The Girl He Chose To Lose

Audrey and I grew up in the same manicured suburban world.

She was in love with the boy next door, the polished and polite Ethan.
I was in love with the boy downstairs, the cold and commanding Rhys.

We were on our own separate, fruitless quests until the day we discovered that both Ethan and Rhys were in love with the new girl, Tessa.

I held on for a while, then let go. Audrey, however, said she was going to keep trying. I yelled at her, told her she was a fool, and then, for my own sanity, I left the country for grad school.

Seven years later, I flew home. Audrey picked me up from the airport. I smiled and asked her how things were going with Ethan.

She took a sip of her wine, paused for a long moment, and then said, very quietly, “Sloane, I’ve decided to give up on Ethan.”

1

Honestly, I never thought I’d hear those words come out of Audrey’s mouth.

I can still remember the day Rhys and I imploded. I had pleaded with her, my own heartbreak still raw.

“Audrey, just let it go. They’re completely under her spell. In their eyes, Tessa is this delicate, helpless little thing, and we’re the villains.”
“It’s just a guy,” I’d pushed. “Come with me. Get out of here. A change of scenery will do you good.”

I remember how she just smiled at me. She was beautiful. She’d always been the perfect one—top of our class, homecoming queen, with a personality so genuinely kind it was almost infuriating. I could never understand what kind of spell Tessa had cast on Ethan, what made him choose a girl who was so obviously a pale imitation of what he could have had with Audrey.

She shook her head gently. “My feelings for Ethan are about me, Sloane,” she’d said. “They don’t depend on him.”

It was the kind of line that would sound cheesy coming from anyone else, but from Audrey, it just made your heart ache for her. I sighed, a mix of frustration and pity. “Fine. Just… try not to regret this later.”

After that, I left. Audrey must have known I couldn’t stand to hear their names, because she never mentioned Ethan or Rhys in our calls. But our circle of mutual friends was a tangled web, and gossip was unavoidable. Little pieces of their story found their way to me across the ocean.

I heard that Tessa, after stringing both of them along, finally chose Rhys.
I heard that Ethan got blackout drunk, and Audrey stayed with him all night.
I heard that Audrey followed Ethan to the same university.
I heard that Audrey and Ethan were finally together.

…

Eventually, Ethan posted it on Instagram, making it official. It was a picture of Audrey. They were in a restaurant, the city lights glittering behind them like a thousand tiny stars. She was smiling at the camera, her eyes so full of soft, genuine love it felt like you could feel it through the screen. She was stunning. Their hands were tightly clasped on the table.

At the time, I was truly happy for her. She had loved him since we were kids. After all those years, it felt like she had finally earned her happy ending.
So I commented with a single word: Congratulations.

After that, I got buried in my thesis, and my contact with everyone back home dwindled. Until today. I’m back, Audrey’s here to pick me up, and we’re sitting in a quiet wine bar. I’d asked about her and Ethan.

I expected a blush, a happy sigh.

I never, ever expected her to be so calm, her voice so light, as she told me, “Sloane, I’ve decided to give up on Ethan.”

I stared at her for a second.

She was looking down into her glass, her head bowed. The dim, intimate lighting of the bar cast a glow from behind her, obscuring her expression. All I could see was the sweep of her lashes—long, dark, like the fanned wings of a bird about to take flight. Her tone was so casual, as if she were talking about the weather.

It took me a moment to find my voice. “But… you’re engaged, aren’t you?”

A small, brittle laugh escaped her. Audrey was always so gentle, her interactions with the world were defined by a soft warmth. This was the first time I’d ever seen such a cold, cynical look on her face. She lifted her eyes to meet mine, a ghost of a smile playing on her lips. “People get divorced, Sloane,” she said, her voice still impossibly light. “An engagement is even easier to walk away from.”

I was silent. I didn't know what to say.

Audrey and I were polar opposites. She was the quiet, gentle soul; I was the outspoken, impulsive one. When we were little, our parents used to joke about swapping daughters. My mom wished I had a fraction of Audrey’s grace, and her mom wished she had a spark of my fire. That all stopped after I pinned the neighborhood bully to the ground and made him cry for his mommy.

Back then, I was the kid who was always covered in dirt, a little tornado in pigtails. And Audrey would be right there behind me in her pristine dress and patent leather shoes, her hair in a perfect princess braid, quietly holding my backpack. She was my lookout when I was about to pummel some kid for pulling her hair, her voice a tense whisper: “Sloane, a teacher’s coming!”

