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Marilyn P. Perkins, 1100 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA (2026)

09/17/2026

My friend group consists of five girls, and for three years, I have been the unspoken outlier. We’re sixteen, an age where physical differences feel incredibly loud. I am on the bigger side. My friends are not.

It’s a silent dynamic you learn to navigate. I’m the one who stands in the back of group photos or holds the bags while they share a single dressing room. They’ve never explicitly called me fat, but the distinction is always there.

I accepted it because I loved them, and you swallow a lot of discomfort at sixteen just to belong. Last night, that dynamic became the only thing in the room.

We had a sleepover at Amanda’s house. All five of us were crammed into her queen-size mattress. It was ridiculous from the start.

A queen bed barely fits three teenagers, let alone five. For twenty minutes, it was a mess of tangled legs, accidental elbows, and everyone trying to find a few inches of neutral territory. Eventually, Amanda huffed heavily in the dark.

""This is impossible,"" she announced to the ceiling. ""There’s not enough room. Somebody needs to sleep on the floor. I'll get extra blankets.""

The silence that followed wasn't normal. It was heavy, and every ounce of it was directed squarely at me. I could feel four pairs of eyes shifting toward my side of the bed.

I knew the script. I was the biggest, so the unspoken math dictated I should exile myself to the carpet. Then the chorus started.

""I’m literally curled into a tiny ball,"" Taylor whispered. ""I barely take up a foot.""

""Same,"" another friend chimed in. ""I’m so small I’m basically falling off the edge, so it really shouldn't be me.""

They were boxing me in, waiting for me to take the hint. A hot wave of shame rushed into my chest, quickly followed by pure stubbornness. If they wanted me on the floor, they would have to say it directly.

I refused to volunteer for my own degradation, so I stayed perfectly still. When it became clear I wasn't budging, Amanda let out a theatrical sigh, climbed out of bed, and grabbed a pillow.

""Fine. I’ll sleep on the floor in my own house,"" she said, acting like a martyr.

Minutes later, Taylor’s voice cut through the dark. ""You shouldn't be on the floor, Amanda. The person who takes up the absolute most space should be down there. It’s common sense.""

Quiet agreements echoed around the room. For an hour, they kept tossing out indirect insults about how much better the bed felt and how sorry they were for Amanda. I lay there, my face burning, staring at the wall until exhaustion finally knocked them out.

09/17/2026

I'm a twenty-three-year-old le***an and I've been part of the same core friend group since my school days. We're a solid bunch of eleven people, and eight of us went to middle and high school together. I finally came out to all of them in March 2023. It felt like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, and everyone was super supportive.

Coincidentally, our group got a new member around the very same time. Her name's Mary, and she's twenty-four. I came out shortly after she got added to all of the group chats. When the news broke, she immediately made a joke about how she must've awakened something in me. I laughed it off right away and thought that was the end of it.

Well, it wasn't the end. She'd repeatedly make these ongoing ""jokes"" about how she was my grand gay awakening. She claimed it was a really weird coincidence that I came out right after she joined the friend group. At first, I just rolled my eyes and ignored the teasing, figuring she'd drop the subject eventually once the novelty wore off.

After a while, it stopped being funny. By that point, the teasing had been going on for five straight months. I took her aside privately to have a serious chat. I told her straight up that these constant comments make me uncomfortable and asked her to stop. She just brushed me off like my feelings didn't matter.

The comments didn't get any less frequent after our talk. In fact, she started making them in front of people outside the friend group too. It became really annoying to deal with on a regular basis. Whenever she said these things to strangers, I made a point of correcting her on the spot.

She always kinda laughed about my corrections, making me look like the punchline. I even tried ""joking"" back that she wasn't my type, hoping she'd take the hint. But I think my constant insisting that she was lying somehow made it seem like she was actually right, if that makes sense. It was beyond frustrating to deal with her ego.

Two days ago, I reached my final straw. We all went to a party and Mary knew a girl there named Jeanie, who's also twenty-four. Mary waved the rest of us over to introduce us to her friend. Turns out Jeanie was also gay, which Mary made a specific point of telling me directly.

Before I could even say a single word of greeting, she turned back to Jeanie and pointed right at me. She went, ""She's gay too, you know. But don't get your hopes up too high, she kinda has a crush on me."" I was really annoyed and fed up with the narrative.

