a girl? I fell for the indoctrination every twelve year old boy does. And it wasn’t like she was a tomboy, either — she was a real, proper girl, complete with the star-and-heart shaped hair clips, sweeping blonde bangs and posters of horses and boybands all over her purple painted walls. She liked fairies, she liked unicorns. I liked her anyways. She was funny, and she always asked me questions, and she always shared. She was quiet around others, her long face always pointed down at her shoes, but she wasn’t like that with me. 

It was my fault we drifted apart. But I couldn’t stand how they looked at us, all of them, when we were playing together next to the basketball courts — I didn’t like how the girls scoffed, how the boys shouted things I couldn’t quite make out and then shoved each other, laughing uproariously… but the worst were the adults. I saw the looks they gave each other when Emma and I showed up to class side by side, secret looks, but I knew what they meant. Hope we get invited to the wedding, right?

So I stopped hanging out with Emma. I made new friends, boys who liked soccer and spitting contests, and the looks and whispers stopped. And Emma stayed alone. 

That was until high school. When we got to high school, I started to notice that Emma had changed. 

At lunch, when I went out to the front lawn with my friends to toss a frisbee back and forth like wannabe college kids, I started to see her with other people. When I passed through the halls, I saw her with boys leaning against lockers, laughing and placing her hand on their shoulders. Every day it seemed like there were more people, more friends, surrounding her like a school of fish around a shipwreck. This wouldn’t be unusual, except that Emma was always such a small, timid girl. She had been a loner since she was tiny. This was when I truly realized I didn’t know who she was anymore. I didn’t necessarily miss her anymore, it had been years since we had so much as spoken to each other, but it still gave me a strange pang in my chest to think it. 

Emma was an extrovert now, I realized. She was nice to everyone, a huge smile was always pulling at her glossy lips. Her hair was always perfect, falling in little swoops at her shoulders, she wore bright pinks and oranges and blues in the form of tight skirts and frilly blouses. She was attractive to the boys in an approachable way, but so nice to the girls that she was never considered a threat. Just a friend. 

Even from a distance, I could observe that everyone liked Emma. How could you not like Emma? 

At graduation, I looked for her. While I was accepting my fake diploma up on the stage, my friends and family cheering for me from the sea of faces, I searched the crowd for Emma. I spotted her quickly, near the back — someone was talking to her animatedly, a girl with a tight brown ponytail and braces, and she was smiling a strange smile, but she wasn’t responding. Instead, she stared straight forward. I felt my face get a little hot: was she looking at me? Should I wave or something? But when I squinted my eyes, I could tell that it wasn’t me she was looking at. 

She was looking somewhere behind me. 

After the ceremony, I looked for her again. I tried to part the mass of bodies, muttering excuse me’s and sorry’s as I went. She was surrounded by a throng of her peers, all speaking so loudly and cheerfully that I couldn’t make out anything she was saying. I got a glimpse of her face for a split second — she was smiling in that same strange way, almost sad. I finally heard her say something, her pink lips parting like they were crumpled up, as if she was crying. 

“I’m going to miss you all so, so much.” 

Then came college. Emma and I ended up at the same school, one that was far enough away from home to feel like a grown up, but not far enough to actually be one. In college, I saw her less, so I thought of her less. College was much bigger than high school, and I had much more to think about than my old childhood friend. But when I did see Emma, things seemed the same. Always surrounded by people, always smiling. 

I made new friends. I tried out for the soccer team, and I made it. My grades were okay, B to C average, and my roommate was weird, but he always left me alone. I felt content with the little life I had been building. 

That was until the party. 

It was by no means the first college party of the year, nor the craziest. I was told it would be just a couple of kids at one of the houses on campus, being rented out by seniors, but in typical college party fashion, it got out of hand pretty quickly. 

