At my birthday party, she cracked open a fortune cookie, read it, and laughed. We all asked what it said. She looked across the room at someone, backed away with a theatrical shiver, and said, “My best friend will murder me tonight. Keep him away from me.
”
Everybody laughed. She didn’t seem to understand what she’d just done. But I understood. She didn’t consider me her best friend.
Not really. Not anymore. I realized it again the time he asked me to come over three hours before our shift. I drove an hour and a half to his place, and he opened the door looking half-asleep.
“Sorry, man, we fell asleep,” he said, and then he went back to bed with his girlfriend, leaving me standing alone in his front room until I finally gave up and left. I sat in the parking lot at work for two and a half hours before my shift started. A few weeks later, my friend was playing a gig at a bar. He texted me: “Stay put, miss your last bus.
We’re coming over. You can crash at our place after last call. ” I trusted him. I let my last bus leave without me.
Twenty minutes later, nothing. Forty minutes after that, he texted: “Oh sorry man, we got too stoned and dozed off. ”
During junior high and high school, he was poor, so I always spotted him. Meals, movies, whatever.
I never expected anything back. But later, when I hit hard times and he was doing better, he turned out to be the cheapest guy I knew. He wouldn’t even spot me a soda or lend me five bucks. I must have spent thousands on him over the years.
A person who takes and takes and never offers to chip in will most likely be a toxic, cheap bastard not worth your friendship. In high school, I started noticing she kept canceling our plans. Most of the time we hung out, it was only because we’d already seen each other at school that day. I finally asked myself how I could call her my best friend if she didn’t make time for me when we no longer went to the same school.
She disappeared from my life more than ninety-five percent of the time whenever she had a boyfriend, and she always came back to me when she was single. Meanwhile, I had another friend who always made room for me in her schedule no matter where we worked or studied. She even wanted to go on vacations with me. That’s when I realized who my real best friend was.
At my wedding, she got blackout drunk, told everyone she hated the rest of the wedding party, pooped all over the hotel hallway, took off early the next morning, and then demanded an apology from me for not making her maid of honor. Another one got a new boyfriend and stopped talking to me for months. When I reached out, all I got were half-assed replies. Someone who ditches her entire group of friends because there’s a new man in her life isn’t someone I want in mine.
I told them I was sick. Really sick. And I never heard from them again. Months later, they called asking for something, and I could barely contain my anger.
I still sent them what they wanted. Now I just found out I’m pregnant, and it feels strange not sharing the news, like I’ve forgotten to tell someone. But I know inviting them back into my life will only end in tears and hurt feelings again. She decided I was her default friend.
She only wanted to hang out when her real best friend, Amber, was busy. We’d been friends for six years before Amber came around. I recently moved to a different state, and right before I left, she said, “I’ll miss you. But imagine how much of a wreck I’d be if Amber moved.
”
He stripped naked, wandered around the house shouting at our other roommate, and drank from a liter bottle of vodka. His third one that morning. Then he took all the food out of the refrigerator and dumped a full gallon of ranch dressing over the groceries I had just bought. Somewhere during the second bottle, he’d dug my wedding dress out of the trunk in the garage and tried to pull it over his six-foot-plus, 320-pound frame.
It got covered in booze and motor oil. We’d been friends since second grade. This happened after our twenty-fifth reunion. He yelled at me, and I listened as he laid out his plan to have his girlfriend flirt with me into working at his store for free.
Forewarned is forearmed. The last three months of our friendship didn’t go so well for him. A felony conviction, seven months in prison, and the permanent loss of his civil rights gave me the feeling I won that little exchange. I finally got some self-esteem and saw what a dick Lee was to me.
He stole from me. He used me emotionally. I was just a shoulder to cry on. By the end, he’d come over a wreck and sob to me about whatever latest transgression had happened between him and his girl.
I was always incredibly generous to him. I never said no when he needed something. I was always there, always available. Then whenever I needed something from him, the answer was always now.
I’d always had pretty low self-esteem, but by my late twenties, it started to build, and I saw our friendship for what it was. I was the giver. He was the taker. By that point, our contact was sporadic, so I cut it off completely.