I looked at her and said, ""You know that's not true, stop telling people that."" To my dismay, she just smirked and said, ""You don't need to be embarrassed, I'm pretty hot"" in a joking tone. I lost my patience right then and there.

I snapped at her and said, ""That's a weird way to say 'effing ugly'."" The entire mood shifted instantly. She went dead quiet, her face dropping in shock. Without another word, she quickly excused herself and walked away from us.

Yesterday, I got a long message from her about how hurt and disappointed she was by my insult. Most of our mutual friends are on my side, except for two who weren't there and refuse to take sides. Fair enough, I guess. But a lot of other people who witnessed the exchange have been blowing up my phone.

They're telling me over and over how mean what I said was. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I went too far by attacking her looks. I'm just so exhausted by her main character syndrome. Did I overreact to her annoying jokes?

09/17/2026

I'm twenty-seven, pregnant, and constantly surrounded by children. I'm three weeks away from my due date with my own baby. On top of that, I'm the trusted backup babysitter for our entire friend group.

I'm used to chaos, noise, and an array of different toddler personalities in my house. My parenting style is quiet and communicative. I believe in redirection and talking things through rather than physical punishment.

My friend Karen operates on a completely different wavelength. She's the type of mother who will raise her voice to rattle the windows. If her kids don't listen to her yelling, they're going to feel a heavy hand immediately after.

We've clashed over this before, but I always tried to keep the peace. The problem is that her oldest son is the most aggressively angry child I've ever encountered. I don't blame him for his temperament, given how he's raised, but he's terrifying.

He refuses to follow even the simplest directions without lashing out violently. He goes out of his way to physically hurt anything in his path without a single warning sign. He'll attack my cat, the older kids, the toddlers, and even the potted houseplants.

The most chilling part is his reaction after he hurts someone. He always laughs, a bright, happy sound, and then follows it up with a shrieking noise that echoes through the house. It feels like dealing with a horror movie character in real life.

Yesterday afternoon, I was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. The house was relatively calm for once, with the littler kids playing quietly in the living room. Karen's son walked up to me and demanded a snack.

Before I could even lift my head from the soapy water, he swung his arm back. He slapped me directly across the face as hard as a young boy possibly could. The sharp sting radiated through my cheek and jaw.

It took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to start crying right there. I knew if I reacted with panic or tears, it would completely freak out my youngest babies in the next room. I'd never been genuinely afraid of a child in my care until that exact second.

I immediately picked him up and put him in my spare bedroom for a time-out. I needed to separate him from the other children so I could calm down. I also needed to contain the massive amount of physical damage he was capable of doing.

Once the door was shut, I pulled my phone out with trembling hands. I called Karen at her office and told her she needed to come get her son immediately. I even offered to keep watching her youngest child to help her save money on childcare.

She let out an annoyed sigh and told me he wasn't really that bad. She claimed it was entirely unfair of me to refuse to watch him when I'd never kicked anyone else's kid out before. She told me I just needed to learn how to better manage the children in my care.

I finally snapped and told her that none of our other friends were raising a child who acted like a feral animal. I asked her why my spare bedroom was currently being torn apart if her son was so easy to handle. I told her I couldn't live in constant fear that he was going to severely injure me or a toddler.

She coldly replied that she couldn't leave work and hung up on me.

09/17/2026

Am I wrong for asking my best friend and her boyfriend to leave my baby shower after she brought him despite a no-partners invitation — and now she says I embarrassed her in front of everyone?

Sara and I have been close since high school. She's an events planner, and after she'd flaked on our plans twice to spend time with her new boyfriend Ted instead, she offered to plan my baby shower to make up for it. I said yes and organized the catering.

I'd been clear about the setup: all girls, no partners. The one exception was for my friend Amy, who's gay — I'd specifically included Amy's girlfriend because I wanted her there. Sara had the full guest list and knew exactly how things were structured.

The day of the shower, Sara arrived with Ted. I assumed he was dropping her off. He wasn't. He took his coat off and it became clear he was planning to stay. I pulled Sara aside and told her we didn't have enough food for him.

She said they could share a plate. My sister stepped in and asked Sara directly if she could ask Ted to leave. Sara said if Ted left, she'd leave too.

I asked them both to go. The shower went on without her — everyone else made it a good afternoon and I'm grateful for that — but I missed Sara the whole time.

Today Sara messaged me upset that I'd kicked her out and embarrassed her. I also got a text from Ted, who'd gotten my number from Sara, explaining that since he'd heard Amy's partner was coming he figured he could come too. He'd used the one exception I'd made — a specific, named exception for a specific person — to justify showing up to an explicitly no-partners event.

