The Game Never Lets You Go

Memory has faded, as it tends to, over most details. I couldn’t tell you how old I was, or which teachers were in charge, or what alley we went to. But it was Elementary school that a bit of my soul was yanked out and put in a bowling ball.

It was my fault, or at least, that is what the thief told me as she laughed at my distress. I started it. And that is true, but I’m jumping ahead in the story.

I have never been good at athletic events. The dexterity of a platypus coupled with the grace of a penguin matched with the eyesight of a mole has left me sadly lacking when it comes to every sport. And while I try to laugh this off and hide behind a claimed indifference to all thing sports, there was (and maybe still is) a little part of me that wished to not have to play the clown to cover for how much of a fool I was making of myself.

When we arrived at the bowling alley we gave up our shoes for the dubious rentals hastily shoved at us by employees overwhelmed by the tiny horde that had descended on them.

We went to our alleys, and I was paired with someone who I thought of as a friend.

The game started out as expected, I was abysmal. The bowling ball would thunk ponderously from my fingers and dart for the gutter, clinging to it for dear life the rest of the alley, as if hoping it could sink into the floor and not encounter me again. Yet my eyes set on a sparkly red and gold ball, which seemed to glow with an inner fire when in motion, and we continued to torture each other for a whole game.

When the next game started I had a bit of inspiration. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to pluck a bit of my soul from wherever it churned within me and sink it into the red and gold swirls in my little ball.

And it worked. X’s were appearing on the screen next to my name. The red and gold sparkles flashed down the middle of the lane, and people were applauding my skills instead of shaking their heads at my wiggling dances of defeat. And that’s when she asked me to explain myself. What had happened, how was I suddenly bowling so well?

I blithely told her what I had done. A part of me at the time didn’t even quite believe it was real. But it was working, and I was excited.

She darted close to me, almost pinching at my stomach, jumped back, and patted her ball. I was shocked, as she laughed and said she’d taken a bit of my soul for her ball as well.

Then she turned and started bowling. And her game improved as well.

The rest of the time there I tried to remind myself that I shouldn’t be upset. My soul hadn’t been stolen and shoved into a truly awful orange bowling ball. But the whole game she laughed and taunted me, and a nauseous ache started in my stomach. The whole time I told no one what was happening. Who would believe this bizarre situation, she said I put myself into?

Our friendship fizzled out after that. I had lost another friend I started thinking of again. She had been a mutual friend with the soul stealer, but they had had a big falling out, and the soul stealer had confided in me about the mean things this mutual friend had done to her. And I fell for it and lost a friend.

Now I starting rethinking losing that friendship.

Years passed, I had better bowling experiences, though I never dared take out a bit of my soul again, and I graduated from Elementary School. I found a new group of friends there, exciting friends who I gelled with.

Then she came back. She joined the group, and everyone was dazzled with her at first. She was so nice. So fun. So interested in what everyone else was interested in. I was wary of her, but I felt I didn’t have anything concrete to voice against her. How do you tell people that she stole a bit of your soul and wouldn’t give it back? Or that in hindsight you think she lied about a friend? So I said nothing.

Despite my silence, things became strained. Suddenly, our cozy group felt suffocating, and somehow, it became apparent that I was the one everyone blamed for sucking out the air. It was hard to know what was happening, but a cold wind was starting to blow, I wasn’t getting invited to everything. And then she started getting mean. Not in front of the others, of course. Just when it was the two of us.

I did what comes naturally to a prepubescent teen. I whined about her harsh treatment of me to my friends. And the winds started blowing even colder.

‘But she’s so nice!’ ‘You’re just being difficult.’ I would hear. And the worst, the blood chilling. ‘I can’t believe she would do something like that.’

My friends couldn’t fathom what she was doing, and I hardly could, so I had no chance of convincing them. I had no idea what she had been whispering for months. How she had made up little lies, not invited me to events and then made it sound like I bailed on my friends. I would only put these pieces together later.

So I drifted away from those friends, I found other friends, and was happy with them, though I was still sad whenever I saw my old friends in the hallways at school. They were so cold to me, that little merry band that I used to be a part of, that I had been plucked out of.

