The Jokes At Lunch
It had not, at first, been about anything.
Liv's friend group — Hanna, Bo, Mara, Liv herself — had picked up, in early September, a low-grade running joke about a girl in their year called Esin. The joke was that Esin walked funny. The joke was that Esin's bag was always too big for her. The joke was that Esin sat alone at lunch.
Liv could not, looking back, remember who had started it. Maybe Bo. Bo was the funniest of them; Bo's jokes were sharp; the group orbited Bo. The joke had not been a sentence, exactly. It had been a series of small things — a snicker when Esin walked past, a particular way of saying her name, an imitation of her hand-raising in class. The kind of low-level mockery that does not feel, while you are participating in it, like anything serious.
Liv had laughed. She had laughed because her friends had laughed. She had laughed because not laughing would have been weird. She had laughed because Esin was, in fact, a little awkward, and the joke was — she had told herself — affectionate-ish. Just a thing. Just a thing the group did.
The joke had got worse over October.
It had moved from in-person snickers to a private group chat that Liv was in. The group chat had a name that was, technically, Esin's name, modified in a way that was specifically meant to mock her. There were screenshots. There were photos. Some of the photos had been taken without Esin