What I keep coming back to is that Sara planned this event. She had the full guest list. She knew about Amy's exception and the reason for it. And then she used that exception as cover for bringing her boyfriend, put me in the position of having to either accept it or make a scene on my own baby shower day, and left when I held the line.

I don't know what I was supposed to do differently. I'd been clear. She knew.

Sara and I'd been friends since high school and she's done a lot for me. I'm not trying to blow that up over one thing. But she showed up to an event she planned with the guest list in hand and brought her boyfriend anyway. Then she left when I held the line and is now telling me I embarrassed her. I'm still not sure how I was supposed to handle that differently on my own baby shower day.

Am I the as***le?

09/17/2026

Meg and I have been friends since our freshman year of college, which is honestly the only reason I agreed to surrender my Tuesday afternoon in the first place. She’s high-maintenance, the type of friend who assumes her minor inconveniences are everyone else’s major emergencies. But she had just signed a lease on a new apartment following a devastating, drawn-out breakup.

When she called me earlier that week, she sounded genuinely overwhelmed and fragile. She swore she had zero eye for interior design, that she trusted my taste implicitly, and that she couldn't bear the thought of navigating a massive furniture store by herself. I work from home as a freelance graphic designer, so giving up my afternoon meant I had to stay awake until 2 a.m. the night before to finish a client revision.

But I did it, because that is what you do when someone you have known for a decade asks for your support. We agreed to meet at a massive, warehouse-style home goods store across town at exactly 3 PM. I fought through my own share of midday traffic and parked myself near the main entrance at 2:55.

At 3:10, my phone buzzed with a text from Meg, breezily informing me that she was just now leaving her house. It was annoying, but fine. I texted back telling her I was already inside and to just let me know when she pulled into the parking lot.

I decided to start browsing so I wasn't just standing rigidly by the automatic doors looking like loss prevention. By 3:30, I had done an agonizingly slow lap of the entire rug department. She texted again claiming she was stuck in crazy traffic and that her GPS showed complete gridlock on the interstate.

I told her it was okay, there was no rush, and to just drive safe. I eventually abandoned my empty shopping cart in an aisle because it was getting cumbersome, and I just started wandering aimlessly through the store. By 4:05, I was on my third rotation through the lighting and fixtures section.

My phone chimed with another update from her, promising she was almost there. I was starting to get genuinely frustrated. The store was steadily filling up with after-work shoppers, and my feet were throbbing in shoes not meant for concrete floors.

Every time a cheerful employee approached to ask if I needed help, I had to do the embarrassed little laugh and explain that I was just waiting for a friend who was running late. But I stayed, because she had explicitly told me she was counting on me. I didn't want her to finally arrive only to find that her friend had bailed.

By 4:45, however, my goodwill had completely evaporated. My lower back was aching, I was parched, and the ridiculousness of the situation was settling over me heavily. I stopped dead in the middle of the kitchenware aisle and decided I was officially done.

I didn't care if she was pulling into a parking space right at that exact second. I had carved out a massive window of my time, and she had shown zero respect for it.

09/17/2026

Am I wrong for getting mad at my friend who shaved off half my beard as a prank while I slept?

My friend thought it'd be funny to shave off half my beard while I was sleeping. I woke up, walked to the mirror, and felt immediate horror. He was already laughing before I'd even processed what I was looking at.

I got angry. I told him to get out of my house, and he did. Then I shaved off the rest myself because there's no good way to walk around with half a beard. That was a week ago and we haven't spoken since.

I won't reach out until he apologizes. My other friends think I'm being too sensitive — they keep saying it'll grow back and that I'm acting like a jerk about it. To them, it's a harmless prank.

But here's what they're missing: growing a beard isn't passive. I'd been actively working on mine for six months. I oiled it daily, shampooed it, tracked the growth, and felt genuinely proud when it finally reached the length I'd been aiming for.

That's half a year of consistency that he decided to undo for a laugh. It's not just about vanity — it's about someone reaching into your life and destroying something you worked on, without asking, while you were asleep. That's a violation, even if the result is temporary.

""It'll grow back"" isn't an argument that it wasn't wrong. A lot of things can be undone and still be a serious breach of trust. The fact that time fixes the outcome doesn't mean the act was acceptable.

