My Boyfriend Won’t Stop Messaging Girls On Facebook Messenger

The song came on by accident.
That was the thing Ashley would remember most, later — not the messages, not the confrontation, not the sound of her own voice breaking in her grandfather’s garage at eleven o’clock at night.
She would remember the song.
Sam Smith. I’m Not the Only One.
She had heard it before. She had seen the music video on YouTube. She had nodded along the way you nod along to a sad song when the sad song is not about you — with appreciation, with the comfortable distance of someone watching someone else’s pain from a safe seat.
She did not have that distance anymore.
She was seventeen years old, and she was sitting on a cold concrete floor in her grandpa’s garage with a sledgehammer in her lap, and now she understood every single word.

Ashley Renner had grown up in a small town in the Ohio River Valley, the kind of place where everyone knows whose car is parked in whose driveway and where news travels faster than cell service.
She was a singer.
Not in the casual way that teenagers sometimes say they’re singers — she was the real kind. The kind who had been performing at church since she was nine, who had been asked to sing at funerals and weddings and school talent shows and the county fair. She had a voice that other people stopped to listen to.
Her choir director had told her three years ago that she had something rare.
Her mother had driven her two hours each way to audition for a regional performing arts program. She had gotten in.
Music was not a hobby for Ashley. It was the thing her life was organized around.

And then she met Jason.

She had met him a year ago, through a friend of a friend at a summer bonfire on someone’s property outside of town.
He was older by a few years — not dramatically older, but enough that it felt significant at the time. He was the kind of boy who seemed like he had already figured something out. He laughed easily. He paid attention when she talked. He had a way of making her feel like the most interesting person in the room, which was a feeling she was not used to and did not know how to resist.
They fell into it fast, the way first loves do.
She gave him everything she had.
That was not a figure of speech.
She gave up the performing arts program because the schedule conflicted with the time they wanted to spend together, and she told herself it was a sacrifice she was making freely, for something real, for something that mattered more. She told herself that singing would always be there. She told herself that a first love was something different.
She told herself a lot of things.
Jason told her he loved her.
He said it early, and he said it often, and he said it in the particular way that makes a person believe it — quietly, directly, without performance.
She believed him.
That was the bet she had made.
That was the thing that would need to be repaid.

Four months ago, they were staying the night at her grandparents’ house.
It was a Sunday. Her grandparents had gone to bed early. She and Jason were in the guest room, and she wanted to put on music.
His phone was on the nightstand.
She picked it up.
She was going to open Spotify.
She accidentally opened Messenger instead.

The message was right there on the screen, from a name she did not recognize.
So when are you going to break up with Ashley to get with another girl?
She read it once.
She read it again.
She put the phone down carefully, the way you put something down when your hands have stopped working properly.
She picked it up again and scrolled.
She read what he had written back.
She did not remember later exactly how long she sat there before she spoke. It felt like a long time. It might have been thirty seconds.
“Hey,” she said.
Jason stirred.
“I accidentally opened your Messenger,” she said.
He was awake very quickly after that.

The conversation that followed was not a fight.
That was the strange thing — it was quiet. It was the kind of quiet that is actually louder than shouting, the kind that comes when someone’s brain is processing something it does not have the right file for.
He said he knew what he did was wrong.
He said he was sorry.
He said it in the tone of someone who had rehearsed the apology before it was needed, which should have told her something.
Ashley looked at him.
Then she smacked him across the face.
She did not do it in rage. She did it the way you do something when your body moves before your mind catches up — cleanly, once, and then she stepped back and looked at her own hand like it belonged to someone else.
“Okay,” she said.
Then she walked out to her grandpa’s garage.
She did not cry in the house. She did not let him see her fall apart. She walked out into the dark and pulled the garage door down behind her and found the old boom box on the workbench and hit play on whatever was already loaded.
Sam Smith came on.
I’m Not the Only One.
She had never understood it before that night.
She understood it now with every cell in her body.
She found the sledgehammer leaning against the back wall — the old one her grandfather used for fence posts — and she sat down on the floor and held it in her lap and listened to the entire song, start to finish, and then listened to it again.
She did not hit anything.
She just held the weight of it.

The sledgehammer.
That was the object that would come back.
Not metaphorically — it would come back the way specific objects come back when they get attached to specific feelings, when the weight of a thing becomes inseparable from the moment you first picked it up.
The sledgehammer was the version of herself she had been holding onto in that garage: not the girl who sang at church and gave up her career and believed everything she was told.
Something harder.
Something heavier.
Something that did not break easily.
She would need it.

