Best Friends Forever

How do I put this delicately? She didn’t turn any heads when she walked into the room. Don’t get things twisted, though. She’s not the brilliant young woman who gets a makeover and turns into a princess, either. She’s neither beauty nor brains. She’s utterly forgettable.

Almost impossibly dull. Educated, technically, though she skipped the majority of her classes, so the important stuff didn’t stick. Her dad had to get her a job because she couldn’t get anyone to tolerate her past an interview. He sits her at a desk in his office and has her do data entry, like a child given a disconnected video game controller to keep themselves busy.

It’s tragic, really. I’m racking my brain trying to come up with just one redeemable trait. Everyone has to have at least one, right? I just have to come up with one. But she’s making it impossible. I really tried here, you know.

She slept past her alarm and woke up her parents before theirs went off. Her mother weeps every day that this woman is still living in her house. Can you blame her? Her daughter is pushing thirty and still sleeping in mommy and daddy’s safety net. That’s Jen for you. Pathetic.

At 9:05 AM, Jen finally rolled out of bed. She quickly ran a brush through her flat, brown hair and swiped on mascara to try to bring life to her cold, dead eyes. She’s so thoroughly boring that she would make a morgue look like a nightclub. She has been out of high school for ten years and still hasn’t figured out why she never won Miss Congeniality. She ruined so many classmates’ high school experiences, and she didn’t even care. She just never has anything nice to say.

I would know. We used to be friends. It was a very, very rough time in my life. She was shady from the start, and her boyfriend kept calling me to ask if she was still over at my house. The thing is, each time I was away from home. She loved weaving me into her lies. One day, I ran into her at the mall with a strange man. That’s when I pieced things together. It’s a shame, really. I always felt bad for the guy for getting trapped in her web in the first place. At least he made it out alive.

She didn’t like that I knew. That wasn’t part of her plan, and she always got what she wanted — including when she wanted me dead for it. That was the worst part. Jen loved to scream her heart out whenever things didn’t go her way. And when that didn’t work, she just had to push. First, she pushed me a little past my limits. She would hurl every deep secret and insecurity at me until I was crying myself to sleep every night. She threatened to ruin my life with her lies. Right after she started doing that, she pushed me into a canyon on an ill-advised camping trip. I thought we were repairing our friendship when she was plotting my murder.

I would say I’ve been haunting her ever since, but I don’t think she has the emotional capacity to feel regret, much less feel haunted by her past mistakes. I bet that in a way, she still feels justified for what she has done. At least karmic justice gave her a small slap in the face, because her boyfriend found out she had been lying to him not long after my untimely disappearance. I think it’s for the best. He might’ve gotten pulled into an early grave, too.

Speaking of karma, Jen did something monumentally stupid — even for her. She actually signed up for a dating reality show. Or, rather, she allowed her desperate mother to nominate her and then gleefully accepted the prize. What she ended up getting was her heart broken. You see, he ran into her at the mall when he was out with his fiancée. Turns out he had been hiding her from production the whole time while cashing their checks. I guess everything works out in the end. Or, I mean, they could if she gets struck by lightning too. We’re almost there.