I stared at the loose gravel and tar road. More specifically, I stared at the long trail of unused toilet paper that had clung to my shoe and now, well, I could hear the snickers of my friends behind me.

They weren’t acting like my friends that night. I was feeling awful, hadn’t said a word. They just laughed, made their jokes. I felt stupid, felt awful.

Then, my luck, there was an extra roll of toilet paper hanging around the floor of our choice of hang-out, which was our friend’s van.

I stepped out of the van, hurrying to get home in the dead of night, while my best friend and _her _best friend, who always hated my guts, went and got hammered. Without me, what a surprise.

All of a sudden, there are the giggles. The chuckles.

I turned around, “what?” And then I looked down. That just about did it.

I kicked the toilet paper away from me, and screamed at the top of my lungs, “_Fuck the world!_”

I threw up my middle finger at my laughing friends and then hid my face so they wouldn’t know I was about to burst out in tears. I practically ran home, sober and upset.

I slowed down, quietly entering the house as to not wake my dad, who was passed out in the dark living room with a bottle in hand.

I crept to the fridge in the dimly-lit kitchen, pulled out the box of chocolate caramel ice cream that my dad’s girlfriend had bought as a bribe to make me like her more.

I curled up on the couch beside my snoring father, eating out of the bucket of ice cream with a huge soup spoon. I stared blankly for a moment, dumbfounded. Tears pricked in the corners of my eyes.

I snatched up the remote, turned on the TV. “Casey Rocket on Kill Tony (complication)” was my go-to for cheering up: a seriously high-energy guy crab-walking around blind bassists and gay funeral home attendants and drug addicts, singing and yelling “_Hell yeah! Cool, cool. Allll riiiiiight!_”

Yeah, forty-five minutes of that, along with about a million calories of ice cream, made me feel numb enough to curl up in bed at one in the morning.

Insomniac, I stared at the ceiling for four hours, until my sleep-deprived body gave up, and I fell asleep… Dreaming, dwelling, on my public humiliation.