Rosie was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, and I had seized the opportunity to do some quality stalking. As I’d hoped, she’d left her Facebook logged in. Squashing any guilt, I typed Suzanne’s name into the search bar and then clicked on it when it appeared.
Her page unfolded before me, full of updates and pictures and messages. She’d changed her profile picture since I’d tried to look a few weeks ago; now it was just her, holding a dog. I scrolled down slowly, looking over the messages. Most were obviously from friends from her old school, because they were variants of ‘miss you!’ I noted that earlier that day Rosie had posted a photo of a rabbit wearing a pair of round sunglasses. For some reason Rosie had captioned this: ‘It’s you!’ Suzanne had written, ‘Oh, shush, you.’ Five people had ‘liked’ it.
Directly below the photo, a message caught my eye.
Ellie Lewis Zanne, have you been watching Corrie?
Suzanne Watts Yes :/
Ellie Lewis ? Are you OK? I can’t believe they didn’t put a trigger warning on it or something!
Suzanne Watts Yeah. I’ll call you, OK?
Ellie Lewis Oh yeah, sorry xxx
This was such an odd exchange that I read over it a couple of times. It made no sense to me, which was to be expected because I had no idea who Ellie was and I didn’t watch Coronation Street. Plus I didn’t know what trigger warnings were. I was about to click on Ellie’s name to take my creepy jealous-friend stalking to a new level when I heard the shower turn off.
I clicked back on to Rosie’s home screen and slumped back on the bed, pulling out my phone. I tapped ‘trigger warning’ into the search and scrolled through the results, which only confused me more. The top entry was, bewilderingly, something to do with feminism. A couple of entries below that, a Wikipedia entry for Trauma Triggers. I opened the page and scanned the first line.
‘What are you looking at?’ Rosie asked, coming out of the bathroom in her pyjamas, a towel wrapped around her head.
‘Just Facebook,’ I lied, turning my screen off. Trauma triggers: experiences that trigger traumatic memories. Trigger warnings: brief messages that appeared before content deemed to be potentially triggering.
I was turning these definitions over in my mind, trying to match them to what I knew of Suzanne, when Rosie flopped on to the bed next to me and grinned.
‘Stalking a certain Jonny?’
‘Guilty as charged,’ I said, even though I hadn’t thought about Jonny for days.
‘You can do better,’ she promised, which was nice if not exactly true. ‘Here,’ she said, pulling her laptop over and opening Facebook, ‘let me show you Liam.’ Her current crush, a football player from the year above who’d smiled at her during assembly.
I looked at the pictures and made all the right noises, but my mind was working overtime. Trauma. What kind of trauma? And what did it have to do with Suzanne? Surely finding out what was happening in Coronation Street would help me answer this, but when I tried quickly Googling it on my phone while I was meant to be brushing my teeth, the top results were all about an actor who’d just been arrested for drink driving. I couldn’t figure out how to ask Rosie without giving myself away, so I decided I’d wait for an opening in the conversation the following day, when there was group of us to hide in.
I can try and pretend that I just didn’t realize that bringing up a subject I’d learned was potentially ‘triggering’ for Suzanne in front of her friends wasn’t a particularly nice thing to do.
But that would be a lie.
The following day Rosie and I arrived at the American diner on the seafront at lunchtime, a few minutes late because we’d missed the bus. Suzanne, Levina and Maya were already there, saving us a booth, talking animatedly. Suzanne was gesturing with her hands, and they were all laughing.
‘Hello!’ Rosie sang out, throwing herself into the booth.
‘Hey,’ Suzanne said, grinning at us.
‘Charlie text me,’ Levina said to Rosie. ‘He’s going to meet us later, with his friends.’
‘Cool,’ Rosie said. ‘What were you guys talking about?’
‘Suzanne’s incredibly successful date with Alex,’ Maya said, smirking.
‘And by incredibly successful,’ Suzanne said, taking a sip from her cup, ‘she means a complete disaster.’
‘What happened?’ Rosie asked.
‘He’s just an idiot. I mean, we had an OK time. We just went to the beach, and he was telling me about his band.’ She made a face. ‘Who sound crap, by the way. They’re modelling themselves on the Smiths. I was, like, aren’t you a bit young to try and be the Smiths? And he got all huffy and said that Morrissey was universal.’
‘That should have been your first clue,’ Maya said.
‘I know that now! Anyway, it turned out the band is actually his brother’s, and Alex is basically the guy who carries the amps and stuff. So I was ready to forgive him for that, but then he started talking about Grand Theft Auto instead, and I just about died. I kissed him just to get him to shut up.’