“Uhh...” I blinked. “What?”
“My love, SueNation was a bust. A disaster. A complete catastrophe!”
“Come again?”
“Oh my gods, come here. You have to sit down for this.” Grabbing my hand, she led me back out to the café floor. “Okay, so get this,” she whispered like we were back in our gossipy high-school-girl days. “After you disappeared, I didn’t know how to find you or find out if you were okay, so I followed Sue on socials hoping eventually she’d drop a clue about you.” She snorted. “And then I kept following her, because I just couldn’t look away from that train wreck.
“It pretty much all started after your sister graduated from Columbia-Southern—”
I held up a hand. “Wait, what? Columbia-Southern?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Is that what they’re calling Columbia U now?”
It was her turn to blink at me. “Columbia University? No, they’re still calling that Columbia U. But Columbia-Southern Community College where your sister graduated is sometimes called Columbia-South.”
“Oh. My. Goodness.” I couldn’t have been more blown away than if Sue walked in right then, sniffed, glared at me, and snapped that it wasn’t a big deal that she lied about where she went to college. “She didn’t get into the Ivy League.”
Court snorted. “If she did, she made the wrong damn choice on admissions acceptance day.”
“Okay,” I cried, blowing back in my seat. “So, Sue attending and graduating from Columbia University—lie.”
“Lie,” Courtney confirmed. “The only thing those two colleges have in common is they’re both in New York. What wasn’t a lie was Sue’s big, fat, trust fund. After graduating, she tried to launch her influencer career by backpacking all over the world, and flaunting all her favorite tips, tricks, products,and sex adventures as a solo polyamorous female traveler. She was dating Alex, Rhodes, and Micah during all this, but non-exclusively.
“Things were going pretty well by this point,” she admitted. “Her followers seemed to really love her whole independent, sex-positive, Asian-women-centered brand. But—”
“I felt thatbutcoming in my soul.”
She laughed. “Butthen it all went wrong. One day, a video taken by a café customer hit the internet, and it went viral within the hour. It showed another customer clearly bumping into the waitress and making her spill her tray. The problem was... that whole tray of frozen ice mocha lattes spilled on Sue.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, no is right! Sue flipped the fuck out. She jumped up, screaming and ranting at the woman—who was apologizing profusely,” she cried. “Sue picked up her cup of coffee—her scalding, hot coffee!—flung it at the waitress’s face, and called her a stupid, Black bitch.”
My jaw dropped, eyes popping wider than the Yellowstone caldera. “Tell me you’re joking. Please, tell me she didn’t do or say that.”
“I wish I was joking, babe. When I tell you your twin sissy was dragged across the internet superhighway, I’m putting it lightly. And you know she did not handle it gracefully.”
I groaned, never more ashamed to share a face with a person than I was right then. “Let me guess, she didn’t apologize in any shape or form.”
“Nope. Not even when it got out that she gave that innocent woman second-degree burns,” Courtney said. “Sue just hopped on socials, crying and bawling that she was the real victim. She was the one forever being stalked, recorded, and harassed by strangers who couldn’t understand that ‘everyone has a human moment.’”
“A human moment?! She called that a human moment?!”
“You know she did.” Court rolled her eyes. “As you can imagine, her complete lack of accountability made the backlash worse—which turned the river she was crying into an ocean. She was the onebeing bulliedandfelt unsafe. Hermental health was sufferingand the rest of the world were the real monsters because wewouldn’t accept her apology and move on.”
“The apology she never gave?” I clarified.
“Yep, that’s the one.”
I shook my head. All of that was typical Sue behavior every time she got caught in a lie or terrible act she couldn’t wiggle her way out of, but still, it would never stop surprising me that anyone could live an entire life without ever saying sorry.
“As you can imagine,” she continued, “your sister was canceled hard. All of her sponsors dropped her. None of her followers would support her. Did you really never hear about any of this?”
“I had no idea,” I confessed. “For one, I for damn sure did not follow Sue on socials. I avoided anything to do with her. I didn’t even like looking in the mirror for a full two years after she ruined my life. Besides, you don’t have a lot of time to mess around on social media when you’re trying to survive into the next day.”
“Very true,” she said, falling back against her seat. “Well, if it makes you feel better, after the café incident, Sue’s world tour adventure was done. She ended up moving back to New York, officially marrying Rhodes, and commitment ceremonying Alex and Micah. Their baby was born pretty quickly after that, and they settled into domestic bliss.”
