AITA for staying silent during a college trip and not explaining myself after a friend started ignoring me and everything blew up?

Hi Reddit. I (18F) am currently a senior high school student, and I’ve been struggling with a situation involving some friends. I don’t know anymore if I’m the asshole for how I handled things—or didn’t handle them.

For context, I have a classmate, K (18M). We used to be close, but he has this habit of ignoring me anytime I don’t respond to him immediately or make eye contact. He assumes I’m mad and then completely shuts down. He won’t talk to me unless I talk first. It’s happened multiple times, and it leaves me crying and emotionally exhausted every time.

A week before our planned college application trip (we were going to apply at a school in a different city, about 2 hours away), K started ignoring me again. I didn’t know what I did wrong—again—and I cried several times that week because of it.

The group was supposed to be: me, my boyfriend J (18M), my friend A (18F) (we’ve been close for two years), her boyfriend S (18M) (also my classmate), another friend N (18F), and K. But I didn’t even know K was coming. On the day of the trip, J and I were waiting at a convenience store, and we went to grab food while waiting. When we got back, K was there. The second I saw him, I felt sick. I told my boyfriend I didn’t think I could go through with it. But I had promised A and N we’d go together, and I didn’t want to let them down—so I went.

The trip was a nightmare. I cried the whole time. No one checked on me. Everyone was chatting and laughing, and it felt like it was just me and my boyfriend in our own world while everyone else ignored me.

When we got to the school, it turned out the admissions office wasn’t open because it was Saturday. Another punch in the gut. I stayed quiet and kept my distance. Eventually, N asked if I was okay. I said “no.” A came up and hugged my waist, asking what was wrong. I was still crying and feeling overwhelmed, so I gently shrugged her off—not out of anger, but because I needed space. She immediately reacted with, “Wow, are you mad at me?” I told her no, but after that, everyone went right back to ignoring me.

The next day, A posted an Instagram story with NIKI’s Backburner and started sharing quotes about being the backburner in friendships. Then she messaged me to say sorry, but assumed the reason I cried was because the school was closed. That really hurt. It made me feel like she thought I was just a brat crying over something so small, when in reality I was struggling with being emotionally shut out.

I didn’t respond immediately. I wanted time to reflect on everything that happened, to figure out if I was in the wrong, and how I even felt about the whole situation. But while I stayed silent, A kept posting things about how ungrateful I am and how she’s always the one being mistreated in friendships.

Then her boyfriend S (my classmate and unfortunately my groupmate for a school project) started messaging people about me. He called me a “babygirl” who cries for sympathy, and said I was a manipulative person. He harassed some of our mutual friends who didn’t want to take sides, demanding they agree with him and A. One of them (B) told me that S wouldn’t stop harassing them for not “choosing” A.

To make things worse, since S and I were groupmates, he refused to talk to me directly. He would only talk to my boyfriend (who is also in our class), and my boyfriend had to relay the messages back to me. It was extremely awkward and uncomfortable, but I stayed silent. I didn’t want to make things worse, and I knew if I spoke up, they might twist my words again and make me look like the bad guy.

Eventually, I messaged A. I apologized for not replying earlier and explained that I never got to tell my side of the story. I told her I was sorry for how things turned out, and that I respected her if she chose to cut me off. I also thanked her for being a good friend before everything went wrong. She said she wasn’t mad at me… but we’ve never spoken since.

S never apologized. K never spoke to me again either. I’ve continued to interact with people at school as normally as I can, even though I still see A reposting quotes about how people take advantage of her kindness and hurt her. B told me A was mostly upset that I didn’t talk to them on the trip and that she felt embarrassed when I shrugged her off. She thought I was mad at her, when I really wasn’t. She just didn’t try to understand what was really going on with me.

S fueled the whole situation even more by talking badly about me and turning it into some dramatic beef, when it honestly just started as me being emotionally overwhelmed by K’s silent treatment. Somehow, A feels like I took advantage of her kindness and made her the victim. And maybe I did hurt her without realizing. But I was hurting too. And I stayed silent through all of it to avoid more drama.

So… AITA for not talking to them during the trip, not responding right away, and for just keeping my distance while trying to process everything?