I went with a couple of my own friends, and we mostly stayed in the kitchen, crammed into the corner with mystery drinks clutched in our hands. The whole place reeked of smoke, and all the lightbulbs had been changed to colored ones, giving the house almost an eerie nightclub vibe. It wasn’t anything special, but feeling the warm buzz brought on by a mixed drink in a red plastic cup, crouched in a stranger’s kitchen with new friends, I was feeling pretty good. 

I knew when Emma got there. I could claim I sensed it, like it was some sort of psychic superpower, but I just knew by the chatter. The air suddenly felt livelier, and people funneled from the kitchen to the living room, calling out greetings. 

My friends and I used the temporary quiet in the kitchen to get ourselves fresh drinks, and then we filed out to the porch to smoke. My warm feeling only grew, and soon I was laughing so hard I felt I might piss myself, elbowing my friends in the way that’s only okay when you’re drunk. The music thumped from inside the house, muted by the sliding glass door, and I didn’t even feel the cold. 

When we finally decided to go back inside, I was surprised to find the kitchen entirely empty. I frowned, and checked my phone. It was only around midnight — why would everyone be gone? 

That was when I heard someone shout from the other room, and my friends and I eyed each other. I felt a guilty twinge at how excited the prospect of a fight breaking out made me, but I wanted stories, I wanted the college experience. 

We all rushed into the living room. And that was when I saw her. 

Emma was on the table, and everyone in the room was facing her, as if she were a caged animal in the zoo. She was on her hands and knees, but in a way that told me she’d been standing up before, clutching a clear bottle in one hand and the edge of the table with the other. I watched, horrified, as she wretched over the side, wobbling back and forth like a swaying ship. Everyone shouted in dismay and crashed backwards towards the wall, wanting to avoid the splash zone, and I was very nearly forced out of the room. 

“N-No,” she moaned, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand, the bottle clanking against her shirt buttons. “I’m sor-sorry… I’m sssso sorry…” 

Clearly she had had too much to drink, and I wondered what I had missed before we’d come in. My friends were laughing, nudging each other and me, but I didn’t join them. Emma keeled over, flopping pathetically on the table, as someone shouted “get down!”, their voice brash and cruel. Someone else laughed. Someone else started taking pictures of her.

I had never seen her like this. And I had never seen anyone be mean to Emma, not since middle school, at least. 

I like to think I saw her wet skirt before anyone else did — at least, I hope that’s true. I would hate for everyone there to remember their last time seeing her alive as her slumped over on someone’s table, pee trickling down her legs and pooling at her hip, hugging an empty bottle like a teddy bear. 

I shoved through the crowd on an instinct, ignoring my friends questioning shouts trailing after me. I reached Emma in a few seconds, gently trying to pry the bottle from her hands and pull her from the table. 

She finally acknowledged me when I scooped her up into my arms, wincing at the wetness soaking through my shirt sleeves. Her eyes fluttered open and she stared up at me, her eyes glazed over. 

“An… Andrew?” She slurred. I nodded, my face made of stone. The people all around us let out a collective oooh, and I was back in middle school, letting go of Emma’s hand, refusing to look her in the eye. 

I looked her in the eye then, though, and she smiled in that sad way that only I seemed to ever notice. Then she threw up on my shirt. 

I got her to the bathroom and I locked it behind us as thralls of people pounded against it with their fists, chanting our names. EM-MA! AN-DREW! EM-MA! AN-DREW! We’ve become the most interesting thing at the party, I thought. We’ve become the spectacle. Emma sobbed as I helped her into the bathtub, figuring it would be the easiest to clean off later.

Emma’s head fell back against the tile and she groaned. I silently slipped off my shirt and scrubbed at it in the bathroom sink, choking back my own bile as I did. I wasn’t drunk anymore, or at least, I didn’t feel it. 

“Andrew,” she whispered after a long time. I looked over at her. She had pushed her blonde hair away from her eyes, stringy with spit and vomit. She stared up at me, watery and tremblin…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gpy7vu/emma_is_an_extrovert/