OMIGOD! Friends...!

That was a really, really dumb thing to do. Kind of malicious, too. That part of it doesn’t surprise me, seeing who it came from. You’d think she’d have more sense. On the other hand, no, it’s completely in character. That’s how I feel now. If you’d asked me a year ago I would have defended her. But not now. We’re in a different ball game, so to speak.

Back then, we were friends. More than that, we were best friends. And now, nothing. Not exactly nothing, she’s in my face all the time and it bugs the hell out of me. I keep telling her to just back off, leave me alone, but she just won’t. She’s a prime-time bitch, that’s what she is.

I felt really sorry for her at first. Maybe not exactly sorry, but kind of bad, you know? Like, we had a lot going together when we were friends. We could depend on one another. So I thought. Sure, she was kind of goofy sometimes, what old people call a Tom-boy, but so what? That aspect of her character was attractive to me, I liked it. She wasn’t like everyone else; she had something different about her. We did share that; we were both different. We just didn’t go with the flow, know what I mean?

Anything that’s ‘popular’, I just won’t have anything to do with it. I hate it when everyone does the same thing. People should use their individuality, we’re all different even though we’re all alike in certain ways. We should cultivate those aspects of our personalities, I think, that are unique to us. So, I liked her goofiness and we had a lot of fun together.

Right now, though, where I am at this very moment, I’ve come to a conclusion that would never have occurred to me before. Sometimes we laughed together, and sometimes it only seemed as though we were laughing in tandem. Sometimes, though I wasn’t aware of it back then, not entirely - sometimes I laughed at her. Big difference.

Anyway, we didn’t mind being odd-couple-out, because we had one another. We had four years of being one another’s best friends. I was steadfast, more or less, though I did deviate from time to time, and hang out with some other kids, and that really pissed her off. But guess what? She did the same thing, so big deal. My Mom always said to me that I should fan out a little, get to know other girls a little more, not to judge them on surface issues. I hate to admit it, but sometimes she’s right.

The last two years, though, grades 7 and 8, we were pretty cool together. One thing I’ll never forget, when I first came to the school after we moved to the area, everyone was just too stuck-up to speak to me. She’s the only one who did. I’ll never forget that. I was so grateful to her. And even when we weren’t so close as we were later, I never forgot that about her. But a lot of things happened between then and now. Almost five years, for one thing, but a whole lot of other things, too.

No one could believe it when she told Todd that Morgan was getting ready to dump him, and then she turned around and told Morgan that Todd was getting tired of her and was ready to call it quits. I can’t understand why either of them believed her. She was just jealous of them, I guess. But if either of them had any sense they would have realized that neither of them would ever treat her as a confidant. They weren’t especially friendly with her, to begin with. Seems she planted a nasty little seed, and even though they found out later that she was lying, things were off between them.

And that was really too bad. She went around boasting to everyone about what she’d done, thought that was pretty smart. I just ignored her, didn’t say much of anything, just shrugged. She thought by doing that people would admire her, and I wondered where the hell she was coming from with that, but didn’t say anything, because that’s around the time when things began cooling off between us.

So she thought she was pretty smart, getting Todd and Morgan to break up. I thought it was cretinous, to tell the truth, because they really liked each other, they shared the same interests, they were both jocks and lived close to one another, the same neighbourhood, and they were kind of cute together, know what I mean?

So wasn’t she surprised with the reaction she got when she proudly informed everyone of what she’d done. All the girls were incensed that she’d do something like that, even the girls who didn’t like Morgan. No one would talk to her. Me, like I said, I didn’t care all that much. She and I weren’t talking much to one another, anyway. Because she’d been talking about me behind my back. When I found out I went right up to her and asked why she would say those things about me. Without batting an eyelash she just said, why not, it’s true. So what can you do about someone like that? She made her own bed, I let her lie in it. Before, I would’ve defended her, found some plausible excuse for her behaviour.

She didn’t much like it, being estranged from me, and suddenly because of her own stupidity, everyone keeping their distance from her. She became the class pariah, everyone was angry with her, the guys and the girls both. She hardly anticipated that kind of reaction to her little bit of emotional manipulation.

So she invented a story of what I can only describe as brotherly love, otherwise known as incestuous abuse, telling everyone that she was a victim, and because of her state of mind resulting from that she wasn’t herself and that accounted for what she’d done.

Of course everyone was immediately contrite, and ready to forgive her anything, as though they needed to make amends to her for behaving so coldly toward her. I know her family and I know that none of what she said actually happened. It’s just that it was the only thing she could think of that would make people feel guilty about isolating her, about blaming her for what had happened with Todd and Morgan. Even they felt horrible for her, and went out of their way to try to make her ‘feel better’ about herself.

