My mistake
The end of 9th grade left me sad. I didn’t want to leave the school that I had grown to love. Harper had become a place where I could feel safe and free to be myself. Once summer started, I felt a bit empty. Having endless days of nothing made me want something that could distract me. Luckily I can always count on my neighbors when I'm bored. I am very close to them because we basically grew up together. About 2 weeks into Summer I went over to their house and spent some time with Stev and Matteo. Matteo is in 8th grade now and Stev is in my grade and friend group. He is someone I like to consider as my best friend.
This particular night we decided to go talk on the trampoline in their backyard which happened often and I enjoy it most of the time. It's a great time to just unload all of our drama and spend some time together. The topic on this night was who Stev had a crush on. Some of my friends thought that he had a crush on me because he was being very secretive about it. When I told him about our friend's suspicions, we both laughed because we are very close but in more of a brother and sister relationship. Even though we found this idea hilarious, it led to a mutual idea of pulling a prank on everyone.
Our friend group consists of a few people that all went to Harper. We have Chuck, who usually doesn’t get involved in drama, Dorian who is pretty nosy, and Merf who just likes to know what is going on in everyone's lives. And then of course we have Stev and I.
Our plan was to convince everyone that Stev had a crush on me and I had no idea. We didn’t really know how long we would go with this prank because we have done similar things in the past with other friends as well. One reason that we thought this would be a good idea was that Dorian always wants to know everyone's business. We were hoping that after this, she wouldn’t be invested in everyone's drama anymore. We also thought it would just be a fun summer activity for me and him. We were pretty bored and didn’t think it would affect people too much.
First thing we had to do was tell everyone in our friend group. Over the course of 3 weeks, we were able to convince our friends Chuck, Dorian, Merf, Katarina, and Montana that Stev liked me and I had no idea about it. It took a lot of back and forth conversations and late night phone calls to make them believe it.
The next step was to have Stev tell me that he liked me to start the end of this entire thing. He told me that he liked me over text. We got the news spread out to everyone else so that way they were all informed that I was aware that Stev liked me now. We had everyone believe that I was not talking to him because things would be too awkward. We were planning on ending the whole thing after a week of me avoiding him.
Before the weekend though,Merf’s birthday came up. We are all very good friends and we had to hang out. So the night before we all went over to her house to celebrate, none of us knew that Dorian was actually going to show up because none of us had heard from her in a week, but she came. She had started to avoid talking to most of the friend group the week before Merfs birthday and no one knew why. When we asked her, she told us that she was stressed about all of the drama going on in our friend group. This made me feel very bad about the prank and I ended up having a panic attack in Merf’s bedroom. This is when I realized that the prank was actually affecting people. I thought that it was all fun in games, but now I knew it was upsetting my friend. I considered telling them right then and there but we were gonna tell them that Saturday anyway so I figured I should just wait.
After I had one of the greatest nights of my life with all of my friends I had to tell them that I had been pranking them for a month and a half. Until a few days prior, I didn’t think anyone would be too upset. I thought they would be annoyed but then be fine with it but now I wasn’t so sure. I was terrified at how they would react and I honestly didn’t know how to prepare myself for what was to come.
Stev and I were going to call each of them individually to tell them that everything was a prank. We started by telling Dorian. We texted her and told her that it was a prank. She had read it but didn’t respond for a while. I was panicking about it so we called her to see how she was feeling about everything. When we called her, she sounded very sad. She hung up fairly quickly and that was the last I would be hearing from her for a while. This is when I knew I messed up.
Next we called Merf. Originally when we called her and told her everything, she seemed fine with everything. She jokingly said, “I hate you guys” while laughing. This made me feel better because at least Merf was okay with everything. I called Chuck next. She was fine with everything but also a bit disappointed in Stev and I because of our poor choices. She suggested that I send an apology text to Dorian. Chuck is a very wise person so I listened to her and sent a large text to Dorian that was really never responded to.
Later that night, I got a call from Merf. When I answered, her normally energetic voice had turned into a sad gloomy one. I knew that this conversation was going to be a hard one. She told me that she had felt betrayed and hurt and that she didn’t think she would ever be able to trust me again. At this point I really didn’t know what I could do. I couldn’t take back what I did and no apology was going to make Dorian and Merf forgive me. I felt stuck, there was no way to get out. This was probably the worst feeling I have ever experienced. Guilt is such a strong emotion that completely attacks my thoughts and feelings. It puts a pause on my life because of how much energy it sucks from me mentally. My mom says that I am very empathetic. She thinks that this is a good thing, but I see it as a curse. I feel guilt worse than everyone around me and I hate it. It makes me hate myself. It causes me so much pain and self doubt. Sometimes I wish I didn’t care so much. Then I wouldn’t feel bad about asking my mom for a ride to a friend's house or spend hours crying about telling someone a secret they weren't supposed to know. It’s the world's most powerful yet damaging feeling. Knowing that your friends hate you and will never trust you again is hard, but knowing that it is all your fault feels impossible.
This started the hardest few weeks of my life. The day was spent pretending that I was okay with everything and that I wasn’t upset while the nights were spent crying hours without end. My friends mean absolutely everything to me. The feeling of not knowing if they would ever speak to me again left me drowning. And every time I started to have fun or laugh again, it felt like something was pulling at me, screaming that I didn’t deserve it. I felt like I deserved to feel sad and that I shouldn’t be allowed to have fun. I hurt people. How could I just go on with my life knowing that?
