For the first few days after I accidentally sent the meanest email a human being has ever written, I blamed everyone other than myself. I blamed my moms for not being able to buy me a proper laptop. I blamed Raj for his shitty computer and the mousepad that never worked right. I blamed Silicon Valley and the tech bros who invented Gmail. I blamed that stupid guy at Pinkberry for giving me a free ice cream, and not my best friend. I blamed Gideon for being creepy and making Parisa that playlist that sparked the original iteration of this fight. And I blamed whoever the first person was who got ademavirus, shut the entire world down, and forced me and my best friend to rely on technology to communicate. But most of all, I blamed Parisa.

How could she not respond to my heartfelt apologies? How could she be so stubborn and selfish at the same time? Why was she making herself the victim again? And then, when that still didn’t make me feel better, I was finally ready to blame myself and stop pretending that I was the victim. What kind of person unleashes on their best friend? Even if I never meant to send the email, why did I need to write something so cruel in order to make myself feel better? After a lot of soul-searching and talking about it endlessly with Wes, I couldn’t come up with an answer and I couldn’t get Parisa to acknowledge my existence. So, naturally, I’ve resorted to stalking by bagging groceries at the fancy market her family frequents. I’m sorry, but the girl left me no choice.

“I said paper, not plastic,” a woman shouts at me as I put her collection of Cowgirl Creamery cheese in a bag. “Were you even paying attention?”

“I’m so sorry,” I reply.

Angie, the girl who works the register, already warned me that the customers here could be prickly.

“They were really nice at the beginning of lockdown,” she explained. “A lot of ‘thank you for your service,’ blah, blah, blah. They would tip and buy us gift cards. That didn’t last too long. Now everyone’s just paranoid and grumpy and pissed that this pandemic has lasted so long. And it turns out white folk feel like they can be even nastier when they’ve got a mask covering half their face.”

We laughed after she said it, in that way that the marginalized sometimes just have to roll their eyes in the face of microaggressions. Sometimes you have to find comedy in the absurd so that you don’t go insane. Angie graduated high school last year and told me she was one of three Black students in her senior class.