Last summer, my wife and I met up with some friends at a new restaurant before a comedy show. We had a good time, however the service was awful. By the time we actually got service, our time had slipped by so we paid our bill almost as soon as we placed the order.
But it took forever for the food to come. My order never even made it to the kitchen, something we didn’t notice until all the food came out. We ended up waiting forever to get my food cooked and packaged to go.
Eating a steak in a minivan with plastic silverware isn’t the best.
When we paid the bill, we didn’t have confidence that splitting it would happen very quickly, so one friend offered to pay it and then we could all send him money.
While we didn’t have friend group drama, the entire night sparked the idea for this story. I completely trusted my friends, but what if you couldn’t trust them?
A Short Story of Friend Group Drama by Jarrett S. Smith
I’m so sorry about your dinner experience the other night. That is not the excellence we strive for. To make up for our bad service, we will comp the entrée items listed. Thank you, and please give us another shot to do better.
Shelby’s eye bugged out at her phone, and she stomped her feet with joy as she read the email. “Oh my god, I got a response,” she squealed.
“What?” Leigh asked.
“Hold on, I’ll tell the group,” Shelby said as her fingers started to dance across the glass screen. Then she looked up at Leigh and waited for her to read.
When I didn’t hear back from the restaurant, I emailed again. This time with more gusto.
Robert replied with a laughing face emoji. Then added You went full Karen and got a response?
LOL Shelby sent. Then she added a GIF of a woman yelling, labeled A Wild Karen, to the chat. Leigh laughed and bumped Shelby’s arm. The two shared a look which made them both cackle.
What do you think they meant by entrées? It was really only Robert’s food that didn’t come back, but they said entrée items, plural. Carlos asked.
IDK. We’ll have to see what money they send back. Shelby sent.
I’ll keep an eye on it. Once it hits my credit card, I’ll let you guys know. Carlos sent back.
“I guess it’s better that Carlos picked up the bill. I bet if we had all paid with our own cards, we might only get one meal taken care of,” Shelby thought out loud. “Although, I regret paying when we did. We should have waited until we at least got our food.”
“Yeah, but we would have been waiting forever. Robert had to get his packaged to-go. We barely made it to the show as it was, and we paid before any of the food came out,” Leigh said.
Leigh’s eyes glanced to the ceiling as she thought back to the night before. Things were a little hazy from the drinks that had arrived to the table on time, but the chaotic dinner seemed clear in her mind.
“True,” Shelby continued. “But I knew things were going to take a long time before we even sat.”
Leigh put her finger to her chin and looked upward as she regarded Shelby’s thought. “Yeah, you’re right, the service was terrible. I shouldn’t have expected it to get any better.”
“That’s what I’m saying! Plus, I didn’t want to send all the money to Carlos. I love him, but he’s got money issues.”
Leigh jolted up straight and her smile vanished. Many of their friends had mentioned how bad Carlos was with money. He spent so much on things he didn’t need and complained about being in debt all the time.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Leigh said, with Shelby’s words rattling around in her head. She started to imagine what Carlos would do with the money. “Do you think he’ll send the money to Robert, or will he send some to all of us?”
“I mean, I know he will eventually send the money. But how soon? I don’t know. I feel icky even saying anything about it—I just…” she trailed off.
Leigh couldn’t remember any time Carlos had paid collectively for them. It felt like he never volunteered for that before. In fact, he sometimes admitted that he didn’t want to be in that position. Leigh sucked her lips in and bit down on them.
“What do we do?” She asked Shelby.
Shelby shook her head. “I don’t know. We can’t say anything. Can we? I mean, he would get offended.”
The last time anyone had questioned Carlos, his temper took over. Leigh had never seen him like that, it was as if he had turned into a rage monster. He had screamed before punching his hand through a wall.
She put her hands to her stomach. She felt doubt and fear swirling inside her, that mixed with guilt made her stomach feel like a bomb that could explode at any minute.
“Maybe Jalisa could ask? She doesn’t care about speaking her mind,” Shelby said.
Leigh felt a bit of tension float away as she laughed. “I wonder if we’ll even have to wait. I bet she says something—“
Both their phones beeped. How are we gonna know you’re not going to keep some of it? Jalisa sent.
Shelby and Leigh’s eyes widened. Shelby’s hand covered her mouth. They shared a look and both started to cackle.
“I can’t believe she said it. Well, I can, but you know. Still…” Leigh said between laughs.
“Can always count on her to say the uncomfortable thing,” Shelby said.
“But she’s saying what you were thinking,” Leigh said. While she didn’t want to descend into paranoid territory, the fact that both of her friends from the group thought Carlos might skim some money felt troubling. But it also reaffirmed her doubt.
Leigh’s stomach felt like it would explode at any moment. She bolted upright. “I don’t like this,” she stated.
Shelby cocked her head to the side. Then she sighed and looked away. “Me either! I wish we weren’t in this position.”
Carlos replied with a shocked face. Leigh watched the typing indicator bubbles pop up, but after a moment, they receded. Then the process repeated. Leigh had a feeling Carlos had wanted to rebuke the claim, but managed to pull back before hitting send.
Leigh forced a smile. She would have been fine with just getting money back if Shelby hadn’t said anything. She wouldn’t be questioning any of her friends. Now, she couldn’t even look at her roommate. When she did, her stomach tightened, making her want to vomit.
“You think that was Carlos?” Shelby asked, glued to her phone.
Leigh bit her bottom lip and shrugged. Suddenly, she wanted nothing to do with any of her friends. If all her friends talked about Carlos like that, she feared what they said about her when she wasn’t around. It made her eyes feel watery.
“You okay?” Shelby asked.
Leigh couldn’t respond. She could barely breathe as she spiraled at every thought of every one of her flaws. She glanced at her phone and thought about everything the group might be saying about her.
