Once upon a time I had a lovely friend named Sparrow. She and I held the world in our hands, and jived it up to the haunting vocals of Whitney Houston's Bodyguard soundtrack. I felt terribly important when I went to her house because her father was a real artist who constructed a brass mermaid that they named a cove after in my town. I told her all about how I wanted to take the cutest boy in class down to St Mary's lake and watch the sunset from the low bluffs...maybe even hold hands. We played on the trampoline and slept in the middle of the golden field behind my house: she even liked my rabbit Bun Buns, who was oddly unpopular with the other children, all on account of being too lean and having screaming hot pink eyes that bulged. We were the bestest of friends for 6 whole months. Until she betrayed me.
Grade 6 was year 1 of my human experiment; you see, up until that point, I had been a snowy owl, cougar, Howard the Duck (Hellooooooooo Lea Thompson), and a wolf, and decided abruptly, i.e. got interested in boys, that I wanted to be popular so people would be better able to relate to me. Sparrow was one of the my first human friends, SCORE! By this time I was wearing second hand Guess t's and jeans with belt, had a micro perm, and had ventured bravely into the accessory world of lip gloss and dolphin-embelished harmony balls; in short, I was hot shit. I somewhat forsook my wolf friends and started hanging with the gang the library, playing ouija board and laughing at the pictures of ho ho's and ding dongs glossing the pages of "Our bodies, Ourselves". This alternated with recesses spent in the girls washroom spreading malicious gossip and peaking at our friends with their pants down from the next stall over. Glorious times.
It was right after the winter holidays that I noticed Sparrows behaivour towards me had changed. At first, she simply declined to hang out, no problem. After all, 11 is a busy year. Then she started to be outright belligerent. She would start by mocking my clothes, which were the style at the time. Mostly saying, well, that they were't new. Hey bizatch, you try living on potato soup for a year and see how important brand-spanking new shirts are to you. She even told the boy that I wanted to take him out to 'some rock by the lake' and rape the shit out him. She would tell the other girls not to choose me for the volleyball team during gym class, and I'm good at volleyball. See, apparently I wasn't popular enough. Even though I was human and now had fully more than 2 other friends, it just wasn't good enough for this one.
I cried and cried, I wrote her notes and called her and asked her why she didn't want to be my friend anymore, and she never said we weren't friends. I would call after school to ask her why she had treated me so poorly, and she said that she hadn't and that we were still friends. I just couldn't get my head around it.
Eventually, I gave up on her, and so did many of the people she seemed to be trying to impress. Most of the others, by some strange coincidence, did like me more than her, and her abuse of me solidified her reputation as something of a cold hearted bitch to be avoided. That did make losing my friend a bit easier, but not any less bitter
That was my first vivid experience with the lies and betrayals that are included in the scope of the human experience in relationships. Anyone else care to share?
2 comments:
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Until you get to college, school is not much more than a sadistic social experiment.
Would you? I'd like that.
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