Ivory Angel #8

Friendship. It’s been on my mind a lot lately. It’s kind of weird because while I’m a loud writer, I’m a quiet person. I don’t really have very many friends, possibly for the same reason I’m awful at relationships. I have a hard time trusting people. Really trusting them. I mean, it’s not like I go around thinking everybody is lying to me or trying to kill/rape me (though I do think that latter late at night when I’m alone and I see strangers. Sorry, I’m not crossing the street because you’re a bad person, it’s just the way I am…) , but while I might believe my friends are good people at heart, that doesn’t mean they can’t cause me pain, so it’s best to keep my distance. As far away as possible. I will never be dependent on anyone, if I can help it. But I will be dependable. The friends I take I guard with my lives. I am the wolf that stands between the pack and the hunters. If I take a bullet, the world stringing up my pelt as a prize emblem, as long as it’s for the people I love, my friends, I will be happy to see my own blood flow. Funny, it’s easier for me to die for them than trust them.

So, while I like my friends to be honest with me, because I can take it, I’m not the same with them. I’m honest in all the little things, but never when I think it causes harm, because taking away the pain is my highest priority. Yes, it’s hypocritical, but it’s also realistic. When my recovering bulimic, manic-depressive friend walks up to me and asks me if she’s fat, I’d never say yes, despite the fact she is a little…well, you know…soft around the edges. I think that just makes her more huggable.

In the same vein, sometimes a friend knows when to stay away. If my guy friends are after a girl, I have to back off and let them work, otherwise the guys closeness with me makes everyone believe we’re dating. It’s so damn frustrating. Can’t I have non-sexual relationships with someone of a different gender? On nights when I want to flirt, I have to go to the other end of the house from male friends, otherwise there’s no chance of a pickup. Similarly, when somebody spends two hours telling me how fat they are and wished they looked like me, ragged stick-girl, and can’t talk about anything else in my presence despite my reassurances they are beautiful, I know that my best support has to be by phone or email. If looking at me makes them feel pain, I won’t let them. It hurts, but sometimes it’s necessary. I wish I could just take their problems away. Like Christ on the cross, I want to absorb their tears.

Sometimes, being a friend means lying for them. There are the little things, like covering for a person in class when they’ve slept in, but there are bigger things too. “Is he gay?” some girl nudges me at the party. “No,” I reply, because it’s not my secret to tell. It’s his as long as he wants it, much as I think he’s overreacting to the possibility of being outed.

Sometimes being a friend is actually fighting against them. Stopping what they do, what they want to do.

“Bitch…” there was snow flying in my eyes, snow between me and the three boys, cold and wet and frighteningly white. It was like I was crying without the tears. It clung to my eyelashes and nostrils and made me paler than I already felt inside. “Stay away from this. This is none of your business.”

I felt sick when I saw them. “Addy” was sixteen and very beautiful to a thirteen year old nerd-girl who has nothing feminine about her whatsoever. Her breasts were the size of mangos, her thighs slender and tight. In the snow, she looked like an angel…a very frightened angel. The three had surrounded her, trapped her between a wall and their own throbbing, sweaty, disgusting male bodies. They told her she had two choices: take off her clothes or they would shove snow into her underwear. Either she could be cold and wet, or she could be cold and wet and have something warm and dry to change into afterwards.

I knew Addy from school. I knew Addy thought sex meant love. I knew Addy was going to do it, even before her sweater came off and drifted down among the snowflakes.

“NO!” I screamed. I didn’t care if this was what Addy wanted, because I knew it wasn’t right. They didn’t love her. She couldn’t get what she wanted this way, so I stepped out of the shadows holding a block of broken ice. The snow made it hard to see, and I suddenly felt very thirsty and cold. I hadn’t gotten in a fight since elementary school. I used to win a lot then because I played dirty and knew how boys were sensitive to pain, but three teenagers in a corner on slick footing was something more consequential. But at heart, I thought only cowards would do this thing and maybe if I looked mean enough, I could make them run away. I stepped in front of them, and I said in a voice that sounded quivery and small, “You’ll have to do it to me, too. And I’ll tell.”

Addy didn’t look grateful. She looked annoyed. And cold, with just her bra on. It was white, too.

The boys hesitated. Threats were one thing, holding a girl down in the snow and wrestling her clothes off was quite another. And I was a tattletale brat who was best friends with the school headmaster’s daughter… that probably had something to do with it. They let me go, at least for now. Later, they groped me in the halls when no one was looking, squeezing my breasts and my buttocks where the teachers couldn’t see. They put graffiti in the art closet talking about how I was a whore. It made me laugh, because I didn’t really understand what they were doing. Now I wish I had broken their necks.

And Addy still had sex with them a month later.

The moral of the story: was I a true friend? Probably. I couldn’t stand by and let anyone hurt Addy not after she was hurt so many times not even when I knew she welcomed that hurt. If she wanted to do it with them, I wanted to make sure it was her choice and it was in a different way. But after that I knew, and I will always know, that the people I call friends will not be able to protect me, not from anyone else and not from myself. Addy couldn’t stop them from molesting me just like she couldn’t stop herself from loving them. So in the end, I guess I have to depend on myself to be strong.

The most important part of being a friend means just knowing when to hold someone. Without asking why. I need a little of that now, I think.