Wednesday Night

Toby was sick of everything.

He was sick of his life at school. For the whole year, he had been stuck with friends he didn't like or care about. He'd been trapped with a girlfriend whom he didn't like, whom he had only been with because she was hot, and good for his appearance at school. But he didn't care about that anymore. Toby didn't want to be popular. He couldn't be himself and he was always forced to pretend.

Toby was sick of pretending—pretending to care about things he didn't actually care for, things he didn't want to care about. He hated having to pretend to like the popular kids that he hung out with, and he hated having to pretend to be someone he wasn't.

He just wanted to graduate, to get out of here and end this horrible year.

Toby sighed and leaned against the headboard of his bed. What was wrong with him? He wasn't usually this jaded and bitter.

It was Sami's doing. She had sparked all the hidden frustrations in him, had brought the negative thoughts that he always managed to ignore out from the back of his mind.

Just her name had the ability to send fresh waves of anger and anguish shooting through him.

He still couldn't believe what she had done, and that she had lied to him about it. He couldn't believe he'd trusted her so much, and so easily. Toby couldn't believe he had thought Sami was an amazing person.

He was unable to stop feeling shaken from the news that Little White Lie was a scam. It had been so great to be in the band, and he'd enjoyed it so much—it was something that he'd loved doing, something he didn't have to pretend to like. And then one sentence—just a few words—had ruined that, torn it apart. It had all been fake, just like everything else at school was.

An awful feeling was prickling across his arms, a feeling that came from the song they had recorded and then performed at the gig. He'd sung a song that hadn't belonged to them, that hadn't been his right to sing.

Toby needed to clear his mind, to escape from these upsetting thoughts. He leaned over the side of the bed and grabbed his acoustic guitar from where it stood against the wall, next to the electric one.

He placed the guitar in his lap and listened to the sounds of the guitar settling: the echo of wind through the hole, the whisper of the strings as they gently trembled, the creak of his fingers sliding across the frets to find their position.

Toby plucked at a string. A clear, loud, beautiful sound rang through the air. The vibration lingered in his ear, making a shiver run down his spine. Another note danced across his eardrums, pure and strong. Toby began to play. It wasn't any song in particular—just a drabble of random chords and notes.

The melody was all around him, as if a thin mist was filling his room. It trickled through his veins, coexisting with the blood flowing through. But it couldn't drive the thoughts from his head. Instead, it only enhanced them, gave the thoughts a soundtrack. Toby poured his feelings into the guitar, turning the melody dark and edgy. The notes whispered murky words into his ears.

Somehow, the meaningless strums morphed into a song—a song he knew well. He found his fingers playing the melody for Sami. The soft strums wrapped around his ears in what seemed like a mocking way. The song twisted around his mood and stabbed at his flesh, wielding emotions as sharp as knives.

He couldn't stand that he still had feelings for her. Toby wanted them to go away. He hated Sami for it, for making him like her and for making it impossible to get rid of those feelings.

He was just as furious at himself as he was towards Sami. Toby had been such an idiot to believe that Sami had written a love song to herself. But the idea had fascinated him—a girl who had such a low self-esteem, she'd felt the need to write herself a love song because she didn't think it was possible for anyone to want to write one for her. He had wanted to fix that. It had been part of the situation he had idealized.

Sami had been more of a fantasy to him, a stream of what-if's with which Toby had been captivated. The possibility had intrigued him. He hadn't known her that well, but he'd wanted to, and the person he had seen seemed beautiful. He had romanticized the concept of a girl who he would actually like, that he could hang out with and enjoy spending time with, as opposed to his "friends"—a girl with whom he wouldn't have to pretend. He had seen an escape, seen the option of someone he could finally connect with, so he'd glamorized the idea until it had turned into an infatuation. He hadn't been in love with Sami—he'd been in love with the idea of being in love with her.

But she'd turned out to be a liar, someone he really hadn't known at all, and now Toby was left with nothing but the fragments of the glorification he'd made her out to be. Sami had been a mirage of an oasis he'd seen in the middle of a desert, and now he clung to the dissolving fragments—but they cut into his skin and stung, and they hurt so much. Little White Lie had been a mirage too; he had always wanted to be part of a band, a band that actually counted, unlike the Hot Girls. And the fantasy of Little White Lie had also shattered, the perfection of that band turning out to be nothing but an illusion, because of Sami and the stolen music.

He weaved the shards of both mirages into the song and sewed the frayed golden threads of his fantasy into the notes of Sami.

That song had fascinated Toby. He'd thought of it as such a beautiful idea. But it wasn't his song, or hers—it belonged to some guy he didn't even know. Toby had taken the song under his wing, and he'd thought that it was for him to use—but it wasn't. It was like nurturing a stranger who only bit the hand that you fed him with , before he left you.

The song was the last piece of idealization that Toby had left. He was throwing the remaining scraps of it into that song, the leftover particles coming together and forming the notes, and the combination of guitar strums and mirage shards was ending everything. He was done, done romanticizing and done pretending to be someone he wasn't—done with everything.

That was all life was—just a collection of endless mirages, one fake oasis after another. He had to accept that and stop dwelling on each mirage, because it would always turn out to be an illusion.

It was for this reason that Toby was grudgingly grateful for Sami, for her coming in and out of his life. The experience showed him that he could no longer hold on to the idealization he always created.

He had to move along. Fantasies only hurt, and they didn't help or fix things. The only way to live was to deal with things and to just get through the situation. It was time to start keeping his feet planted firmly on the ground.

The music coming from his guitar flowed through him, cleared his head, and helped him accept that fact.

Toby's fingers paused on the strings. He didn't want to hear the painful song anymore. He put the guitar back in its spot against the wall, but the song continued to play in his head, floating and drifting through the layers of his mind. When he closed his eyes, the song turned to images under his eyelids—colors that held the essence of the song in their flashing hues.

The notes haunted him in his dreams.

THE END