We were inseparable from the first day of kindergarten. Our friendship was ironclad—though it faced its first real test when we hit that awkward, confusing age of first crushes. I was secretly into Rhys, she was secretly into Ethan, and for a horrible few weeks, we each suspected the other was in love with the same boy.

Fueled by a diet of 90s teen dramas, we both subscribed to the sacred rule: you don’t go after your best friend’s crush. We danced around it, hiding our feelings awkwardly, until I couldn't take the tension anymore. I confronted her directly.

She refused to say. So I went first. “I like Rhys.”

She just blinked at me, her brain trying to catch up. “What? Wait. You like… Rhys?”

I narrowed my eyes. “So who do you like?”

A blush crept up her neck, and she looked down, mumbling into her chest. “Ethan.”

“Ugh,” I groaned. “You like that pretty boy? He’s always got that fake smile plastered on his face. What’s the point of being handsome if you’re that boring?”

She shot me a glare, firing right back. “And Rhys? He walks around like everyone owes him money. It’s so childish.”

We went back and forth, each defending our chosen champion, until we both just dissolved into laughter. She sighed, a real, happy sigh. “This is great.”

And it was. It really was.

Back then, liking someone was so simple. I fell for Rhys because the pack of neighborhood kids I’d been terrorizing for years finally decided to stage a coup. They cornered me, ready for revenge, when Rhys, who had just moved in, took them all on, one against ten. He dusted off his hands and sneered, “A bunch of guys ganging up on one girl? Pathetic.”

Then he turned to me and held out his hand. “Don’t worry. What’s your name?”

I instantly morphed into a timid little lamb, hiding the wiffle ball bat I’d been holding behind my back. “Sloane,” I whispered shyly.

He grinned, took my hand, and walked me home. “Cool. I just moved in downstairs. I’ve got your back from now on.”

I put on my best damsel-in-distress act and nodded sweetly under my mother’s baffled gaze.

Audrey’s crush on Ethan was even simpler. He was a year older, a grade ahead of us. He was brilliant, the one who always gave the student address at school assemblies. Audrey was a straight-A student, too. I figured it was a meeting of the minds, a mutual admiration between honor students.

Because we all lived so close, the four of us became a unit. We were the golden kids, the ones everyone knew. On the night of my sixteenth birthday, we celebrated on the beach, and I made a wish with all the sincerity a sixteen-year-old could muster: “I hope the four of us stay like this forever.”

A month later, we started our sophomore year of high school and met Tessa.

2

Tessa. The clumsy, quiet work-study student.

The first week of school, she managed to spill a cup of scalding hot coffee all over my arm. I hissed, sucking in a sharp breath as the skin instantly blistered. But before I could even react, she was the one who cried out, her face tilted up, eyes already brimming with tears. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

She looked so pathetic that I swallowed the angry words on the tip of my tongue. I just stared at the two huge, angry red welts forming on my skin, the stinging pain making me wince. Rhys, who was beside me, took one look at my arm and then shot her a death glare. “Don’t you have eyes?” he said, his voice dripping with ice.

She flinched and stared at the floor, her tears now falling in silent, fat drops onto the linoleum. The sight of it was irritating. “Forget it,” I said. “It’s fine. It was an accident.”

That was how we met.

To be honest, I never gave Tessa a second thought. We were in the same homeroom, but she had all the presence of a ghost. Northwood Academy was one of two things: a place for the exceptionally brilliant scholarship kids or a playground for the children of the city’s elite. Tessa didn’t seem to fit into the first category, and judging by her worn-out clothes and the perpetual anxiety in her posture, she definitely wasn’t one of the latter.

Someone once wondered aloud if maybe her dad was a teacher at the school. No one cared enough to find out. This wasn’t some TV show; the rich kids and the smart kids were too busy competing for Ivy League spots to bother with bullying some nobody. People like Tessa weren’t targeted; they were simply ignored. It’s a cruel kind of reality.

She and a quiet, overweight boy sat in the back corner, blending into the wallpaper.

The first time I really saw her was when she got into an argument. Her deskmate, the quiet boy, was standing in the aisle after class, blocking the way. The guy behind him, Greg, waited a beat before sighing loudly. “Some people shouldn’t be allowed to block traffic,” he muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Tessa, who was normally silent, shot to her feet. “You can’t talk about people’s bodies like that,” she said, her face bright red.

