Free A Little Friendly Advice by Siobhan Vivian

changed in a dark corner while she pushed the trundle back underneath her mattress. She wouldn’t let me sleep on it, no matter how I insisted. Instead, she scooted to the very edge of her twin bed and patted the empty space next to her until I lay back down.

Sweat sticks the stray hairs of my ponytail to the sides of my face as my ears search my bedroom for sounds. I’m wrinkled and warm, still dressed in last night’s clothes, my left arm branded with the basket-weave impression of my scarf. I tell myself it’s fine. I’m dreaming. That was absolutely not the crackle of driveway gravel.
    But that doesn’t satisfy me for more than a second or two. I have to check, to make sure.
    I roll out of bed and race to the window in one sloppy movement. I warn myself that he won’t be outside, but I still fling it open. My panting slows as I search our driveway for nonexistent tire tracks and crane my head out the window to seek imaginary red taillights.
    I shiver in the cold. I am in bad shape.
    By the time I reached Maria’s car last night, my tears had dried. With my well-rehearsed smile, no one was the wiser that I’d been straddling hysterics mere moments before. Even though I told myself not to, I turned and looked for Charlie, but saw he’d gone. I guess that’s to be expected when a strange girl cries and runs away from you when you try to kiss her.
    Bypassing friendly arguments over whose turn it was, I slid into the Period Seat, cracked the window, and concentrated on the white noise of air rushing past as Maria flirted with the speed limit. Exhaustion diluted my sadness into something I could swallow. I didn’t want to have any dreams that night. Only thick, black sleep.
    But I wasn’t that lucky.
    Now, after one last look down my quiet street, I pace the perimeter of my room and let consciousness catch up with me. I’m tired of being held hostage on trips down memory lane. It’s not like I’m willingly reflecting on my painful past, like Beth warned me against. I’m being completely hijacked. And I have no idea what to do to make it stop.
    I just want to go back to how it was before he came. When everything was so in the past that it almost could have happened to someone else.
    Part of me doesn’t want to bother Beth about how I’m feeling. I mean, this is well-worn territory between us, and I doubt she could say something comforting to me that she hasn’t already told me a million times before. The thing is, when friends ask you what’s wrong, there’s this part of them that doesn’t really want to know the answer. Especially if they’ve seen you upset before over the same thing, again and again and again.
    They’ll usually give you some kind of wisdom the first time, and repeat it four or five times more, if you’re lucky. I guess I’m mega-lucky, because I’ve heard it, on and off, for six years. But after a while, you hit a wall. If you’ve been given a strategy to deal with your problem, it’s time to deal with the problem already. If you don’t, if you avoid changing things, it kind of becomes your own fault when they don’t get better. And people will just shrug their shoulders and say patronizing things like Are you really surprised? or I told you this would happen . And then they stop feeling sorry for you.
    Last night already felt kind of weird like that between me and Beth. Like because I didn’t hook up with Teddy, it means I’m hell-bent on screwing myself over. Like because I didn’t do exactly what she wanted, I haven’t been listening to her at all.
    My cordless phone chirps alive. I follow the sound and narrow in on the stubby rubber antenna poking out from under a stack of Polaroids on my nightstand. The stack is topped by a sky-blue Post-it note.
    Put these somewhere other than my silverware drawer. And plan on dinner with me tonight.
    — Mom
    I take the photos in one hand and the phone in the other and crash back onto my bed.
    “Hello?” The smell of my own morning