When I told my Mom, she laughed and said sooner or later that tangled web of lies would come back to haunt her. Not that I tell my Mom all that much. Just some things, to see her reaction. I don’t always agree with her conclusions. But it’s interesting. On this occasion, there was no arguing with what she said.

I don’t, actually, myself, like to say things that aren’t really factual. If I’m really pushed into a corner I might try to pass one off, but carefully, nothing too stupid. This latest stupid stunt did the trick for me, though, and I felt it was past time to make a clean break. Not that I initiated it, I didn’t.

But that’s what catapulted me into a new set of friends, people whom I really like, though I‘d kind of given them short shrift up to now. I thought they were stuck-up, just too fixated on themselves, but I learned otherwise. It’s like my Mom said, it was about time I reached out a little more, broadened my horizons, made other contacts and friends, rather than rely on my, what she called ‘close-minded vision’ of other people based on initial impressions.

And all of a sudden I began to notice things. Of course this really has nothing much to do with my new friends, the girls that I’ve really come to appreciate. Of whom there’s one exception, who drives me absolutely insane.

There’s two Brendas, one’s now my absolute best friend, the other drives me to distraction. It’s like this kid doesn’t have an original thought in her head. She keeps pumping me for my perceptions and attitudes, and then she reflects them. My Mom tells me that's a symptom of a sincere form of flattery. Means nothing to me. I'm just irked all to hell by this kid.

She’ll say something when the group of us is together, something that sounds profound, coming from her, and I realize she’s just repeating something I said to her the day before. She follows me around like a little puppy, it’s really, really irritating. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I don’t say anything, but I can’t respect her, one little iota.

She doesn’t seem to do that with anyone else, just me. Why me? I wish she’d just kind of go away. Follow someone else. Stop cozying up to me. I don’t like it when she does that, it makes me nervous. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m just going to get so annoyed by something she does that I’ll blurt out how I feel about her. And I don’t really want to do that.

It must be awful, after all, not having the mental capacity to know what you like without asking someone else their opinion, and then repeating what they say. My Mom said it’s probably a symptom of low self-esteem, but I don’t care what it represents. It makes me nauseated, and I wish she’d just go away.

Good thing we’ve got guys around, to break the tedium of girls’ stuff. I find they’re just easier to get along with. They just take you for what you are. You don’t have to prove anything with them. And they’re a whole lot funnier, too, the way they crack jokes like it’s the most natural thing, which it should be.

Not like the girls, always looking for meaning in stupid stunts, ready to jump on someone for something said in all innocence. I guess I’m a lot more reticent with the girls than with the guys, come to think of it.

What I really meant to mention, though, is how I’ve been noticing lately how talented Corey is. Funny I never noticed before. But that guy is amazing. I’ve never seen anyone who could skateboard like he can, throw that basketball right into the hoop every blinkin' time, skate rings around all the other guys playing hockey, exhibit such grace and skill playing soccer. And he’s no dummy in class, either.

I’ve also noticed that he’s always looking at me. I guess I wouldn’t notice that if I weren’t also kind of looking at him. He’s got this cute smile when he sees me looking at him. I feel like smiling back, but I don’t.

And I wonder what he’s thinking. He’s a little more reserved than the other guys, and I like that. It’s the way I am with the girls. I’m just not a joiner, more of a loner, myself, even though I do like to be around the other kids. On my terms.

I don’t try to ingratiate myself with anyone, and they all know that. He’s cool, I like that, isn’t anxious to be on anyone’s team, seems like he’s all right with his own opinion, not caring all that much if he seems different from everyone else. That’s me, too. I make up my own mind and if I don’t care what everyone else thinks.

My friends keep sending me invitations to join them on Facebook. Well, I’m not interested in that, and I know everyone’s got a Facebook account but me, but that doesn’t bother me. I just think the whole idea is kind of stupid. It’s just not what I’m interested in. I’m cool with keeping in touch with my friends, but this whole social network stuff is gross, fine for whoever likes it, but that’s just not me.

I have to admit I'm always texting my friends. We text constantly. Just something we do. I like that, because somehow it's become a part of my life, and it's fun to keep in touch, just flash one another these silly little messages back and forth. But that's different, in my opinion. Anyway, I have no intention of broadening my social networking as it were, to include another 'window of opportunity', as some of my friends say, to keep in touch.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing more and more that I’m being noticed more and more. And that’s cool. It wouldn’t be if I didn’t like whoever it was that was doing the noticing. But in this particular instance, I like that he’s sending me all those signals. I just wonder why he’s taking so long getting around to doing something concrete about it.