All These Friends I Have Known

I have had a lot of friends in my life, and looking back, it appears to me that most of them were pretty fucked up in the head. Now, I'm not saying that I am a perfect individual. In some cases I think there were cultural clashes, even with friends from the neighborhood I grew up in.

I had one friend who was a pretty alright person, except when it came to money. Now, at the time, I was a pretty big mooch. But I always repaid my debts and I would like to point out that I was fifteen and had no way to make money to begin with.  She always made sure I paid her back, no matter if I had to scrub toilets to get the money. One day, when out to a dinner her mother had invited me to, I realized just where she got this tendency. My friend pulled me aside and told me her mother got really offended by me. I asked why, because I have a big, loud mouth and this is usually how I offend people. She looked me dead in the eye, and without any hint of embarrassment for her mother, said, "She's mad because we've taken you out to dinner twice now and you've never offered to foot the bill."

Let me remind you I was fifteen and had a small side job cleaning houses for sick elderly people. I literally made money scraping grease off of counters and washing soiled sheets, so naturally I should pay for a dinner I was invited to. Never mind that these jobs were infrequent. Never mind that I was a minor and she was a working professional. Never mind that I had already chipped in for fucking gas. But I realize that this is how my friend was raised and it was a cultural difference. Once I got a paycheck, I blew through it buying friends CDs and tacos because I liked their company. This wasn't the case with my friend's family.

I had another friend who only hung around with me because I had a lot of hot girlfriends who were dumb as a box of rocks and twice as talkative. He would date one friend and bemoan to me about how little they had to talk about, then he'd move on to the next one when he got bored. He may seem like a total asshat, and eventually I completely cut him out of my life. But his father was a huge womanizer who constantly complained that he got tied down to this poor guy's mom, and I realize the kid just wanted to avoid the same fate.

Some kids, however, are just plain old fucked up right in their damn heads. Take Sophie, for instance. Sophie and I were inseparable for a good chunk of high school. It was in Sophie's basement that I had my first drink: she wanted to make me a rum and coke, but could only find Sprite and extra dark Jamaican rum. She tried to lighten it up with lemon juice and cherry syrup from her snow cone machine, as well as a shot of Baileys for extra malice. At the time, she didn't tell me what I was drinking. I credit my first sip of this horrendous drink as the reason I did not drink for the rest of high school and most of college. It was just that horribly foul.

We shared common hatreds for our grammar school: she, the isolated new kid who was never replaced by a newer new kid, me the bookish kid with the flood pants who got rocks thrown at her (in my school mates' defense, I did smell pretty bad sometimes). One Halloween we gathered all her grandmother's extra large underwear and some truly outrageous 40s-era coned bras and decorated her grammar school's trees in a misguided, nerdy act of vengeance. I think the only person we were avenged against was her poor grandmother, who spent the rest of our friendship telling us the importance of proper breast support.

Sophie told me some ridiculous things from time to time. One was that she was the daughter of a wealthy Saudi prince. When she was born, her mother made her father angry (most likely by being totally independent and awesome, Sophie would beam). "Well then my mother went over there and took me right back!" she would conclude, adding that she and her mother were always best friends and she was glad she got to keep her clitoris. I didn't understand the mechanics of sex until I was a sophomore in high school, and the religion teacher begrudgingly told us every oh-Jesus-why-do-they-have-a-nun-teaching-this detail, so I wasn't quite sure what that meant. In any case, the story was pretty unbelievable so I just took it with a grain of salt. The next story she told me was not, however.

I had another friend, Mark, who was an unapologetic Himbo. One day, she pulled me aside and said, "Guess what! I gave Mark a hand job!" Not knowing quite what that meant (I think I assumed rubbing his nipples or something equally insane, looking back) I just said, "Oh, good for you then. Are you his girlfriend now?" Sophie chugged on a stolen cigarette and said, "Fuck that! Now that I know how to get a guy off, I want to play the field a little." I shrugged and went back to my French notes, pretending I was too busy to care instead of just being ignorant. As high school is with girls who give hand jobs, word got around FAST. The next thing I know, Mark is calling me saying, "Tell your friend Sophie that I would rather fuck a manhole than let her touch my dick." Had she offered, I'm sure he wouldn't have turned her down. This boy once failed a history test because it was a little drafty in the attractive teacher's classroom, if you catch my drift. But it was just one more lie to confuse the hell out of me. Why was she trying to impress me with all this nonsense? We were already friends.

Then one day, Sophie just stopped talking to me. Out of nowhere, told me to take my hoodie and leave her alone. And I noticed something else, too: everyone was glaring at me. Even some of the teachers furrowed their brows in my direction. When I passed her in the hallway, she acted as though she would break down and friends would support her to her next class. My French teacher, a sarcastic yet lovable woman who pummeled me back into the straight path an infinite number of times, once took me aside and said, "I'm sure whatever you did she'll forgive you eventually." But I had NO FUCKING CLUE what I could have done. I never said anything about the Mark thing. Or the underwear thing. Or the filched cigarettes that even I could see she didn't smoke properly.

No, none of these things were what killed our friendship. It seems she got sick of hanging out with me. I was bringing her down about our French project, I was allergic to cigarette smoke, I didn't want to date any of her skid-mark buddies and at sleepovers I never flashed my tits out the window: in general, I was a drag. So to get out of a friendship she made up a lie. Shocked? I was at the time, but now I'm really not. She told people that before her awesome mother had her, she had two older brothers who were mentally handicapped. She also claimed that they died when they we three and four, respectively. In her own words:

"They were just so retarded they stopped breathing."

Really, it was genius. Not only did everyone believe her, but when I asked my friends why she was angry at me, they would respond:

"Well, it has something to do with, you know, her... brothers. She said you didn't believe she had them."

And I would reply:

"What brothers?"

Which usually garnered:

"You're such a fucking monster, Julie! I can't believe you!"

Her mother had Sophie at fifteen, so I think anyone born before her was a bit of a stretch anyway. Sometimes there is just no excusing a bad friend's behavior. There is no way to defend a girl who pretended to have disabled brothers who died just so she can make new, sluttier friends. In the long run, I was much, MUCH better off without Sophie. My grades improved, I made better friends, and eventually everyone stops being a fourteen-year-old girl.

Though that was pretty fucked up, right? That's pretty much the most evil thing I've seen someone do. That takes a special kind of asshole.

This post was by Julie, who would have felt genuine empathy if Sophie really had deceased brothers.