#like they hated each other for 17 years and then it morphed gay longing and the deepest acts of devotion i've ever witnessed

[duchessvultjag]

act five of harrow the ninth is INSANE. the first three chapters are weird AUs and then in the fourth it's revealed that the main character is half-dead and basically comatose because someone stabbed her but we don't really know who-what-where-when. and it also turns out she's being haunted and weirdly enough whoever is haunting her is NOT one of the many souls she accidentally held hostage in her little bubble of hell and then we return to reality and i am now on the verge of tears over the soul of silly jock who constantly makes bad sex jokes piloting the body of her pathetic asshole rival turned not girlfriend, but also not not-girlfriend, whose own soul has vacated the building

[abortionado]

I have a real life tale of Homeric Epic proportions for you all. I do not condone the actions of anyone in this story

My senior year of high school, I was entrenched in a preposterous scandal between two of my friends.

Guy 1 was this completely indescribable, sexually ambiguous, utterly ridiculous little xc/debate club twink who was an armed libertarian leftist, HYPERfixated on working class history, and VERY intelligent but so hyperactive and deliberately loud/obnoxious that all of our teachers hated him anyway. He called me “Rosita Bonita,” and was accepted to Princeton and CalTech but was going to a mid-tier school nearby because he didn’t want to leave the mountains. 🥺

Guy 2 was an extremely easygoing, widely-beloved football player with a FIANCÉ he’d been with for 3 years (religious people in small towns get engaged young) who was a devout environmentalist and was planning on going to trade school in Italy after graduation. No real reason, he just thought Italy was dope, which I respect. 

Both good guys, both weird

We were all the same friend group (me, the dudes, the fiancé, & several other ppl), and those two were really close. Like if I was slightly more heterosexual I would say “bromance.” The summer before senior year, those guys, another friend of ours, and the fiancé went on an educational environmental science trip to Peru, where they, like, hiked around and camped out in the mountains. I don’t know or care what they were supposed to be learning about the environment up there, I just know that they split their little group of 4 up into a boys tent and girls tent, and these two boys who the Lord God put on this earth to play high school sports started fucking each other in tents in the rocky mountains of Peru.

Which would normally be like, okay, so what, Rose, why are you telling me these dudes’ business, but you have to remember that the second dude had a fiancé, a female fiancé no less, who was on the trip and was sleeping just a few yards away from where these boys were fucking each other. And this is where it morphed into everyone’s business

My friend, the only member of their little group who was not involved, called me from a hotel one night when they’d gone back down out of the mountains and into a town (and thus had cell service again), and she was like, “Rose, you need to help me.”

And I was like “What? What’s wrong?” Panicking, because my four dear friends were very far away in a weird mountain town and I had no idea what could possibly have happened

And she goes “I think that [guy 1] and [guy 2] are having sex, and I don’t know how to tell [fiancé].”

This is news to me, because I was previously SO sure that guy 2 was straight. I was like “I really think you’re losing it”

So we talked it out a little bit and decided that the high altitude was getting to her, and our friend wouldn’t cheat on his fiancé, who he really loved, and our other friend wouldn’t sow division in our close-knit group like that

School started back up however long after they got back, and things were just like. Completely normal for a while, and then after like a month of the whole thing being forgotten and under the bridge, guy 1 becomes overwhelmed with guilt and decides to tell the fiancé that he was in fact fucking her beloved in the Peruvian mountains.

Now, this was a MAJOR blow to the law, serenity, and order of our group, as im sure you know if you’ve ever been involved in a situation where a member of a friend group was cheating with another member of a friend group. All of my friends are very progressive, so it was much more about the cheating and lying than the fact that they were both men, but I would be wrong to say that that was not also a concern, because it came so completely out of nowhere. We were all blindsided (except for my friend, who I had accidentally gaslit into believing this wasn’t happening and she was going crazy from mountain air 🤪)

So. This is where it gets wild

Guy 2 takes the logical path out and decides to just lie and say that this never happened at all. Like, he straight up denies everything guy 1 is alleging.

I don’t know why he did that. You should never lie about something if the other person has screenshots, which guy 1 did. He had screenshots like you would not BELIEVE.

And he IMMEDIATELY took to the public Internet, which my mother uses, with these screenshots.

A lot of people had heard rumors about this by now, because these guys were both athletes and guy 2 was like “popular” or whatever, so it just kinda gets around. Guy 1 decided to feed the people and send the screenshots to the school gossip IG acct (“____ high school tea”), and of course, the person running the page was THRILLED to have such top-tier content so early in the school year, and it was all posted for their 1,188 followers to see.

The screenshots told a story that ran much deeper than two dudes fucking each other on a field trip. I had initially kind of assumed was just a “gay-for-the-stay,” messing around kind of thing, but there were screenshots of texts from guy 2 about getting MARRIED, telling guy 1 that he was his SOULMATE, telling him he “set my heart to flame,” “I love you more than anything,” etc etc., and, most notably, a picture of guy 2 in the act of SUCKING GUY 1’s DICK. Some of these things dated from WEEKS AFTER they got back from Peru.

So, it was clear to me that guy 1 AND the fiancé both felt (justifiably?) extremely fucked over by guy 2 at this point. The previously-airtight group was on the verge of collapse, as all of us had been dragged into this conflict between these 3 mfs. The girl called off the engagement.

Guy 2 wrote a notes app apology to the entire school claiming he had dissociative identity disorder and blaming the entire affair on his gay alter ego. Then he wrote a sad rap begging his fiancé to get back with him.

But the most insane part of all of this is that, since guy 1 AND guy 2 were both 17 when the explicit pic was posted on “[redacted]hstea,” the POLICE got involved. Guy 1 was investigated on CHILD PORNOGRAPHY charges for a picture of him getting his own dick sucked by a peer, as was guy 2, AS WAS the person running the tea account.

(This tea account had ruined lives, so when her identity was revealed, she literally transferred schools within like a week. Or maybe she’s in jail idk)

The charges were dropped and the boys were let off with a warning, because like. From a legal standpoint, who cares, but we All had to go to an internet safety assembly run by cops where they lectured us for two hours about not taking nudies, and EVERYONE was looking at me and my friends, because even though we had nothing to do with it, they KNEW we were affiliated with the defendents, and that was enough for them

Then guy 1 shot out the back window of guy 2’s car, which was the catharsis of the whole event, and it effectively blew over within another month or two.

Our group was split in half by loyalty (we joked and said guy 2 and his fiancé were like our divorcing parents), and I did not see those two in a room together for SEVERAL months, but then there was one weekend in like February that we all got together like old times (except for the fiancé who had moved on to a better man, as she should), and we were talking about going to a party with some of guy 2’s football friends, and guy 1 was like “I’m not gonna do that. You know what they say about me.”

And guy 2 tucked guy 1’s hair behind his ear and said with ZERO hesitation, “But you know I won’t let anything happen to you.”

This is a completely benign interaction, but imagine being me, witnessing this after 8 months of general social hell, child pornography charges, ruined friendships, Megan is missing assemblies, THE most dramatic breakup I’ve ever seen in my life and subsequent SoundCloud raps, shot out car windows, and a fake DID diagnosis, ALL because guy 2 wanted to avoid allegations of gay behavior. For WHAT.

Anyway coronavirus happened and idk what’s going on with them now and I don’t care but that’s my villain origin story