It’s been almost ten years since I’ve seen her last.
Yet I still remember her birthday (two days after Valentine’s Day.) I remember how she used to always wear a pair of black legging shorts under a t-shirt while we ran around at camp. I also remember how she cast a spell over those around me, leaving me as the only one imperceptible to her charms.
There is a sense of safety on the periphery – what seems so important to others is shadowed in the light of reality. I watched, safe from a distance of sorts as she belittled her own best friends. Where she spoke of them behind their backs, and treated them like the most important person in the world when facing them. I shook my head every time, and wondered how they could listen to her bash one another and never think she did the same of them. Time and time again, I was made her personal dartboard – where those I considered my closest friends at the time betrayed me to please her.
What was it, this power she held over our small group of friends, bunkmates, that they were so willing to call legion to her alliance?
How is it they never saw the wall so staunchly wavering in front of her, her own call to arms?
No one ever saw her cry.
I envied her, for being called the best dancer in our group, when I knew for a fact it was not true. I envied her for having the power to steal my best friend at the time, not aware that it takes two to convey a friendship. I even envied her parents having been smart enough to divorce when she was young. In the library one day, I wanted to read a book on divorce. She refused to let me have it, claiming I could never understand what kind of a world it is. I can’t recall the words of spite and anger she tossed at me summer after summer, but I can remember her refusal to give me a book when I was eight. How strange my compassion lies for literature!
Her name was Whitney. It was one of those names that declared an air of eloquence, of stories yet untold, and seemed doomed to heroines of Harlequin romances.
She won the lead in every musical. She led boys on (for really, we were only in our early double digits and they couldn’t be called anything else but boys), kissing one behind the canteen one night, and kissing another the next. What might now be construed as a cry for help was ignored by our envy – we were eleven, twelve, thirteen, and she was so advanced! She even showed us how to get rid of a hickey – her dad taught her to use hydrogen peroxide, which only now seems a bit strange.
What no one ever saw was when the wall came down. I never quite realized until I was older how jealous she was of all of us – with our fancy two parent houses, our pets, never being shuttled between homes, having the security of what must have looked like such an ideal lifestyle to her. I can’t ever pretend to know why it was so easy for her to make me the target of her cruelty. Perhaps it was because I never got close enough to fall under her spell. Perhaps it was because even though I envied her, I still saw through her enough to know there was something very wrong.
Behind her chestnut colored hair that was so perfectly wavy and easily straightened when straightening was the thing to do for a bunch of Jewish girls who had wavy and curly hair, beneath the dark brown eyes that carefully locked away her secrets, there was nothing but a broken shell of a girl. If you listened closely, you’d hear the words she never seemed to be able to say, the ones where she admitted how tired she was of being Whitney. Just once, couldn’t she be a Lauren? Or a Jennifer? Or an Amanda? Or one of those millions of names that swarmed the charts in the mid 80s when we were born? Hidden behind the layers of false bravado and self-assuredness was a little girl who just wanted what she thought everyone else has.
Irony sure has a funny way of disguising itself as envy.
Beautifully written post, as always. Okay, I’ve already said this on gtalk but yo, I can relate. Sort of. There was this girl from my class who most everyone found adorable and charming. All the boys were in love with her. She was fragile and delicate and all sorts of wonderful. I liked her up until she stole my best friend’s boyfriend. The brilliant thing is she somehow managed to make it seem like she was the victim in all this. People actually felt sorry for her.
This is what you get for talking to me too much. I am now officially redundant.
The grass does sometimes seem greener on the other side. What we fail to remind ourselves is it’s better to face the devil we know than the devil we don’t.
It’s sad how easy it is to be jealous of other people’s lives because it seems like they’re so much better than our own.
Fantastic post, DS. I like the subtle details that tell us what was going on here without really telling us. “Her dad taught her to use hydrogen peroxide…” – I got chills.
On a non-post related note…I will be around over the Christmas holiday. Home on Long Island for Christmas proper, but in the city the days surrounding.
This was such an amazing description and story….haven’t we all known one of those. And Whitney probably never changed….I’ve known two girls in my class, one who is 21 and one whos 27 who are exact replicas of Whitney. Usually people who trash talk for a living? Are very jealous and insecure about their own situations so they have to make those who have what they have seem worse of a person than they are.
Get working on a manuscript. Your posts leave me craving for more, every damn day. You are a brilliant writer, that flowed as effortlessly as life itself; and so precise a description lifted from real life…I feel like I grew up knowing Whitney…and my head is doing a song for her right now, strangely a good song – you lost little girl (Jim Morrison)
wow. fantastic post. you get better and better with each one spunk. as i read each word i was envisioning my own “whitney” from high school and how true everything you said rings.
Amazing ending.
(have I said that 22 times to you already?)
I, too, had my Whitney. I got back into contact with her a few years ago. It is odd how she speaks with such regret, and is not doing the amazing things she should have been from the way things used to be.
this could have described my best friend growing up to a T
really, really well-written.
Perfectly written.
“There is a sense of safety on the periphery”
What a fantastic line. I love this story, because it’s universal, and we all have known a Whitney, of either gender. But that line really says a lot about standing back and observing the freakishness of such an individual.
And of course, excellent writing. A force to be reckoned reckoned with.
[...] what’s transpired over the last fourteen years. Is it no wonder that one of those girls was Whitney? Things change. You’ll learn to become more active in taking charge of what you can hear. [...]
[...] what’s transpired over the last fourteen years. Is it no wonder that one of those girls was Whitney? Things change. You’ll learn to become more active in taking charge of what you can hear. [...]