The After Girls by Leah Konen Read Free Book Online Page A

uhh,
rightfully
pissed at us,” he said, “could you please make your point with a chocolate shake?”
    She heard Sydney laugh, and she couldn’t help it. She did, too.
    And for a moment — a small one — the world felt okay again.
    • • •
    Ella couldn’t sleep that night. She kept waking, wide-eyed, dreams too fuzzy to remember, but with dark colors, tones that meant they’d been bad. On the third or fourth time, she sat up and pulled her computer onto her lap. She couldn’t imagine going back to sleep but reading felt impossible, like the words would blur together if she even tried to look at a page, so she opened the screen, and on impulse, logged onto Facebook. She hadn’t been on since Astrid died — seeing a public reaction to everything had felt like way too much. But now she didn’t care — she knew that Astrid would be there, words and pictures on a screen. In a pixel world, in the cloud and the data centers far away, it was almost like she was still alive.
    Nothing much was new. Her music-obsessed friends were posting links to YouTube videos and reviews, a lonely girl from her English class had put up a sad quote about finding romance at the right time, and it looked like it was the official day for posting your doppelganger. Ella might have done it herself a few weeks ago — everyone said she looked just like the brown-haired girl from that TV show that she didn’t really watch — but it all felt so pointless now. How could she really have spent hours on this site before? It was meaningless. It wasn’t even real. Just a bunch of people trying to make other people think that they were a certain way. If she’d learned anything lately it was that you couldn’t really know people from the outside — and especially not from the Internet.
    Ella went to her own profile. Her wall was filled with messages, but her eyes froze on the side of her screen. There she was, like an apparition. The first face in the list of all of her friends. Smiling back at her like nothing in the world was wrong. Like she still
existed
.
    Astrid.
    Ella couldn’t help it — she clicked. She was instantly taken to her profile. Her friends, her activities, her high school, her hometown, listed out as if she were still around. As if she might respond if you sent her a message or invited her to your birthday party.
    Ella took a deep breath as she took in the pseudo-memorial — posted photos, goodbye notes, declarations that she was in a happier place. All of a sudden it didn’t seem right. Astrid wasn’t around anymore. You couldn’t touch her. You couldn’t hug her. You couldn’t make her any better. It wasn’t fair.
    “Write something …” it said at the top of her screen. Calling her. Asking her to join in, too. Even if she wanted to, what would she say?
    How could you?
    Where did you go?
    Was it my fault?
    Should I have seen it coming?
    Why the hell did you do it right now? Couldn’t you have waited until we’d grown up and grown apart and gotten married and then maybe I wouldn’t miss you as much as I do?
    Ella clicked on the box, and the cursor blinked at her, begging for her to say something to her best friend in the world. Her best friend who wasn’t in the world anymore.
    She laid her fingers on the keys, and she started to type — slowly, but surely.
    All I want to know is why.
    She held her finger above the button, waiting to click post. This was what she really felt, what she wanted to say to Astrid, not that she missed her, not that she loved her, even though those things were true, truer now maybe than ever before.
    But she couldn’t do it. Slowly, she deleted the letters, one by one, and the box was empty again. Waiting.
    I miss you.
    And she hit enter and flipped the computer shut, flopping back onto the bed and rolling over before she could say anything more.
    • • •
    When Ella got to the café the next morning, Becky was already there, leaning against the counter and looking