Friends who betray you

I'm not happy telling you this. There are things you want to forget, it all happened long ago but with all things I write, if I think there might be value in it for someone, then sod it, I spill. It's long though, and a bit boring, so you can stop reading now, I won't be offended.

My Best Friend actually betrayed me the first week at Shit School. Some spanish girls were giving me dirty looks so I asked them why and they told me, in their not brilliant english that I'd been bitching about them. Who told you? I asked. They wouldn't say, and then when they did, I didn't want to believe it,despite Best Friend being half spanish herself

Then my roommate, a Chinese girl, who'd I'd been having a real laugh with, started blanking me, turning her back on me when I walked in the room, that kind of stuff. Turns out my Best Friend had told her I'd been bitching about her as well. In my first week!

I challenged my Best Friend and she denied it.

What you've got to understand maybe, what I've got to understand, is there were slim pickings for friends at that school. There were what, a dozen girls in my year. Me and My Best Friend made each other laugh. Things were never the same, as lighthearted and fun with the Chinese girl anymore. She probably thought it was true, and that I had been bitching and that I had lied to her.

Fast forward a year and My Best Friend is bitching about two girls in our class, A and B. I didn't really like A and B, I thought they were up themselves and vain (B would brush her hair gazing infront of her mirror, every break time, before every meal time)So I joined in the bitching. "What's he doing with her?" would say My Best Friend. "I know, he could do so much better..."

(I've cringed about all this before, there's no value for me in writing this)

Anyway, one night, when I'm in my bedroom in the stairwell with the bricks missing from the wall, B comes in, furious, saying: "I heard you've been bitching about me."
I say: "Um, yeah." "Why? What have I ever done to you?" she says. "Well (I struggle for something) I guess you're a bit vain.." She shouts at me, goodness knows what she says, and storms out the toom.
Then A comes in the room:
"I heard you've been bitching about me," she shouts.
"Um, yeah," I answer unable to deny it.
"What have I done to you? What have any of us done to you?"
"Oh for fucks sake, I'm tired of this. Don't either of you wonder who I've been bitching about you with???"
"Who? Who have you been bitching about us with??"
"Well if you can't work it out I'm not going to tell you."

I was furious and hurt, really hurt but no time to think about it, exams looming and all. I don't even think I had it out with her, My Best Friend. I think I just profoundly thought: FUCK YOU. FUCK ALL OF YOU. FUCK THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD.

A day or so later a 'friend' called C tells me My Best Friend, A & B want to see me in the school field at 1 O'Clock. I tell her to tell them they can fuck off. Then I think no, no, stupid fucking bitches and I go down to the main hall, where some boys have gotten wind of it and tell me they'll come with me. "You don't have to do that," I tell them. But they do. The Black Hand Gang I'd call them; five of them and a Greek fella. Have you ever felt rescued? I remember feeling rescued.

I reach the girls who have not expected the boys, and have become all girly, flicking their hear, "hi!" they say.

I don't remember beyond that. Alot of shit was going on then; detentions, priests telling me I was Satan, general abject misery, oh yeah and A levels...Maybe it'll come out over the next few days, in my sodding sleep. Maybe it never will, because it's not important. It is past.

Here's this though. The value, particulary for someone who has been bullied.

My Best Friend followed me to college a year after I got there. She wanted to come see it before accepting a place and to see if she'd changed, I told her I fancied my flatmate. I told my flatmates my little plan and My Best Friend did indeed try to snog by flatmate.

When I returned from a year in France she had a group of friends and I'd see her in the SU Bar but never talk to her. Then one day, she was gone.

She'd tried her, what, game? with her friends. She betrayed her new Best Friend, Em, telling others in the group she'd been bitching about them. She didn't count on Em being close to the others in the group and the lot of them figuring out what My Best Friend had done.
My Best Friend got hissed out of college. The whole art department turned against her.

Karmic Justice! Thank you Universe! Sure I was sad that another person got hurt, and Em and I since became friends but the relief, the relief I wasn't the only one. Maybe that's the important point. You are never the 'only one'.

I. Let. It. Go. Didn't I?

My Best Friend invited me to be her friend on facebook earlier this year. I ignored it. So why now, suddenly all this fear bollocks.

She may be at the reunion. A photo popped up, see, on the Home page, of a guy who I can't remember so why did I accept a friend request from him..anyway, a photo popped up and it turns out she's going out with him. "My beautiful boyfriend!" she writes. And other girls (A but not B) from the year commenting and liking.

My Best Friend would never go to a reunion on her own but with this one she won't have to. She's very much part of the school network that exists and which I don't want to be a part of. I care for so few of them and don't remember so many.

She is not My Best Friend. She has not been My Best Friend since we were teenagers. I'm likely to see her precisely because I don't want to...in that place with all those people who remember us as being joined at the hip..are you fecking kidding?

What will I say?

What would you do?

All I do know, is that I allowed that whole experience to affect the whole of my adult life. I do not fight for my friends, geez, I don't even fight for my son.

Here's what God says and I can't tell you that it makes me feel any better about any of this:

Betrayal
of yourself
in order not to betray
another
is
Betrayal
nonetheless
It is the
Highest Betrayal

Your Shakespeare put this another way:

To thine own Self be true
and it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false
to any man


Skeletons in closets ey, who knew they could make so much noise...