Leigh felt Shelby’s judgmental eyes on her, and she knew she needed to respond or make things worse. “I just don’t like this situation. I wish we hadn’t let Carlos pay for everything, but I don’t like questioning him either. He’s our friend.”
Shelby shifted her eyebrows down toward her nose, the way she did when she contemplated things. “I mean, he’s not my friend. How did he even join our group anyway?”
Leigh cocked her head to the side, trying to pull from her memories. She smiled as she remembered meeting Shelby and Jalisa in high school. How they had spent so much time together on the way to games. How they had brought in a few more friends, but remained close all this time.
The group had evolved. It had been almost twenty years since high school and they had remained close.
Life had moved on, Jalisa had kids now. Leigh had been engaged at one point. When things ended, it had been her friends who supported her through it all.
The one constant had been their connections—or so Leigh thought.
“Didn’t Carlos date Louise?” Leigh asked. Her eyes went to the ceiling as she tried to dig through her memories.
Shelby’s eyes brightened. “Oh yeah. Didn’t she marry some girl?”
Leigh smiled. For a moment, all the tension in her stomach vanished. “I think you’re right.”
She unlocked her phone and started searching. As each picture passed, Leigh saw the same happy pose from a woman she’d known since high school and had fallen out of contact with. The bright brown eyes and ivory white smile remained the same, even though her hair and the setting changed constantly.
Louise posed alone in most of the pictures, but in a few, a blonde woman with tattoos and a nose ring would wrap her arms around her old friend. Louise looked happier than ever.
Leigh felt herself transported back in time, to when she and Louise sat together on the school bus on the way to a volleyball game. They shared laughs, arms locked in friendship. She had thought they would be friends forever. Louise had worried senior year that they might drift apart when they went away to college. Leigh had reassured her that good friends never really drift apart.
But they had.
It had stung when Leigh found out about that part of Louise’s life, and she hadn’t known a thing about it. They had been so close throughout high school, and she had never once mentioned anything about liking other girls.
Louise had drifted away from all of them after she and Carlos broke up. The group hadn’t meant to adopt Carlos and lose her, but that’s what happened. Leigh had let her friend drift away.
Her legs felt weak. She felt grateful to already be sitting, as she might have collapsed under the weight of failure. Now, her group was splintering and she didn’t know what to do.
The knot in her stomach twisted into something new. Guilt mixed in with the anxiety. Leigh hadn’t stayed true to her word. They had drifted apart, and she had allowed it. Allowed it enough that her friend hadn’t confided things about her life. She didn’t like it and she wanted to repair it. She opened up the chat to send her a message when her phone buzzed with a new message.
Wow Carlos finally replied. Leigh could imagine his flabbergasted expression. She could visualize his wrinkled brow as the verbal blow struck. She could also see Jalisa’s shoulder shrug and indifference.
Shelby made a sound somewhere between a grumble and righteousness. Her eyes focused on her phone screen as if held in place by magnets.
Leigh hovered her fingers above the keyboard, trying to find the right thing to say to appease everyone and calm the situation down, but nothing came. Her stomach gurgled.
Things had spun so far out of control. They had all had such a lovely time at dinner and the show, and now, she didn’t know if they would still be friends.
Her phone buzzed again. If she didn’t read the messages, her friend group would remain intact in her mind. Yet, she couldn’t resist knowing what was happening.
She took a deep breath to prepare herself for whatever attack was coming. Upon checking, though, she realized it hadn’t buzzed with a new message. Instead, she saw a notification from her money app. Carlos sent her eighteen dollars and seventy-four cents.
Her thumbs sprinted around the screen. She checked the money app, then returned to her messages.
“Oh wow,” Shelby whispered. “Did Carlos send you—?”
Leigh nodded. Inside the group, Carlos had sent a screenshot of his bank statement. It showed the restaurant and the refund amount. The second screenshot showed a spreadsheet with a breakdown of every item ordered at dinner, who ordered it, and the price. He had gone back in and adjusted it for the refund he received.
“You got yours?” Leigh asked. Shelby nodded.
Leigh rolled her tongue over the front of her teeth. While she felt she should be grateful that everyone got their share of the money back, she couldn’t just erase the last few moments.
She typed away at a message for the group. Thank you, Carlos. Sorry for the doubt, but money is the root of all…
Don’t mention it. Love you guys. He responded. Even you, Jalisa 😂.
Leigh burst out laughing. She and Shelby shared a look and laughed some more.
“Should we go get lunch now?” Shelby asked.
“Yeah,” Leigh said, but she didn’t move. The tension in her core mostly subsided. However, a dull pain remained, nagging at her for something forgotten. She shook her head and tried to convince herself that it was just a lingering feeling from the near destruction of her friend group.
She swiped away the message app and noticed Louise still smiling at her from her feed.
After all the drama, she knew she couldn’t just leave things with her old friend the way they were.
“I just need to make a call first,” Leigh said as she placed the call.
A soft voice answered after a few rings. “Leigh?”
“Louise?” Leigh said with a held breath. “I haven’t heard from you in a while, and I wanted to check in.”
“I was just thinking of you,” her friend said. Almost immediately, the ache in her belly subsided and all she felt was hunger.
Continued Reading
I hope you enjoyed this piece. If you’d like to read more stories, make sure to check out my Library where you can find all my short stories and novellas.
If you like to read more stories like this one, I might suggest checking out Offline, a story about a father and son reconnecting outside of tablets and work through imagination. Or A Book’s Longing, the story of a book and its process of getting selected.
Also, make sure to subscribe to The JSwordSmith Update, my weekly newsletter about everything going on in my life as a writer and stay-at-home parent, plus writing tips and more.
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