Wistful (Burnin' for You)

You take a deep breath and decide, there's nothing for it, so you might as well do your best to put aside your fears, and hope for the best. This is a little easier said than done, and okay, maybe you're not feeling all that hopeful just now. But you can... at least you can sit on your own a while and wallow in some music, nothing too sad or moody probably, and figure out how to make your imminently-approaching friendship goodbyes variously less terrible or less imminent.

In your heart you know that if Scott and Dex don't reconcile, and you had to pick one, you'd pick Dex. Right? Because he's had your back for too many years and it would be wrong not to pick him if you were capable of being that disloyal.

But it does make you feel really sad to think that your friendship with Scott might not survive this. There's no reason, you know, that you can't stay friends just the two of you, no matter what's going on with Dex. But... you also know how easy it is to slip further and further away from somebody in most cases where life doesn't fold that person into your existence without a lot of extra effort from you. You've known Scott four years, but you're never going to sit in class with him again, and by fall you'll be in different towns, and little by little he'll be gone from your life. Your sweet, good-natured, boyishly good looking friend Scott will just slip quietly out of your life, if you don't do anything to stop it.

You wake up your phone. "Hey Google," you say. "Play me something off Scott's Playlist."

"Hi. Bridget. Do you want me to shuffle this playlist: Scottie Jacinto's Cool Music for Hot Babes?"

You snort, because that's Scott's idea of ironic, and you're kinda fine with that. "Yeah. Thanks Google."

It's creepy sometimes, how perfectly Google guesses your mood.

But nobody said a thing couldn't be both creepy and kinda cool. If creepy cool wasn't fun there wouldn't be a Wednesday-fucking-Addams series. So you settle into it and pick your way down the hill to the jetty, where you plant yourself at the end with your earbuds in, swinging your legs over the side, and unscrew the bottle of rum.

Isn't it rum, that famously gets served by fingers? You're not sure if that's fingers-on-the-bottle, or fingers-on-the-glass, but you figure you'll conservatively split the difference. You drink two pinky-fingers-worth of the bottle, which immediately has you almost **** on the fumes. Right. You went long enough without doing anything like this, courtesy of your last drinking experience being a total disaster, that you'd forgotten why shots are a thing. Because people want to breathe again.

By the time you're finally done coughing, you have a pleasant pre-buzz, tingling warmth in your belly while you flirt with a fun-seeming head-high. Journey is playing, which makes you laugh aloud, since you wouldn't have guessed he'd even heard of this band. It's a kind of fun surprise. You haven't listened to Scott's babe list in ages, since for a while there your mom mostly had your phone confiscated for all fun-adjacent shit.

You take another swig of the rum, and flop backward on the jetty, further into the shade that's starting to inch over you, so you can listen to Scott's music and think about how you're going to swing keeping him in your life after The End of Everything.