I knew Greg. He was from a wealthy family, arrogant and mouthy, but not malicious. Being called out in public like that wounded his pride. He sneered at Tessa. “Excuse me? He’s been standing there like a statue for five minutes. And you’re his knight in shining armor? How touching.” He smirked. “You two are a perfect match.”

Tessa looked like she’d been slapped. She stood there, crimson-faced, unable to form a single comeback. Her deskmate, however, was quick to distance himself. “I don’t even like her,” he mumbled.

A few people snickered. Tessa just stood there, mortified. I frowned. Greg was being an asshole, but Tessa jumping in to defend someone who clearly didn’t deserve it was just as stupid. Still, it had gone on long enough.

“Greg,” I called out, my voice sharp. “Are you leaving or not? If you’re late for next period, I’m putting your name down for a week of cafeteria duty.”

He threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Alright, alright, Madam President. I’m going.” He squeezed past Tessa and her deskmate without another word.

Tessa looked over at me. We were too far apart for me to read her expression, but I could feel her eyes on me as she stood there, frozen.

I just shrugged and turned away.

Behind me, I heard Rhys let out a quiet, dismissive sound. “Idiot.”

After that day, Tessa seemed to shrink even further into herself.

Every time I look back on this, I want to go back in time and slap some sense into my sixteen-year-old self. Maybe it was pity, or maybe I was just having a moment of profound stupidity. I’m not one to get involved, but I’ve always had what Audrey once called a “misguided sense of heroic compassion.”

That year, for our school’s Founders’ Day celebration, every student had to participate in a performance. My grades were average, but I excelled in these kinds of “extracurriculars.” I wrote and directed a one-act play, which conveniently took care of the performance requirement for a dozen of my more introverted classmates.

As class president, I was in charge of collecting everyone’s sign-ups. The deadline was approaching, and the only person who hadn’t signed up was Tessa. When I went to her desk, she looked deeply uncomfortable, refusing to meet my eyes as if she were ashamed.

I got it immediately. Trying to sound casual, to spare her dignity, I said, “Hey, you know, my play is missing a piece of scenery. A rock. All you have to do is sit on stage. You in?”

She gave a small, grateful nod.

I never could have imagined that this stupid play, this throwaway role, would be the beginning of everything between her and Rhys.

The part of the rock was literally created so she wouldn't be embarrassed, but she took it so seriously. She’d put on the lumpy, grey costume and lie on the stage, perfectly still for the entire rehearsal. It was, in its own way, very dedicated.

Once, after we finished a run-through, she must have gotten a cramp in her leg. She staggered when she tried to stand up. Rhys, without a word, tossed her a bottle of water. “You’re a rock,” he said, his voice flat. “It’s just a rehearsal, you know you can sit down, right? You’re an idiot.”

I glanced over at Tessa, surprised. It was an insult, but for Rhys—a guy who wouldn’t waste a single glance on someone he truly thought was stupid—to even speak to her, let alone give her water, was something else. It was almost… concerned.

I’d already told her twice that she didn’t need to be so method about it, that she just needed to be still on the actual performance night. But she insisted on being the most professional rock she could be.

She reacted to Rhys’s comment the same way. She picked up the water bottle he’d thrown, her face flushing as she mumbled, “I… I didn’t want to mess up the rehearsal for everyone. It’s better to be… professional.”

Rhys didn’t say anything else.

On the night of the performance, during a scene between me and Rhys, he missed his mark and accidentally stepped on her hand. I heard her let out a tiny, sharp hiss of pain, but she didn’t move a muscle. For the rest of the play, Rhys was off. Distracted. His mind was somewhere else entirely.

After the show, I had to stay for the closing ceremonies. By the time I made it backstage, the area was mostly empty. And in a deserted corner, I saw them. The tall, handsome boy standing over the small, timid girl. He was frowning, his voice impatient but somehow soft. “Let me see your hand.”

Tessa shyly held it out. Rhys gently, carefully, placed a bandage over her knuckles. He smoothed it down, his lips pressed into a thin line.

“Idiot,” he muttered again, so quietly it was almost a whisper.

And Tessa, sitting before him, looked up at him through her lashes and gave him a small, adoring, grateful smile.

I stood there, hidden by the shadows in the wings, and just stared.

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