Screenshots Don't Lie Quotes

I was only fourteen, Addie.” Her lower lip trembles. “I feel so stupid for believing everything he told me and letting him do all that stuff to me. It messed me up so bad. I just want to keep him from doing it to anyone else.” She sniffles loudly. “Please come with me.” Her shaky voice is breaking my resolve—I’ve never seen her be anything but perfectly poised. I wring my hands together. “They’re probably not even going to believe us. I don’t have any proof at all. We only talked on Snapflash, and all those messages are gone.” “Nate and I talked on Snapflash too,” she says. “But I took screenshots.” “You did?” She bobs her head. “At the time, I did it because I wanted to remember what he was saying to me. But they’re all there. All the lies he told me.” She digs into the bag hanging off her shoulder and pulls out her phone. She brings up a photo on the screen, and that’s when I see it. You’re my soulmate. The same words he had written for me. But for Kenzie. I’m

Girl friends You on my lock screen. My phone when it calls. The seven-minute voice note, so you know it all. The cute shit. The bad bits. Everything we don’t even need to say. Sorry, again, for the total essay. Your note on my bed. Never being left on read. That whole summer. Our secrets. The evenings that left us sleepless. Having crushes that need stalking. Being together and not talking. Late nights. Hydrolites. The calmness of knowing your advice is always right. My clothes that you wore. Your shoes, unbuckled, still lying on my floor. Screenshots. Our mistakes. Running commentary from our first dates. All my secrets that you know. Every debt that I owe. How many times do I say this before it is too much? I love you with all my skin and bones.

I don’t even understand the language properly, all the strange abbreviations and the failure to properly punctuate or use capital letters, emojis scattered across the pages like grapeshot on the screenshots of Facebook messages that comprise one of the files. There must be a key to teen speak, a way of understanding. I grit my teeth and get on with it.

Your smartphone caters to your every whim, which seems great, but then it’s made it so much harder to adjust to the unclickable world. Everything real is also disappointing. No friend is as funny as a video you can pull up on your phone. No girl as hot as the endless catwalk in your pocket. You could meet someone for pizza, but with a swipe it arrives at your door; “contact-free delivery” means you don’t even need to talk to the pizza guy. Sometimes with a classmate you let your guard down and trade messages you shouldn’t. It was only a joke, but it’s never only a joke. Friends preserve everything you say in screenshots. You do the same, so that the deterrence of mutual assured destruction applies, enforced by teachers and administrators and college admissions committees. You’ve rarely spent a whole afternoon with a friend who lent you her full attention. You don’t know most of her secrets, and she doesn’t know yours; she’s already divulged her most intimate worries to a therapist. Rehashing it all again seems so pointless. You don’t really have time for friends, anyway. Your full-time, unpaid internship consumes every extra minute: five, six, eight hours a day—the settings don’t lie—staring at your phone. “My mental health sucks,” you tell the group chat. The others say theirs does, too. You can’t believe your dad had an actual job at your age. You don’t feel ready for anything like that. You’ve only ever known this overmanaged, veal-calf life. Occasionally it occurs to you to wonder: What if taking the risk is the only way to feel ready? What if the solution to adolescent mental health problems is to outgrow adolescence? That may explain why the unending parade of accommodation and intervention, which stretch childhood out like taffy, has only prolonged your torture.