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She had a wild look in her eyes that made me verbally agree out of self-preservation.
“It’s telling me they’ve had ulterior motives this whole time. Why else would they get all pissy about not being mentioned in your first big, national interview? A real friend—hello, that’s me! A real friend would be nothing but thrilled for you, sharing the link to that damn interview on every fucking social media they could think of. Shouting to the rooftops, proud of you, because they’ve seen how hard you’ve worked to finally get to this point of recognition. No… a real friend who cares about you wouldn’t get butt-hurt that their name wasn’t said in an article that was all about you. So that tells me maybe they’ve been riding your coattails this whole time, letting you do all the work, doing juuust enough to make you feel like you need them, because they knew eventually all your hard work would pay off. And there they’d be, soaking up all this glory they had no right to.”
Vi had grumbled to herself for a moment before stopping, placing her hands on her hips, and looking heavenward before narrowing her eyes on me. “Didn’t one of those assholes mention she sat down recently and wrote her very first chapter of a book ever?”
I tilted my head at her, immediately picking up on what she was throwing down. “Yeah. It was—”
She interrupted me with a squawk. “That dirty whore! God, I hate women! They sure are masters of the long-game, aren’t they? Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say from the beginning I didn’t like them? For the longest time, I thought two of those hussies were the same person, because I refused to give them much thought when you talked about them. I had a bad feeling about them, Sienna. Didn’t I fucking tell you when these fangirls started moving in on you and making you feel like you were the greatest author who ever lived that you needed to be careful? Narcissistic little cunts. They love-bombed you.”
“Us,” I reminded her gently. “When they didn’t go away after a while and you realized they’d be hanging around with us, you opened up to them too. They made you feel the same way, Vi, and it’s all my fault for letting them get close.”
She frowned with her whole damn body, if that’s even possible, hissing out, “Bitches.” She shook her head as she paced in front of my fireplace, the passion in her eyes burning hotter than the gas-fed fake logs behind her. “No, you are not allowed to feel guilty or in any way bad about this situation. You’ve been there for all of us even when you had your own chaos going on. You did your job as a good friend. More than your fair share, actually, since you went all crazy pants to prove to them you had talked about them in the interview, when you didn’t have to even mention them at all.”
This was the part where I opened my stupid mouth and compulsively confessed that not only had I sent them proof of all the things I said about them, but I also emailed the coffee company in a complete panic and begged them to add a few sentences to the article to include my girlfriends.
I knew I was on the wrong life path when even the founder of the company emailed me back after putting two and two together of what was going on, the only reason I would be asking for such a thing. She very nicely told me I needed to reconsider who I believed to be my closest friends in the whole world. Because she had a feeling taking a step back from the situation and viewing it without whatever emotional bond I felt toward these women would show me just how fucked up it was.
She also very nicely let me know I wasn’t the first and definitely wouldn’t be the last person to ever feel used “for clout,” as the kids say these days. She too had to drop some dead weight along her road to creating the first ever woman-owned brand of coffee.
She added the sentences as I requested, but she made it known that the second I saw things more clearly, she’d revert the article back to its original form in a heartbeat.
The article stayed that way for a number of months, several of which I held out hope that one of them would apologize. One of them might possibly see things less selfishly and put me out of my misery. Because surely I couldn’t have been that wrong about the people I was closest to in life. Surely, I couldn’t have been that blind to someone’s true nature. Years of friendship, becoming part of each other’s fucking family, couldn’t possibly have been all a lie, a long-game as Vi put it.
