Word Count: 348
I knew everything there was to know about Sandy McDonnell. We were best friends after all. Then she dumped me for a new girl that’d transferred from Middleton High and that’s about when her secrets started to leak out.
I’ve been called “passive/aggressive” and I suppose that’s a true image of how I can be. I’m not a fighter, a yeller, a punch-in-the-facer. I’d rather take defeat, rejection, what-have-you, with a silent sense of dignity. Time always gives you a chance to retreat and recover. To reassess and plan your revenge.
Sandy’s boyfriend Darryl was about the seventh person to hear of her pregnancy and it took a whole day before anyone dared tell him. I don’t know what Sandy said when he asked her but evidently he hadn’t been getting anything himself from her yet so it was not her he was concerned much about. They split up almost immediately. Eventually it became obvious she was not pregnant; or at least that she wasn’t pregnant anymore.
Sandy and I went to the same college but her new bff went there too. They were roommates and I was three floors upstairs in a drafty cardboard box of a room with three others who came from somewhere in the Midwest. They had the same strange sense of humor and laughed at things I scratched my head over. I finally ignored them and focused instead back on Sandy. It slipped out, to my Midwestern roommates, about Sandy’s unfortunate problems back in our small hometown. They were naturally aghast and promised to keep all her secrets, but somehow it spread campus-wide. Sandy spent her Saturday nights with her little friend. I spend mine painting the town.
We both married guys local to the college and lived within blocks of each other. Her bff, I later heard and only whispered to others, married another woman back home.
I run into her now and then at the grocery or cleaners and though I do my best to be forgiving and cordial, she never even says hi.
