2. Tweens Can Be Cruel
I’ve had a few times where I’ve realized maybe my friends weren’t really my friends after all, but the one that hurt the most was when I was about 12.
My neighbor and best friend invited me to her birthday dinner. It was just going to be her parents, her two sisters, a couple of aunts and uncles, and three of her friends. Her parents drove me and her two other friends of choice to the dinner. Everything seemed to be going well and we were having a great time.
After dinner and presents, she disappeared with the other two girls and it seemed like they were taking a really long time to come back to the table, so her mum asked me to go find them. I looked around the buffet and they weren’t there, so I went into the girl’s toilets and found them.
They had locked themselves into the same stall and were talking about me. I don’t remember exactly what they were saying as it was years ago but it wasn’t nice. I didn’t know what to do so I hid in another stall. They must have heard me come in as they wrapped up their conversation and left to go back to the table. It made the rest of the night super awkward, and because her parents had driven us there I had to wait for the celebrations to be over to be driven home.
We had had fights on and off over the years because that happens, but this for me was the last straw. One of the girls she invited I had known since I was little; the other girl was new to our school and my bestie had become friends with her and I found out later had started to turn her against me.