My new friends were awesome. We planned world domination in French class, drank root beer till we couldn’t stop giggling, and were the type of students that made teachers alternate between grinning and grimacing. Unstoppable. Inseparable.

Then, suddenly, she was there. Trying to become cozy with everyone, sitting at our lunch table, trying to get invited to our social adventures outside of school. I did what any self-respecting Irish woman would do, I refused to be fooled twice. I fled.

It never occurred to me to try to warn my friends what she was like. I already saw that she had turned the charm factor up to its max setting. I saw her mirroring everyone’s’ interests; I saw my friends swooning. So I made myself scarce, I gently bowed out of our group, and though people were puzzled, I made sure I did it on my own terms. I still had some periods of school with just these friends, and I made the most out of that contact, and waited. I had a sense this time that the storm would pass, and I just needed to take cover.

Meanwhile, my old friends were suddenly less cool in the hallways. Contact resumed, slowly, tentatively. And then it flourished into rants about her. The veneer had started slipping when I left. Without one person to center her energy on, she had started becoming cold and mean towards everyone, in random bursts. By the time she refocused her energy on another person in the group it was too late for her. She’d shown too much of her real face, everyone else had banded together, and they made it clear that she was no longer a cherished member of the friend group.

That was when I heard about the whisper campaign she had started against me, why she had joined my new group of friends; she needed a new place to take root and start her festering.

Now I started feeling a bit guilty about my new group of friends. They didn’t know what they had let into their midst. And from my time hanging out with them in class, I picked up that she had already started kicking up a storm against a member of the group. No one told me this directly, but I was ready to see the pieces, and there they were. The same whispers that had been uttered against me were being innocently, and with an annoyed frown, repeated by my new friends about one of our group.

I tried to help, I tried sticking just a bit of my arm into the storm and waving a red flag about, but it wasn’t enough. And looking back, I should have done more for my friend.

She managed to drive one person out, and then again her mask started slipping. She was booted from that group faster than the other, and for that at least I can take some credit. My own whisper campaign, though unable to help my friend, had at least set the groundwork. Once she started showing her true self to everyone, it did not come as such a shock.

When she left that group I happily rejoined, and the first order of business was clearing out her cobwebs of lies, mending hurt feelings, and reinstating the friend she had driven out. It was a good time, I now had two great groups of friends to hang out with. But both groups were never quite the same again. There were cracks in the foundation and hurt pooled up through them every now and then. And a touch of distrust.

Middle school ended, and I ended up at a high school and with classes without a single one of my friends, though I was in the same town. Faced with the task of making a whole new set of friends to hang out with in class, I was filled with inner dread. I found the mere concept of approaching anyone terrifying. But as the days progressed, there were a group of girls in my social study class that seemed to be so very fun, so lively. I remember hearing their laughter across the room and wishing I could be a part of it.

I changed seats to an empty one near them. I had a whole plot to try to infiltrate myself into their group. I was sure it would take ages.

It didn’t. Their leader, their brave leader, locked eyes with me when I sat down, said hi, and instantly welcomed me into their group. I was in paradise.

I am sure you are by now expecting what will come next, but I can tell you that it didn’t happen for a while. Freshman year passed, then Sophomore year, then Junior year. Those friends in social study class introduced me to other friends, and we became a tight knit group, fast friends who still are close to this day. Always with our brave leader looking after us, being a pillar of support and kindness.

We stayed close even if we didn’t have the same classes together, even if we didn’t do the same clubs. Through personal issues at home.

One of the friends in this group had a particularly rough start to Senior year. Her parents were going through a divorce, a broody, frosty divorce. We had one class together, and I watched her become more and more despondent.

As the months passed, she started pulling away from me, confiding less. I assumed this was all due to the divorce, and I pestered her to confide in me until she opened up at last. I was horrified and enraged when she told me the truth. The divorce was the issue at home, the issue at school was HER.

Most my friends were in a choir together, myself excluded, as I tend to find notes the way people win lottery tickets, at chance, with usually the same results.

