Anyone who has ever lost a friend can tell you that it’s far worse than losing a boyfriend. There are so many ways to lose a friend, but the worst is when they were really your enemy all along and you never even knew it. That’s how it was with me and my roommate Kaycee. I had never had much luck in the roommate department, living with randoms freshman year and then having a string of psychos, sometimes including myself. Then finally my senior year, I thought it was over. I was going to live with Kaycee, one of my best friends. We had a great first semester together. We never got into a single fight. We were two peas in a pod.
Unfortunately, our Stepford world came crashing down as soon as spring semester began. Kaycee had always had a long distance boyfriend, with whom she Facetimed regularly. Spring semester, this communicative connection got out of control. They would talk at least three hours a day, minimum. Sometimes all in one long sesh, sometimes intermittently. Kaycee was one of those people who talked even louder when using headphones, so yeah, it started to get really annoying. I was slowly losing my mind, as their conversations became the soundtrack to our tiny shared room in the sorority house. I was going to say something to her about it, when it suddenly stopped. They went back to Facetiming once a day like they had first semester. Had I bitched about her Facetime habits to anyone who would listen? Absolutely. Did she ever hear any of it? Maybe, who knows. Is that the worst complaint to have about someone? No way. Despite all of the chatter, I still loved her and considered her to be my best friend. I listened to her talk about all of her fights with her boyfriend, always liked her Insta, and always said she looked like she’d lost weight from doing pure barre, even when she didn’t. I was a pretty good friend.
But one day, I did something that many people will consider a huge breach of trust. She had been acting really weird all week, and she’s not the kind of person to confront me about anything. So when she got in the shower, I creeped through her phone. I know, I know. That’s shitty. But see, I’m of the belief that the only people who get really defensive about that kind of thing are the people who have something to hide. Look in my phone and you’ll find long, panicked messages about my hair crisis to my mother, some questionable texts to boys, and texts to my dad asking for more money. What I found in Kaycee’s phone ruined our friendship forever. I knew she texted her boyfriend all day every day, but I never knew that a great deal of it was about me.
She critiqued every single thing I did during my day. The fact that one day I slept until 2 and still went to get a coffee at 9 pm. When girls from our hall came in to say hi, what I wore out with some of our friends, and how I was subsequently defensive when she asked if I “really wore that out in public” later. I was channeling my inner Kendall Jenner, sue me, everyone else liked the outfit. Needless to say, this was both painful and annoying to read about myself. Everyone sleeps late and wears “ho” outfits. Why did this bitch even care?
These comments aren’t what ruined our friendship though. I’d just gotten into a really nice graduate program in London, a place I wanted to study more than anywhere else, and I could not be more excited. But according to Kaycee, that’s not why I’m going. To her boyfriend, she said (grammatical errors included): “Platty just acts smarter then everyone. Like you couldn’t even get into school in the us”. I was shaking with rage when I read this. Did I just have a stroke? How could she possibly think this? Was this really how she felt? Never in a million years would I have thought that Kaycee would ever say something so horrible about me, but there we were.
I didn’t know how to bring this up, especially since I had gone through her phone, so I started small. I asked if we had a problem. Kaycee is a terrible liar, and said that no, she was just really stressed, which was why she had been acting weird. I asked if it bothered her that girls came into our room to chat. Such a simple issue, which to her boyfriend she had described as us being “fucking obnoxious” and “so fucking disrespectful,” could have been addressed and fixed right then. But instead she said no not at all, it’s fine.
It’s fine. Ha. No, nothing is fine. I left it at that, because it was late, and it didn’t feel like the time to have a big confrontation about everything. But I knew it was over. Kaycee had just looked me in the eyes and lied to my face, about something so small. I know when the bigger moment comes, she’ll be furious that I looked through her phone. I would be too if it was me, but I would be more embarrassed, and guilty, and ashamed that my friend now knew the horrible things I had said about her, the words I’d now have to own up to as mine.
They say that ignorance is bliss, and that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. But I disagree. The truth always comes out, and the sooner it does, the sooner it will set you free. Yeah, this hurt a lot, but at least I’m minus one toxic friend. Moral of the story: if you have a problem with someone, tell them when it happens. If you have as much contempt for a person as she does for me, don’t pretend to be their friend, it doesn’t end well for anybody..
Nice Move383
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