The next morning, she went back inside.
She told herself she had a choice. She was seventeen and she was in love for the first time and she had given this boy the parts of herself that you cannot take back, and she had to decide what to do with that.
He came into the kitchen while she was cleaning.
She was scrubbing the counter and trying to keep her mind occupied — her mind was always running, always moving, and when it stopped moving it went somewhere she did not want it to go.
He walked in and she stopped scrubbing.
And it hit her again, all at once — the same wave that had knocked her down in the garage, except this time she was in the kitchen and there was nowhere to go.
She sank to the floor.
Not dramatically. Not intentionally. Her knees just stopped working and she went down and sat there on the kitchen linoleum and put her face in her hands and felt her stomach hurt the way stomachs hurt when something is wrong that cannot be fixed with antacids.

He came and sat down beside her.
He did not say anything for a minute.
Then he said, “I know what I did. And I’m sorry. And I want to do better.”
She looked at him.
She thought about the music program she had quit. She thought about the two-hour drive her mother used to make. She thought about her choir director’s voice: you have something rare.
She thought about the way he had made her feel at that bonfire — like the most interesting person in the room.
“I know you’re sorry,” she said. “And I want to get back together with you. Because I love you.”
She said it clearly.
She said it with full knowledge of what she was doing.
She got back up off the floor.
She picked up the sponge.
She started cleaning again.

He told her he would never do it again.
She tried to believe him.
She genuinely tried.
She installed no apps on her phone that tracked him. She did not go through his messages every night. She gave him the benefit of something that looked like trust, even when the voice in the back of her head — the same voice that was always running, always moving — said things she did not want to hear.
Two weeks ago, she found the messages from Becca.
<!– IMAGE PROMPT #5: Two phone screens side by side — one showing innocent-seeming messages, one showing the ones he forgot to delete. The split-screen of a double life. Graphic design style, moody blue tones. –>
She had not been looking for them, exactly.
She had picked up his phone to check the time and he had left the app open.
He loved deleting his messages. Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. She had noticed that early on — the clean screens, the empty inboxes, the phone that looked like it belonged to someone with very few friends. She had started to understand that this was not minimalism. It was maintenance.
But he had not deleted these.
Becca.
The messages went back further than she expected. They were friendly at first — the casual shorthand of people who had known each other for years. Inside jokes. References to things she was not part of.
Then they were less friendly.
Then they were something else entirely.
She read every message.
Then she put the phone down and stood very still and thought: here we go again.

When she asked about Becca, Jason said what Ashley had already predicted he would say.
“She’s just a friend. We’ve been friends for a really long time.”
“What did she say about us?”
“She said we were a cute couple. She said she couldn’t wait to see our baby someday.”
Ashley looked at him.
“She can’t wait to see our baby,” Ashley repeated.
“Yeah.”
“She’s rooting for us.”
“Yeah.”
She did not say what she already suspected. She filed it away in the part of her brain that was always running and let it run.
She checked his phone calls next. She started noting how long they lasted.
Fourteen minutes. Twenty-two minutes. Thirty-seven minutes, on a Thursday afternoon when he had told her he was watching film with his buddies.
She started keeping a log.
She had never been like this before.
She knew that. She said it out loud to anyone who would listen: he made me this way. She had been innocent. She had been the girl who took things at face value, who trusted her instincts, who assumed the best about people she loved.
He had dismantled that, carefully, over the course of one year.
The girl in the garage with the sledgehammer was not who she had been.
But she was who she was now.

She came to the show because she wanted a fight.
Not a physical one — or not only a physical one. She wanted the confrontation. She wanted to put Becca in a room and make her say out loud what had been happening in those messages. She wanted to look Jason in the eye with an audience around them and hear him explain himself with no exits and no deletes.
She was going to have her first real fight.
She had said so.
She had never been in a real fight before this.
Jerry Springer had, technically, offered her the venue.
She walked out onto that stage with the energy of someone who had been holding something in for two weeks and was done holding it.

Becca came out first.
She was not what Ashley had expected, which was the first thing that threw her.
“You really brought me here to fight me?” Becca said. She said it with a half-smile that was either confidence or a bluff, and Ashley could not immediately tell which.
“Yes,” Ashley said. “I can.”
“Whoop my ass, then,” Becca said. “Your man has slept with me.”
The audience reacted.
Ashley went very still.
She had suspected it. She had run the numbers — the deleted messages, the long phone calls, the specific warmth in Becca’s tone on those chats — and she had arrived at the conclusion that any reasonable person would have arrived at.
Knowing something and hearing it said out loud are different things.
“It’s not my fault,” Becca continued. “You can’t please him.”
Ashley absorbed that.
She absorbed the next part too — the part where Becca looked at her with that half-smile and said, about Ashley’s future child, a child that did not exist yet, a child that Becca had been messaging Jason about with apparent enthusiasm: Tell your kid that. Tell your boy that.
“You’re my cousin,” Ashley said.
The words came out quieter than she had intended.
Becca’s expression did not change.
“I only met you a year ago,” Becca said. “I’ve known him a lot longer.”

