Toxic Friends

Toxic

I have tried to forgive them, I have tried to forget. But it's been years since I have seen these girls, and what they did still haunts me.

Clara, Tina and Karly all hurt me in different ways. It took years of pain for me to understand that they were toxic friends. I never understood why they wanted to hurt me, but I think I understand now. These girls had very dark demons, and I had what you would say a semi normal life at home. My parents were together and very much in love. I had good grades, I was I suppose beautiful in my own way and I made friends easily.

"They are just jealous of you," my friend Angelina told me once in 8th grade.

"But why? I have always been good to them."

"Because you are the kind of person they wish they could be....You are kind, smart and beautiful. Your parents are still married, you live in a nice neighborhood. And Tina, for example, doesn't even know who her father is," Angelina told me as tears dropped down my face.

They hurt me because they were jealous, envious but most of all they were just destructive people. They we're jealous that my parents were married while their parents weren't . They wee jealous that my family did give a crap about me while no one in their family seemed to care about them. They were cruel and they were lost. They had a myriad of problems I didn't have. Broken families, one was a love child. And they didn't know what being a true friend meant.

Once I realized that the only way to stop them was by cutting them out, I was able to understand what having real friends was all about. It was about listening, about loyalty, it was about loving each other and doing whatever we could for each other. I did find my sister friends that following summer, and they are still my sisters to this day.

But before I tell you about my sister friends, I have to tell you about the toxic friends, whom for many years tried to destroy me. Well they did crush me but somehow I found the strength to move on and find happiness, at least during that one summer. My life would have been so much different if I had not found my sister friends.

I met all three girls when we were about 6-years-old. I either met them in the classroom or in the playground, maybe even in religion class. All I really remember is when I met Tina in 4th grade.

We were friends since then, and at first she was a good friend, although she was always sad. She had an empty look in her eyes, a bleakness I could not comprehend. She was a little chubby when she younger, although by 8th she had lost a lot weight and looked beautiful. She was really shy. She has short brown hair, and beautiful brown eyes. But she always looked sad.

But when she invited me over for a sleep over at her grandma's farm house, her shyness diminished and I got to know her a little better. She was sweet and fun and liked scary movies.

By 6th grade Tina was no longer the sweet girl I had gotten to know. She was now best-friends with Clara, and the events that followed were not those that characterized a good person. But rather, of an evil, jealous, manipulative person. She was very similar to Clara at this point.

Clara had long dark blonde hair. It was really curly and thick. She had dark green eyes. She was beautiful in a "special" way but she didn't know how to fix her hair, so it always looked messy and a little oily. She was mean, cold and scheming.

Clara never let me really get to know her, she was very private about her life, but she had no problem in hurting others, in hurting me. I think her issues went back to her mother, her beautiful, alcoholic, slutty mother. The "party mom" as she went out nearly every night with Tina's mom. They would get drunk and pick up married men. People talked about them, and not in a good way. So Clara's "issues" may have come from her experiences or lack of them for that matter, with her drunk mom. Years later I heard news from a friend that her mother had died in a car accident. Apparently she was drunk, lost control of the car and crashed into a tree. Police said that she likely died instantly.

Clara's toxic ways may have also come from the fact that her father cheated on her mom with a much younger woman. He left Clara's mom and married the younger woman. They had three more kids and he bought a beach house with a beautiful swimming pool overlooking the ocean. He never bought Clara's mom a house. He rented a pretty slummy apartment near our school. It had two bedrooms, meaning Clara  had to share her room with her older brother. She was however, very social. She was a good dancer and volleyball player and she looked like she was a happy person although she really wasn't. She was evil and still is from what I have heard. She liked to create fights amongst her so called friends. She would turn her friends against one another by spreading false rumors. She was a teachers pet and the would rat other students out for random, stupid shit. She still got several teachers to give out demerits to different students and she got off on it! Even though she was pretty she didn't know how to take care of herself or fix her very curly hair. She looked dirty and messy and her clothes sometimes didn't match. She lacked empathy and sympathy. And I wish I would have never let her in my life because she was the definition of toxic.

Then there was Karly. Oh God! How can I even start to describe her. She was a broken person that started having sex when she was 12 because well I guess the only way to describe it is that she did it because she was apparently "quite easy." She was beautiful and had a voluptuous body her hair was straight and long and black . Her skin was flawless. Karly however had no self esteem and so every boy I liked since 7th grade she just had to take from me. She seduced them, had sex with them and they would stay with her until she got bored and slept with someone else. The guys at our school really didn't say nice things about her. They all just called her a dirty slut.

Karly too, had daddy issues. Her father had cheated on his wife with Karly's mom, got her pregnant and she had Karly. She was just a big mess. And she hurt me in more ways than I can remember.

The summer before 9th grade I cut all three of them out. And I found real friends and I was happy, at least during that summer in 1990.

And there was me. My name is Bernice. I had long straight brown hair and big brown eyes. I was an athlete and I ran 10 miles every day. So I suppose my body, although petite, was built. I had dancer legs because I took ballet for 10 years and from all the running I did each day. Others told me that I was the most beautiful of the four toxic friends. I never looked at it that way because I wasn't like that, I thought we were all beautiful in our own way. My parents were happily married, or so I thought. And we had a nice house and we had expensive furnisher. I had good grades. I loved to dance at school parties and I was extremely social. I just really liked to talk with people and listen to their problems while offering them advice.  That's just who I was.

For some reason, these characteristics that defined who I was, led these three girls to want to hurt me all the while they pretended to be my friends. This is one of many stories I would like to share.

But let's start at the beginning, the summer of 1989. Right before 8th grade started.