After he joined the corps, he moved to Maryland. We kept in touch for years, but rarely. Recently, I heard he’d been in town several times. His mom’s house is literally half a mile from mine.
When I heard this, he happened to be in town at that very moment. I never got so much as a phone call. That pretty much concluded that friendship. She asked me to be a bridesmaid, and of course I said yes.
A month or two later, pictures showed up on Facebook of her and her other bridesmaids picking out dresses together. No message. No phone call. Nothing.
We’d been best friends since first grade until just after high school, when we started drifting. A simple notification would have been nice, but life moves on. We realized we had absolutely nothing in common. He was literally the outdoor, see-the-mountain, hiking type.
Like one of those Man vs. Wild guys. Camping every week, tying knots, canoeing, all of it. Meanwhile, there was me, into comic books and video games and reading a good book inside.
To those Hollywood execs who insist on having completely different characters as best friends for eternity, it’s complete bullshit. I realized how one-sided the friendship was. She didn’t really care about me. She just used me as a place to vent.
If I wasn’t available the moment she wanted me to be — as if I didn’t have a family to take care of — I’d never hear the end of it. But when I had an issue or needed to vent, she’d remind me that whatever I was going through wasn’t nearly as bad as what she had going on, so I had no right to complain. At one point, I gently tried to point out that there were solutions to many of her problems. Let’s just say it wasn’t well received.
After twenty solid minutes of non-stop berating, I decided I’d had enough of that toxic relationship and completely cut ties. In spite of how she treated me, it sucked losing my best friend of eight years. She lost her job, met a guy one night, invited him to live in her room rent-free for months, got pregnant by him, married him, and moved out owing me eight hundred dollars. She refused to respond to my calls, texts, or messages.
Almost a year later, I found her at a bar. She apologized and said she’d been going through a rough time, which I understood. She said she’d add me on Facebook so we could catch up. She never did.
The next time I saw her a few months later, she pretended she’d already sent the request and said she’d send it again. It never happened. We’d been best friends since we were six. She moved away in sixth grade, but we kept in contact.
Then she moved back for our senior year of high school, which turned out to be a horrible year. Even so, we stayed close after graduation and attended the same college. I moved twelve hours away after college, and she moved back to the small town we were from. We made a point of talking on the phone at least once a week.
Then things just changed. I was becoming more independent, making friends, dating more. She lived with her parents and hung out with high school kids. A couple weeks ago, something big happened in my life, and all I wanted to do was tell her.
She wouldn’t even give me a chance. All she wanted to talk about was small-town drama. I realized right then that we were no longer best friends. I’d seen it coming for a couple of years.
It had always been a one-sided friendship. When we hung out, it had to fit into her busy schedule. Even our weekly phone call turned into that. The only time she had for the call was her ten-minute drive home from work.
It really started to annoy me. It was like I wasn’t that important to her anymore. I’m relieved to be done with that friendship. We were best friends all through junior high and high school and roommates our first year of college.
I treated him too much like a sibling, not like a best friend. I was hard on him. I lost my temper too easily. I was demanding.
One night, he and some mutual friends were supposed to pick me up to go out drinking, and they just didn’t show. They apologized profusely, and we still hung out after that, but we slowly drifted apart. I made new friends, and after a while, I started seeing my old behavior in others, which forced me to assess how I’d acted. It hurt a lot.
Over time, I realized it was mostly my fault. It made me a better person. It made me a bit more withdrawn, but I learned how to be a better friend and not so hard on people. After a ten-year friendship, my boyfriend died, and that’s when I really realized how much of a bitch BFF was.
The first guy I ever loved died the day before my high school graduation. She’d had many guys she’d loved and banged and was at a fork in the road between two ex-boyfriends. But no, a woman cannot love anyone. It’s just not possible.
So Kurt died, and they figured I hadn’t dated him long enough to actually love him. An argument ensued. Then I started getting prank calls on my cell, at work, and at home. I knew exactly who it was.
After days of thirty-plus calls a day, I got sick of it and realized I could do the same thing. So I did. Then I got a call from an angry ex-friend asking why she was being pranked. The thing was, she was holding Kurt’s favorite shirt hostage.