Here was the arithmetic: one year.
Ashley had known Jason for one year.
Becca had known Jason for four years.
Ashley had known Becca for one year — the same year she had known Jason, because Becca was Jason’s friend first, and Ashley had only come into that orbit when she came into his.
So Becca had watched Ashley arrive. Had watched Jason introduce them. Had been in those early conversations, the friendly ones, the ones where she said you two are such a cute couple and I can’t wait to see you guys have kids together.
She had said those things knowing what she knew.
She had said I can’t wait to see you have a baby together while she was in the deleted messages on his phone.
“Obviously I lied,” Becca said.
Three words.
Flat. Unapologetic. Said the way you say something when you are done pretending.
Ashley had come here wanting a fight.
She was getting something worse than a fight.
She was getting clarity.

Jason walked out.
He came through the curtain with the specific energy of a man who has had time backstage to think about what he is walking into and has not arrived at a good plan.
He was good-looking. He had always been good-looking. He had one of those faces that made the bad behavior harder to process, because the face kept sending signals that contradicted what the behavior said.
Ashley looked at him.
The audience looked at him.
Becca looked at him.
“Who do you want?” Jerry asked.
Jason took a breath.
“Honestly — I do love Ashley,” he said. He looked at her when he said it. “We’ve been together for a while. But I’ve known Becca for about four years. She’s been my best friend. She’s been there through thick and thin.”
“Obviously I’m more, buddy,” Becca said.
“So which one do you want?” Ashley said. “Do you want her or do you want me?”
He paused.
The pause lasted three full seconds.
In talk show time, three seconds is an eternity.
“They’re both cousins,” he said. “They’re both equally crazy.”
“It’s really that hard?” Ashley said.
“My heart goes to Ashley,” he said finally. “I love Becca as a friend. She’s been there the longest. But — my heart goes to Ashley.”

There was a version of this story where that sentence landed well.
There was a version where Ashley heard my heart goes to Ashley and felt something shift back into place — the specific relief of being chosen, being named, being the one that mattered after all.
She did not feel that.
She felt the pause.
She felt the three seconds.
She felt the word honestly at the beginning, which is a word people put in front of sentences specifically when what follows is not something they have been consistently honest about.
“It seems to be what you do all the time,” she said. “Apologize. Apologize. Apologize.”
“You wanted an apology,” Jason said. “I’m giving you one.”
“I’m not happy.”
“The way it happened — yeah, I did make her this way,” Jason said. He gestured at Ashley when he said her. “I messed up the first time. But I still love her. I went through a lot to get with her.”
“He came to me,” Becca said.
“You didn’t run away,” Jason said. “So you can’t put this all on me.”
“It takes two to tango,” Jerry said.
“Wipe that smile off your face,” Ashley said to Becca. “Because I will be happy to slap it off.”

Becca shrugged.
“You two can have each other,” she said. “I’m good on all this drama.”
She said it with the ease of someone putting down something that was never that heavy for them to begin with.
“But I’m sure you’ll hit me up when you need pleasure,” she added. “So I’ll see you again.”
She said it to Jason.
Not to Ashley.
That was the last thing she said before she was done.
Ashley watched her go.
She thought about the messages. The ones he forgot to delete. She thought about Becca’s face when she’d said obviously I lied — the complete absence of guilt, the half-smile, the shrug.
She thought about the word cousin.
She had grown up in a family where cousins meant something. Where you showed up for each other at funerals and holidays and the hard parts of life, where the fact of shared blood was also the fact of shared loyalty. She had only met Becca a year ago, but she had operated under the assumption that family was family regardless of how recently you’d found each other.
Becca had not been operating under that assumption.
Becca had been operating under a completely different set of rules.

Jason was still in the room.
He was looking at Ashley with the expression he always had when things had gone badly enough that the charm had stopped working — an expression that was genuinely sorry without being genuinely different.
That was the problem.
He was sorry. She believed that.
But sorry and different were not the same thing, and she had been confusing them for a year.
She thought about the music program.
Two hours each way, her mother driving. The audition, the acceptance letter, the folder she had kept on her desk for two weeks before she told him she wasn’t going.
She had given that up for a boy who had her on one phone and Becca on another and probably three other names in the inbox he hadn’t deleted yet.
She thought about her choir director: you have something rare.
She thought about the garage. The sledgehammer. The cold concrete and Sam Smith and the specific understanding that had moved through her body like water finding the lowest point.
She had understood the song because it was about her.
You say I’m crazy, ’cause you don’t think I know what you’ve done.
She knew.
She had known for a long time.
She had known and stayed anyway, because leaving meant admitting that the thing she had traded her singing career for was not what she had been told it was.