I've seen people argue that getting this upset over hair is an overreaction. But I'd ask those people to imagine spending six months on anything — a project, a garden, a skill — and having someone casually destroy it while thinking it's hilarious. It's about what it represents, not just the hair itself.

He didn't ask. He didn't warn me. He did it while I was unconscious and then laughed in my face. That's not a prank that went too far — that's just disrespect dressed up as humor.

I'm not refusing to speak to him out of spite. I'm waiting for an acknowledgment that what he did wasn't okay. That's a pretty basic expectation between friends.

My other friends can call me a jerk if they want. But I don't think expecting an apology for someone destroying something I worked on for six months makes me oversensitive.

Am I wrong?

09/17/2026

I am the legal guardian of my best friend's eight-year-old daughter, and I never anticipated that my biggest job would be protecting this little girl from the woman who gave birth to her. Taking over custody wasn't a casual favor or a temporary arrangement.

It was done formally through the family courts after a twelve-month stretch that completely shattered her entire universe. Her year from hell started when her parents' marriage spectacularly unraveled, ending with the man she called dad walking out the door.

He had been in her life since she was six months old, but he packed his things, took his biological children, and made it explicitly clear he wanted nothing to do with her. Watching an innocent child try to understand why the only father she has ever known just erased her from his life is a specific kind of heartbreak.

Then the grieving started, and it never seemed to stop. Over the next few months, she lost her childhood best friend to a sudden illness, and shortly after, her grandmother passed away. On top of the severe mental trauma, her physical health took a nosedive, resulting in four separate hospital admissions and two difficult surgeries that left her exhausted.

But the single most dangerous threat she lives with on a daily basis is a severe, life-threatening nut allergy. It is not a mild intolerance; it is full-blown anaphylaxis that has already caused two of her previous emergency room visits.

Keeping her safe requires a level of constant, exhausting vigilance that I have built my life around. I read every single label, I ban outside baked goods, and there are EpiPens stashed in my purse and every room of my house.

Despite all of the chaos, I genuinely wanted to keep her mother in the picture. There is no rigid, court-mandated visitation schedule because I always believed flexibility would be healthier.

Usually, I host the visits at my place since my house is conveniently located right on her mother's commute home from work. It allows them to spend quality time together in a perfectly controlled, safe environment, and lets her mom tuck her into bed.

Recently, her mother went back to court and secured official visitation rights with her younger children—Emma's half-siblings. Emma missed them terribly, so I agreed to start bringing her over to her mom's place on the weekends they were there.

Normally, I stay the entire time to manage the chaos and keep a close eye on everything. But last weekend, I had a mandatory work shift I absolutely could not trade away.

I drove her over, stayed for about half an hour to make sure the environment looked safe, and then left for my office. To ensure she was properly looked after, I paid my trusted babysitter to swing by and pick her up a few hours later.

09/16/2026

About a month back, my husband and I got married in a very small church wedding with just family and close friends. My friend David is actually a professional photographer, and he's kinda famous in our city for his amazing work. When I first told him about my upcoming wedding, he graciously offered to do the photos for free as a wedding gift.

We were thrilled and thought it was such a generous offer from him. Yesterday, we finally received the highly anticipated wedding pics in our email. Well, I quickly realized he's edited the heck out of my face and body without my permission.

The first major thing I noticed was that he's purposely made my waist smaller. He apparently did this just to get that trendy hourglass appearance that you see everywhere. The next thing he did was to edit my rather pointy nose into a small, button-like one.

In some pictures where my side profile is clearly visible, he's actually edited out my natural dorsal hump. The end result still looks like me, but also like every generic Instagram model you see online. I quite like my nose in real life, and I quite liked the way I looked on my wedding day.

I immediately called him up to ask if he still had the unedited versions of these pics. I was hoping we could just revert back to the originals and call it a day. He casually told me that he's already deleted those, which broke my heart.

I firmly told him that he shouldn't have photoshopped my wedding pics without asking first. I explained that it ruined the whole thing for me because I don't look like myself. He argued back, saying that he only made subtle changes to my appearance.

He claimed these are changes that most of his clients actively ask him to do. He said that's exactly why he was being proactive in my case, assuming I'd want the same treatment. I told him that it was very stupid to assume that everyone likes or wants the exact same thing.

He didn't think he was wrong at all and said that he was just trying to do a nice thing. He then had the nerve to call me ungrateful for his hard work. I told all of this to a common friend to see if I was crazy.

