Five years together, and whenever I fought with an outsider, my girlfriend never once took my side.
I told myself she was just cold by nature, so I was the one who stepped up for her in everything.
On our trip, a seafood restaurant shorted us on weight. I argued the point, calmly and with the facts on my side, not expecting her to help.
Instead, she said, in that light, careless way of hers, "They've got it hard too. Making a scene over a few dollars like this, it's kind of cheap of you."
The junior traveling with us kept his head down and added, with a sneer, "Yeah, not exactly classy."
The two of them, playing off each other, nailed me in place.
The manager, who'd been about to refund us, watched me with a smirk, his whole face saying he was enjoying the show.
I didn't cry. I got up and went straight back to the hotel. She didn't come after me. She just kept eating with the junior, like nothing had happened at all.
What she didn't know was that before we left, I'd added her junior as a friend, and I'd seen his social media feed.
There was a completely different version of her in it. In one video, her face was flushed with anger as she gripped an old vegetable seller, an old woman, and wouldn't let go. "My junior's a good guy, he bought up all your vegetables, and you rig your scale to overcharge him ten dollars? At your age you should know better. Aren't you ashamed?"
The junior had captioned it with a starry-eyed emoji: A senior like Monica who'll stand up for me is honestly the coolest.
The girlfriend who could never learn to stand united with me, she'd stand up for her junior without a second thought.
On this trip, the extra person had always been me.
I booked the earliest flight back. I was done with the trip. I was done with the relationship too.
……
Not AI-generated. Not some edited-together prank.
That was the gentle, elegant Monica Vaughn, doing this for her junior, Fred Bates.
In the middle of a busy street, gripping a woman in her seventies or eighties and scolding her that she was too old to act like this.
I found it absurd, almost funny. For the owner of a big, thriving seafood restaurant, she could feel sorry that he "had it hard."
But for a vegetable farmer who'd overcharged her junior ten dollars, she'd suddenly learned how to stand up for someone.
And it hit me all at once. Who the other person was didn't matter. Who was standing beside her, that was what decided her attitude.
If it was me, she'd play the bystander and stay quiet, and when she had to, she'd take the opposite side, playing the nice, agreeable one.
But if it was her junior, then she knew all about standing united, defending him, settling the score for him.
There was no point to it. Really.
From the first time I heard the name Fred Bates, my instinct as her boyfriend told me there was something special about this guy.
At first Monica would complain to me about him. "He's so dumb, he can't even get basic lab work right. I honestly don't get how he passed the grad exams."
But later it turned into her telling me, with a smile, "Sweet, naïve kid. He brought me coffee he ground himself."
And then she deleted the pinned post of us holding hands, and switched to a couple's profile picture.
She said, "I have to deal with higher-ups. It's not convenient."
The time she spent on our dates started shrinking. From going with me to the library, from dates and dinners.
It turned into grabbing library seats for the junior, tutoring him, doing academic research with him.
Slowly, I went from the boyfriend at the center of her life to someone out on the edge.
I kept comforting myself that they were just a normal senior-and-junior pair.
But once, a younger classmate of mine bought me a bubble tea to thank me for lending her my notes.
Monica's face went cold on the spot. She said the girl had bad intentions toward me.
That was when it stunned me. So she understood all along exactly where the lines were.
Yet this trip, the one we'd planned together for so long, she insisted on tacking her junior onto it.
When I showed I wasn't happy about it, she'd looked at me, exasperated, and said, "Can you not make everything about romance? I'm just a big sister looking out for a younger kid."
I gripped my phone, my eyes burning.
I held it back for a long time, and still couldn't stop myself from crying.
By the time I was crying so hard I could barely breathe, the screen lit up.
It was a message from Monica.
I picked it up and opened it. Just six short words: Come down to the hotel front desk.
I ignored her and shut the screen off.
I was pouring myself some water when Monica called, her voice frantic. "Come to the front desk right now, this second."
Thinking about everything from today, I didn't want to bother. But then I worried it might really be an emergency.
So I went down in the hotel's slippers, and the moment I reached the front desk, Monica spoke.