She was in choir too. She’d probably been booted out of another friend group recently, and had started assimilating herself into my group of friends. She would arrive at choir first, save everyone a seat, and position herself at almost the end. The seat at the end was always saved for my friend with the divorcing parents. Then she would physically and vocally block my friend, her body swaying to match hers, her voice covering hers, whenever she tried to interact with the group. Backwards and forwards my friend would try to rock, but she would always find a wall of persistent flesh between herself and a friendly face. With a quiet voice, she didn’t stand a chance of projecting over this viper, and with a sore heart, she didn’t have much energy to keep trying.

She didn’t understand why this was happening to her. Why someone who had seemed so nice, who made such a point of saving her a seat, was so actively excluding her from talking with her friends. She had tried complaining about it to the others but was just met with grumpiness. The whispers against her had already started. The viper was always good at that, whispering about how someone was difficult, then pushing that someone to complain, so then the viper looked right.

She hadn’t brought it up with me because she didn’t know that I even knew this viper. And that’s when I realized what I’d been doing wrong all those years. It had always seemed impossible to talk about what the viper was doing, except with those who had directly experienced it. Her behavior was so polar, she was so nice and so nasty, for no apparent reason, and it was always dreaded that you would sound crazy, or a liar, if you tried to expose her.

And other people had paid the price for this silence, and now a friend was as well. I was incensed, and fully ready to fight. And this time, I wasn’t afraid of losing friends. I knew too many people who could vouch for her behavior.

I approached our brave leader first. It was hard at first, and I had decided to appeal to her logic and observation skills first before calling in my witnesses. I told her what my friend said was happening, and when she rolled her eyes, I told her that I had also experienced issues with their newest friend. And I told her to watch what happened at the next rehearsal.

She did, a bit dubiously at first, I’m sure. But then she saw what was happening. Then she sprung into action, with the swiftness and diplomatic suaveness that make her our brave leader. She personally arranged for the seats to be rearranged, viper and friend with divorcing parents at opposite ends. Then she gently made others aware of what was happening, gently made it clear to the viper that her antics would get her nowhere now.

I was elated. I had braced myself for an epic battle, when I first heard what was happening, I had been excited for it even. But then once I talked with our brave leader, once I heard that she had taken care of the problem, I believed my work was done, and with so little turmoil within our group. I hadn’t needed to do anything directly in contact with the viper, and yet my friend group was safe, with no one kicked out. I should have known that that would not be the end of it.

Our brave leader at the time was dating a guy who was not worthy of her. This did nothing to help her heart when he and the viper were caught publicly kissing. I know with absolute certainty that the viper, deprived of her usual rush from pushing someone out of a group and trying to implode it, felt the need to retaliate against her perceived ouster. And since I remained in the shadows during all of this, the retaliation was completely against our dear brave leader. The boyfriend was weak and incredibly stupid, the viper was cold and calculating.

And yet also stupid. Word spread of her cheating, and then the flood gates opened. It was suddenly okay to talk about her openly, and what an awful person she was. And then it became apparent how much of the school had faced the viper and born the results in a sullen silence for years afterwards.

How she had been playing a game for years with all of us, and how we had stepped to her tune for years, never letting our voices above a whimper against her, her flitting from circles of friends. All because we were afraid of the friends we might lose if we spoke out against her.

We graduated, she moved away, I haven’t seen her in years, thankfully. But the game still hasn’t stopped. There is more than one viper in this world.

I can be very harsh about judging certain people, I’ve been told. Wow. She’s actually quite nice, I don’t know why you don’t give her more of a chance. That’s what I’ve heard, and usually it’s been followed later by an apology, and a sharp retraction.

You can’t tame vipers, it’s often impossible to immediately chase them out of your life. But you can spot them, once you know the signs. And you can warn people about them.

People will not like it at first, they never like it when someone makes a fuss in a group, points out an unpleasantness. But caring enough about friends to risk losing their friendship is worth it. Because there’s a chance you can protect them from having to dance to the viper’s tune, from getting caught in the game for too long. You never know when you’ll meet another viper, when the next round of the game starts. The best way forward is straight through, not skulking in the gutters, incandescent and shouting.