Finally, we reached an agreement: the prank calls would stop if I got his shirt back. Seemed harmless. When I went to pick it up, she left it on my porch. I hurried out and grabbed it.
As I ran back inside with it in my arms, something fell. A sleeve had been chopped off. Turns out they’d destroyed Kurt’s shirt. It was covered in sayings like “Where’s the pills?
” and “I killed myself to get away from you,” and worse. Then it was covered in ketchup, mustard, and a few guys had jacked off onto it. Ten years of friendship, and she did that to me. Horribly sad, because we always saw an awesome future of us having kids together, of them being best friends too, of being silly in nursing homes when we were really old.
We’d grab a beer after work and talk, and I couldn’t relate to anything going on in his life anymore. His involvement with the church — I’d left the church eight years ago. His issues with his marriage — never been married, and it felt like his marriage was a mistake from the start. His kids — I don’t have any and don’t want any.
The things we used to have in common don’t interest him anymore, and the things that interest him now don’t interest me. That doesn’t make either of us wrong, necessarily. It just means we grew apart. I had two of these.
I realized how often she made me feel bad about myself. She stole from me, and when I brought up the items and said I wanted them back, she claimed they’d been hers for years. A TV. A VCR.
A pair of boots. I realized how trashy she was. I realized I was happier not hanging out with her than I was hanging out with her. The second one, who was actually the first, was a doozy.
A compulsive liar. In high school, she wrote a note she claimed a guy had written to another friend of ours, an acquaintance of mine. She said she’d found it and was worried about it. It graphically described how the guy would rape and slit the throat of the friend and all of her friends if she tried to leave him.
I convinced her to take it to the principal. Later, she somehow convinced me the girl herself had written it. I hated that girl. What kind of awful person does that?
Now I know the truth. My friend had written it herself. I still can’t fathom why she lied about being raped. She lied about being pregnant and having a miscarriage, five times, for attention.
She lied about being in a lockdown at the hospital where she worked, claiming a man had come into the ER brandishing a gun, all to get attention from her recent ex, who happened to be another friend of mine. What did she expect him to do? He lived in another state. Did she think he’d race down, sweep her off her feet, and drive off into the sunset together?
They broke up for many reasons. Her personal hygiene was horrible. Her breath always stank. Her skin and hair were always greasy.
Her hair was so matted he had to have the mats cut out every time. Whenever she had her legs apart, the stench cleared a room. She threatened to kill herself if he broke up with her. She didn’t.
She called an ambulance for herself multiple times at different jobs, including the hospital job, so she wouldn’t have to stay. She never had a legitimate reason. “I don’t feel good” or “I feel uneasy” or “I think I might have a panic attack later,” despite never being diagnosed with any kind of anxiety. She got fired from several jobs for calling in too much within a few months.
She ended up getting them evicted because she was blowing money she didn’t have, and he didn’t know about it until it was too late. He wasn’t spotless either, of course. They were really toxic together. When we lived together in my first apartment, a long time ago, she took my half of the rent, spent it on a vacation with her boyfriend at the time, and paid for everything as a treat to him.
I managed to avoid eviction by explaining what happened to the landlord, who knew she was shady. He said she was being evicted, but he wouldn’t have kicked me out. Still, I had to move because I couldn’t afford the rent alone. She stole from me a lot.
She stole other people’s work constantly, which I didn’t find out about until recently, and it made me angry all over again. She constantly lied about me to make herself look better. She was overweight and didn’t take care of herself and did badly in school. I was the opposite.
I’m glad that friendship went out in a glorious blaze. I’m so glad it’s over. When we lived together, he’d smoke weed until he was numb every day. He lied to his parents about his schooling even though they paid his tuition and rent, wasting thousands of their dollars.
He’d wake up and do two bong hits. He basically lived in the living room. He left a bowl of tuna fish out for a full week until it rotted. But the icing on the cake: he had a friend over who was six months pregnant, and she smoked weed and drank in our apartment.
I asked him to talk to her about it. He said, “It’s not my responsibility. ” He was the smartest guy I knew. Ten years of friendship down the drain.
He’s working in a donut shop now, trying to be a rapper. Good riddance.