The Three Versions
A free C1-level English story for language learners, readable online in English, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
A teenager tells three increasingly different versions of the same breakup to three different audiences, until a friend who actually witnessed it leaves no room left to edit.
By the time Larkin had told the story three times, it belonged less to what had actually happened than to whichever audience was currently listening.
At the lunch table, the version was brisk and unbothered: Booker had been "kind of a lot," and Larkin had simply decided, calmly, to end things before junior year got busy. Nobody questioned it, because nobody had any particular reason to, and Larkin appreciated how easily boredom could pass for closure if it was delivered fast enough. Only in retelling it that way did Larkin notice how carefully every actual detail had been left out.
The second version came out that evening in the group chat, typed in fragments between other people's messages about homework. This one admitted a little more: Booker had stopped replying for four days before the breakup, not after it. Larkin had spent most of those four days checking a phone that never lit up. Framing it as Booker's failure rather than Larkin's own hurt made the story easier to type, even if it wasn't, strictly, the more accurate order of events.
The third version arrived almost by accident, late on a Thursday, to Yara, the one friend who had actually been there for the argument itself. She therefore couldn't be told a version that contradicted what she'd witnessed. Talking to her, Larkin ran out of edits to make. What came out instead was the plainer fact underneath both earlier tellings: that Larkin had ended it first, out of fear, the exact moment it seemed like Booker might end it first instead.
"You never said that part at lunch," Yara said, not unkindly.
"I know." Larkin turned a straw wrapper over on the table, not quite looking up. "Saying it out loud there would've made it a whole thing."
"It is a whole thing. You've just been telling three different smaller ones."
Larkin didn't answer right away, turning the wrapper over again, aware of how strange it was that the truest version had needed the fewest words to say. Had anyone at the lunch table asked a single follow-up question, the fast, unbothered version might have held up for another week at least. Nobody had, which was either luck or a sign that everyone already sensed there was more to it than Larkin was offering.
"Do you regret it?" Yara asked. "Ending it, I mean — not how you told it."
"Some days." Larkin shrugged, the kind of shrug that wasn't really an answer. "Mostly I regret how much easier the fake version was to say than the real one."
Yara didn't push further, and the two of them sat there a while longer, the straw wrapper now folded into a small, tight square between Larkin's fingers. Somewhere across the cafeteria, a version of the story Larkin had told at lunch was probably still circulating, unbothered and brisk and almost entirely untrue, moving further from Thursday's version with every retelling it survived.