Before we told everyone that we were pranking them, Dorian, Merf, Chuck and I were originally planning on going to Tahoe together. After Merf and Dorian stopped talking to me, I told Chuck that they should go without me. She instantly said no and that they wouldn’t want to go without me. She reassured me that we would all go together when everything blew over and that she wouldn’t allow them to go without me. Even though I told her that they should go without me, this made me feel relieved. If they went to Tahoe without me, I would honestly have honestly felt dejected. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. When I was on my phone I decided to check my Life 360 that all my friends were on, and I noticed that Chuck, Merf, and Dorian were all in a car going towards Nevada. I felt like an ant being stomped on by a toddler, helpless and sad. Before I found out, I was barely holding on. I was dangling from a bridge over the ocean. Trying to find the good in everything. But once I figured out what was going on, I fell. I was consumed by the massive ocean, struggling to get help. There was no way out.
I have always said that I use social media and things like that in a healthy way and it doesn’t affect my mental health whatsoever. And this was true before I saw pictures of my closest friends smiling and laughing on a trip that I was supposed to go on, without me. It became my obsession. Day after day I would go onto Life 360 to see when they were hanging out without me. I would scour my friends' Instagram and TikTok to see what was going on in their lives. It was an endless pit that I threw myself into. But I couldn’t help it. I needed to feel guilty. I wanted to feel the pain of being left out because that is what I honestly believed I deserved.
I look back and think about how my friends probably wanted me to feel this way too. They didn’t bother turning off their location when hanging out and had no need to post about them hanging out without me when they knew I was supposed to be there and would see all of these things. The thing is, my friends aren’t malicious. They don’t typically try to hurt people, but this felt very targeted. I feel bad about the way I thought of myself during this time. I know I hurt my friends, and I was very sorry about that, but I had no bad intentions throughout the whole thing and shouldn’t have felt as bad as I did during the time. It truly ruined the end of my summer when I could have enjoyed it a lot more if I just thought about this then. But all I could think about was how badly I messed up and how I couldn’t fix any of it.
Now came the final week of summer, I knew I had to do something in order to get things back to normal before the school year started. I decided to text Merf, Dorian, and Chuck to ask if they wanted to meet up and talk about the whole situation the weekend before school started. I got no answer at first which felt like a thousand knives stabbing me in the back at once. It was very difficult for me to build up the courage to text them since they were just ignoring me. Eventually, Merf and Chuck agreed to meet up. I still had heard nothing from Dorian, but I was just relieved that Merf was talking to me again.
On the next Saturday, Merf, Chuck, and Stev all came over to my house and it was really awkward. No one really knew what to say and we were kinda divided into two groups. We played a few games and talked about music and other topics as well, but the prank was never brought up. I knew I had to pull Merf to the side at some point. We needed to have a talk about what happened and what we could do moving forwards and this talk actually went pretty well. She told me she just wanted to move past everything and go back to how everything was before. This was the relief I needed. That is until I remembered there was still a massive bump in the road that I had to go over before everything was okay again. Dorian still hated me and we have 2 classes together this year. What was I going to do?
It then came time for Sophomore Orientation. Stev and I were planning on going together and I was shaking the whole ride. I couldn't control my hands and feet. They couldn’t stop tapping and tapping and tapping. We made it to school and the tapping continued. Eventually we were seated and things were about to start. Then Dorian arrived. She sat right in front of me and our other friends. I haven't seen her in weeks and I didn’t say anything until she turned and told me she wanted to talk after orientation was over. I said yes in a happy and surprised voice. Stev gave me a big smile and a thumbs up when she turned back around. He knew how nervous I was about talking to Dorian again, but her wanting to talk was a big shock for me. She went from completely ignoring me to asking me to talk. I was terrified the whole time until she eventually just said that she wanted to put things behind her and that was that. At the time I was super happy about this. Things were finally back to normal but now I’m not so sure.
I heard that Dorian was talking behind my back about this to a lot of different people. She was telling them that I’m toxic and kind of just gossiping and at this point I honestly don’t know what to think. She told me she was okay with everything. Is she just faking so things won’t be awkward between us in our friend group? I wasn’t sure. But I do know that after this whole event I lost a lot of people's trust and they have lost mine. I didn’t completely understand why they were reacting so strongly to us pranking them, but now I feel like I can never mess up again or else they will all just abandon me again. So now I will definitely be taking a break from pranks for a while and will try to rebuild the trust between the people in my life that I consider to be my friends.
The Aftermath
It’s now been over a month since I started talking to Dorian again. I have had a lot of time to reflect on things and I’ve had a chance to fully talk to Dorian expressing both sides of the story. We both apologized and it was the closure I finally needed in order to move past everything. Things are good now; I now realize that she never tried to gossip behind my back or anything like that and she was simply asking for advice. We both did things we regret and now that the whole puzzle has been put together. My life finally feels like it's back to normal. My friends are normal, my family and school is normal, and everything is how it should be. As difficult as this experience was for me to handle at the time, I’m not mad that it happened. I learned a lot about myself and my friends. Everything that happened can only help me be a better person moving forward. I’m glad that I still have Dorian in my life because she is truly an amazing person whom I admire greatly. I don’t know where I would be without her.