She thinks I'm definitely overreacting because all he did was make me look prettier in her eyes. I just wanted my wedding photos to reflect reality, not some photoshopped fantasy. Am I wrong?

09/16/2026

My partner and I have been entirely child-free by choice for the decade we have been together. We do not want kids, we do not want a dog, we like our quiet mornings and our disposable income. Our life is built around spontaneous trips, scuba diving in deep water, and doing exactly what we want to do on a Saturday afternoon.

My best friend since middle school took a different path. She and her husband had an unplanned pregnancy last year, and despite the shock, they were thrilled. We stepped up and spent all fall celebrating them, throwing our energy into their rushed engagement, a beautiful wedding, and an expensive baby shower.

I accepted the role of godmother when they asked. We clarified upfront that it was a symbolic gesture, not a legal guardianship in their will, and I have loved watching how much joy this child has brought them. I enjoy snuggling the baby when we visit, but loving her kid for an hour on a Tuesday evening is very different from altering my entire lifestyle.

Before the baby arrived, the four of us did absolutely everything together. We spent three nights a week having dinner at each other's places, and almost every weekend was booked with shared plans. We took massive, exhausting vacations to Europe, exploring cities until midnight, and spent weeks lounging on remote beaches with no schedule at all.

Now, their baby is eight months old and, by their own admission, still does not sleep through the night. I go to their house constantly, at least once a week if not more. We are highly involved friends and we have absolutely not ghosted them, which makes their recent behavior so frustrating.

Recently, my partner and I started planning a major, two-week diving trip just for the two of us. We desperately need a break, and we purposely kept the details quiet because every time we mention leaving the state, my friend insists they should come along.

She keeps telling me how easy it is to travel with an infant, how we can all still sit on the beach, and how nothing actually has to change. I love her, but I do not want to be beholden to a baby's schedule on my one big vacation of the year. I do not want to listen to a screaming child at two in the morning in a shared rental house.

Lately, she has started throwing in comments about how great my partner and I would be at raising kids, and how much she wants her baby to have our future children to play with. It feels incredibly dismissive of the life choices we have clearly communicated for years.

Because of all this, we booked our diving trip in total silence. We picked a spot halfway across the world, finalized the dates, and decided we would just tell them we were going away on a private retreat. It felt cowardly, but we wanted to protect the friendship from a massive argument we knew was coming.

09/16/2026

I've got this very frustrating roommate situation right now, and I really don't know what to do next. I'm dealing with sensitive skin, so I've always bought this special, hard-to-find face wash to keep my acne away. It's a pricey product that I order online, and it generally lasts me a long time.

A few months ago, I started noticing that I'm running out of the cleanser much faster than usual. My roommates know about this special face wash, because they've actually helped me look for it in the mail when a delivery got delayed. They were the ones who told me my package arrived that day.

Around the same time, I noticed the roommate who shares my bathroom hadn't bought a new cleanser for weeks. I got suspicious that she'd been secretly dipping into my pricey stash without asking me. She's the only one with access to that bathroom, so the math wasn't looking great for her innocence.

I went on a two-week vacation last month, and I decided I'd figure out the truth once and for all. We've got a kitchen food scale, and we're all allowed to use it whenever we need. I put my bottle on the scale before leaving, and it weighed exactly eight point three ounces.

When I finally got back from my trip, I grabbed the bottle and placed it right on the scale again. It weighed six point nine ounces, which meant someone had definitely used it. The missing ounce and a half proved she'd been washing her face with my premium stuff almost every single day.

I went up to her and asked her nicely to please stop taking my things without permission. She quickly denied everything right away, probably because the bottle's opaque and she thought I couldn't see inside. She figured she'd get away with her little lie since the liquid level wasn't visible from the outside.

That's when I dropped the bomb and revealed that I'd actually weighed the bottle before my trip. I told her the exact math, showing that there wasn't any room for debate about the missing product. Her face turned bright red, and she couldn't formulate a proper excuse after hearing the hard evidence.

Now she's been avoiding me for days, acting like I'm the one who did something wrong. She told our other roommates I'm a controlling person, and she claims normal people wouldn't ever weigh their beauty supplies. She thinks sneaking a little bit of face wash isn't a big deal, but I firmly disagree.

I genuinely don't know how to handle the resulting tension in our shared apartment anymore. I'm wondering if I should apologize for making things weird, or if I should just stand my ground to protect my property. Am I wrong?

Marilyn P. Perkins

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