SOS: With Friends Like These...

I'm pretty lucky when it comes to friends. I have some that I know I can call at 6 a.m. to come sit with my kids while I rush to the emergency room. I have some that bring me treats for no good reason. And I have some that I can show my true dorkitude to and they'll still hang out with me. But I wasn't always this lucky. Junior high was rough (who doesn't have a hard time, though?) and the "best friend" I had as I start high school morphed into the Wicked Witch. I'm taking a break from the dating stories to tell you a little bit about this friend.

Let's call her Cathy. Cathy was cute, skinny, and smart. However - and I am being completely unbiased here - I was cuter and smarter. She didn't like that I made better grades, took AP and was in the Honor Society. Cathy didn't like it when I hung out with my friends from church or anyone else besides her. She also didn't like that I nearly always had a boyfriend or several targets for flirting. In fact, she would frequently develop a crush on the same guys, then it became a race to see who would win him. One time, my crush was older and had already graduated from high school. I would go to see him frequently and of course, she would go with me. He and I started dating, did the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing, etc. Then we kinda lost interest around the same time. That's when she made her move. I could say she stole my boyfriend but I didn't really care by then, it was on to the next guy.

She had a serious boyfriend when we were sophomores. I thought he was a jerk and didn't like hanging out with them. Then one afternoon, right before Christmas, he calls me and confesses that he is in love with me, not Cathy, that the only reason he stays with her is so he can see me. I didn't buy it. Seconds after I hung up, Cathy calls me. She insists that I have something I need to tell her. Wha...? It's obvious she had totally set up the phone call from her boyfriend and listened to the whole thing. When I confronted her about it, she said she did it to see if she could trust me. Yeah, that sure builds trust.

Also another trust-building step? Take your "best friend" to your church's youth group so they can gather around and tell her just how wrong her religion is compared to theirs. That's lots of fun, I tell ya, especially when I'm already feeling a little insecure about my personal faith. And she wondered why I would never go back...

But the final straw came with my cancer diagnosis. We discovered the tumor two days into the new school year, on a Thursday. On the following Tuesday, I was wheeled in for surgery. Since it happened so quickly, I only had a chance to tell a few people what was happening. So Cathy took it upon herself to report the news to others. Only she changed the story. I wasn't in the hospital, I was at home. I didn't have a tumor, I had a cold. Even when friends who knew the truth asked her about it, she told them I was lying to them, that it really was a cold. Then she had the audacity to come visit me in the hospital. I was so mad at her that I hardly spoke. Finally, I faked a muscles spasm so the nurse would come in and shoo her out.

After that, Cathy and I never willingly hung out together. We were both on the school drama and debate teams, which did a lot together, but we would coolly ignore each other. I sometimes wonder what happened to her, where she went in life and how many other friends she drove crazy...but then again, I don't really care.