She was seventeen.
That was the number that mattered, in the end.
Not the four years Jason had known Becca. Not the one year Ashley had known both of them. Not the fourteen-minute phone calls or the thirty-seven-minute ones.
She was seventeen.
She had her whole voice in front of her — the one her choir director had said was rare, the one she had been developing since she was nine years old on a church stage, the one that could take her somewhere if she let it.
She had stopped letting it.
She had stopped letting it because a boy at a bonfire had made her feel like the most interesting person in the room, and she had made the classic trade: the sure thing for the feeling.
The feeling had cashed out.
The sure thing was still there.
It was still there in the way that real gifts are still there when you come back to them — patient, unchanged, waiting.
She thought about the garage again.
The sledgehammer against her palms.
The song coming through that old boom box.
She had not hit anything with it. She had just held it.
Maybe that had been the wrong call.
Maybe the right call — the one she had not been ready to make in that garage — was to use it to break something open. Not his stuff. Not the walls.
The story she had been telling herself.
The one that said: love is worth what you sacrifice for it.
Love was worth sacrifice, maybe.
But only if the thing you were sacrificing for was real.
What she had been sacrificing for was a deleted inbox and a boy who needed three seconds to say her name.

She did not make a decision right there on the stage.
That was not how real decisions worked.
Real decisions happened later, in the quiet, when the cameras were off and the audience had gone home and you were alone with the version of yourself that had to live with whatever you chose.
She made the television decision — the one that fit the format, the one with the heat and the audience and the moment.
But the real decision was still coming.
She could feel it the way you feel weather coming, that particular shift in the air that says: something is about to change.
She thought about Colorado — no, that was the other story. This was her story. Her town, her stage, her voice.
She thought about the audition folder on her desk.
She had not thrown it away.
She had filed it. She had put it in the bottom drawer of her dresser, under a stack of old notebooks, in the specific way that you file something when you are not ready to let go of it and not ready to look at it.
It was still there.
She knew it was still there.

The sledgehammer was still in her grandfather’s garage too.
That was the thing about objects — they stayed.
He had moved his things in and out of her life for a year: the phone with the clean inbox, the apologies that reset like a counter, the charm that turned on and turned off with a reliability she had started to find almost mechanical.
None of those things stayed.
The sledgehammer stayed.
The folder stayed.
The voice stayed.
She had something rare. Her choir director had said so three years ago, and the world had not done anything in the intervening years to make that less true. The performing arts program had not stopped existing. The two-hour drive was still the same two hours.
She was seventeen.
She had time.
Not unlimited time — no one had that. But she had enough.
Enough to go back to the bottom drawer.
Enough to make the two-hour drive.
Enough to walk onto a different kind of stage, a real one, the kind she had been working toward since she was nine years old on a church platform with her hands at her sides and her eyes closed and the music moving through her like something alive.

She walked off the Jerry Springer stage with her head up.
Not victorious. Not devastated. Just — clear.
The kind of clear that only comes after something is finally named for what it is.
Jason was still in the building somewhere, figuring out what he was going to do next.
Becca was already gone, which was probably the most honest thing she had ever done.
Ashley stepped out into the parking lot and the afternoon was cold and bright and the sky over the Ohio River Valley was the specific blue it gets in late fall when the leaves have come down and there’s nothing left to block the view.
She took a breath.
She thought about Sam Smith.
You say I’m crazy ’cause you don’t think I know what you’ve done.
She knew.
She had always known.
The knowing had not been the problem.
The problem had been what she chose to do with the knowing.
She had chosen wrong, once.
She was not going to choose wrong again.

She called her mother on the drive home.
Her mother answered on the second ring, the way she always answered when Ashley called — like she had been waiting.
“How’d it go?” her mother asked.
“I’m okay,” Ashley said.
Her mother waited. She was good at waiting.
“Mom,” Ashley said. “That performing arts program. Do you know if they still do auditions in the spring?”
A beat of silence.
Then her mother said: “I’ll find out.”
That was all.
That was enough.
Ashley drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off and the Ohio River moving somewhere to her left, wide and brown and certain of its direction.
She was seventeen.
She had a voice.
She had a folder in a bottom drawer and a mother who would make a two-hour drive and a choir director who had told her the truth when she was nine years old.
She had a sledgehammer in her grandfather’s garage.
She was not going to need it for holding anymore.

First loves end.
That is what they do.
Not because they were wrong to begin with.
But because a first love teaches you the shape of what you want.
And then you go find the real thing.
Ashley Renner was seventeen.
She had a voice that could carry.
She was just starting to hear it clearly.

[END]