Friendship with Girls (Ex. 13)

It was easy for us to do the backstabbing. It came naturally to all of us. At one time or another each of us had been the victim of it, had understood that we were no longer liked, that the group did not approve of us, that everyone was talking about us but we didn’t know what was being said. Or we found out because someone would “defect” for a moment to tell us, but that was really just a way of playing the game in a different way, or making the backstabbing worse, because what is worse than knowing something your aren’t supposed to know and the only way to expose your knowledge is by making a scene. It is a test of the limits of one’s restraint, of one’s ability to suck it up, of one’s weakness in the face of the others. Likewise we had all been the ones doing the stabbing, picking apart the actions of one of the others, storing up scraps of gossip to parcel out at the most advantageous moment… “Did I tell you about the time when she….?”

It was about power. Or about using allegiances to gain power. It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when we all, or most of us anyway, thought we were actually friends. Thought that it was our common interest that bound us together, despite having such radically different approaches to life. Thought that we were superior because of our inclusiveness. Now we know better. Now we know there is a game to be played and the winner is the one who gets what she wants.

The shift began when she showed up. By she, I mean the bitch. This is not to say that we weren’t all bitches in one way or another, only that we all saw right away that she was a different kind of bitch than we were, dirtier, less polished, less practiced, louder. She was the kind who would make a scene. She didn’t play the back door way. We saw right away that nothing was to be gained by absorbing her into our group. In fact, some of us saw that more was to be gained, in the form of entertainment anyway, by not absorbing her, by passive-aggressively pushing her away. Maybe we would get to see her breakdown. If it wasn’t at our expense, it would be fabulous to watch.

There were some, well, one really, who saw what was to be gained by pretending to be friends with the bitch. This, some of us came to think, was actually some supreme form of bitchiness, or politics-playing, or just the underlying problem of being friends with girls. This was when we realized there was a game being played, that we had been played, and that like the bitch, we might not ever have realized it except that we did.

We would say to each other, “I heard she went to that party, at the washout.”
“Really? What happened?”
“I heard she got trashed and fucked a couple guys.”
“Who told you that?”
“I heard it from a bunch of people. I saw pictures on Joey’s myspace.”
“Joey took pictures?”
“Of course, you can’t trust any of those assholes.”
“I don’t like that. Except I kinda do, if he got pictures of the bitch.”
“So wait, she fucked two guys or three?”
“That’s not what she says. She has a whole different story of how the night went down,” one of us would say, the one who knew about the game we were playing.
“How do you know?”
“I asked her. You know what she says? This is fabulous. She says Adam asked her out and he was really sweet and gave her his jacket.”
“Adam?! Oh she totally got fucked!”
“Of course she did,” says the one of us who knows the game. “But she doesn’t know that we know.” There is a smile we all share, it is a knowing smile. A smile that shows we know we are going to do something with this information. We are going to play with it. We are going to write some notes from Adam to the bitch. We are going to show some pictures to some people. We don’t all know exactly what we’re going to do, but we are going to play the game a little harder.
“I hate that bitch!” we say.
“Of course we do,” says the game-player.
None of us see yet that the bitch could be any of us.