Have you ever felt like a broken piece of artifact on the ground? Like you've been discarded like a used tissue? And then suddenly someone comes along and picks you up and puts you back together and you feel full again?
For me, that was Natasha Barlowe.
My knight in shining armor, the girl who saved me from drowning in self pity.
It was September when I first met her. Well, I did meet her on the first day of school but it was actually on that lazy friday afternoon that I really meet her.
Ever since the beginning of the school year, I always saw Natasha with her big group of girl friends. They would always sit at the back of class and giggle and gossip amongst themselves.
I would be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.
Despite studying in an all girls school, I always had quite a lot of difficulty making friends. And even if I did make friends, they never seemed to stuck. When I was a little kid, I used to roam around the playground all alone watching other kids play with their friends because I felt like it was too hard for me to fit in anywhere.
This void of mine stayed with me until I met Bernadette.
But good things rarely last.
Ever since we got to highschool, Bernadette and I were slowly and gradually drifting apart. And I couldn't exactly pinpoint what the reason was. Even though we sat next to each other in class and joked about mundane things, we barely ever talked. Like a real conversation.
Not to mention the overbearing amount of attention she was getting from the male folk in school.
I didn't mind it. Bernadette was pretty, like a natural beauty. She was easy to talk to and become friends with. And even though she didn't always flirt, she always had the boys' attention. She would often do their homeworks, finish projects on their behalf and the boys, being the lazy asses they were, loved her for it.
I tried convincing her that the transactional relationship had started to seem a bit one sided but she didn't wanna hear it so I dropped the case.
If Bernadette wanted to avoid something, she would go to extreme lengths to do so and being aware of that habit, I wasn't exactly willing to put in too much effort, that I knew would go futile.
So during this confusing "phase", Natasha Barlowe became my friend.
I don't remember the exact deets but she swooped into the scene like she had just been waiting on it. And with steady efforts, she eventually managed to get me involved in her posse.
For a split second in my life, I was actually happy.
I thought I found my people.
Boy, how wrong I was.
_______________
Three months into my friendship with Nat, we were practically inseparable.
I had started adapting to their ways, sitting at the back of the class, making fun of the teacher during lectures and gossiping on video calls for hour after hour about people I didn't even know.
One thing about Natasha; she knew everything about everyone. I called her my personal Gretchen Weiner.
Nat always had the inside details about people's business, people who weren't even in our class and some who didn't even go to our school. I always marveled at how many people she knew. It was like everyone we met on the street was her friend.
To quote Aristotle,
‘A friend to all, is a friend to none.’
At the time I hadn't realised how deep in shit I was getting myself into. But the facade didn't last very long. If I remember correctly, it was right after Christmas that I got my first warning.
