A Chilling Friendship - Part X

Now that she’s dead, I can write about her without fear of lawsuits or reprisals. We were best friends, almost sisters, until we weren’t. Jealousy overtook her, and as a result she intentionally and maliciously tried to sabotage my career. Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say. But my revenge was hot hot hot.  

THIS IS PART 10 of a TEN-PART FICTION STORY

with new episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

 

The college couldn’t fire Caroline – she’d been there too many years, was too important – but they sure as hell could make her life uncomfortable. I can only guess what happened. The story of her impropriety would have traveled. She would have been questioned, perhaps even put on leave. People would have grown to dislike her more and more. Rumors would have flown like a flock of swiftly migrating birds and she would have had to suffer the consequences.

All of this gave me pleasure. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but for Caroline the dish was hot hot hot. I wasn’t around to learn what happened to her. During the term I was a guest lecturer our paths rarely crossed, and afterwards the busyness of life took over. Not that I forgot about Caroline. I would think back to when we were high school besties – our silly pranks and high minded discussions, our hours of lolling on her bed or mine, gossiping about fellow students, movie stars, Nobel Prize winners – and wonder what had happened. The girl I had known was nothing like the sour and power-hungry woman she turned into. Did her decline from fun-loving and adventurous to mean and bitchy start with the fawning boyfriend, Ronnie Goldman? Had it been her failure to achieve a physical relationship with gay Ray Davis, whose affection she’d craved so badly? Or had it been something further in her past, a dissonance that had occurred in college or shortly afterwards?

Whatever it was, despite myself, I didn’t wish her well. I’d had the satisfaction of effortlessly spreading a mean (but true) story about her and that should have been the end of it. But over the years, I found myself keeping an eye on Caroline’s progress.

She married, she had children, she wrote articles, she acquired a country house (I saw pictures in a glossy magazine), she received an award for a mode of teaching she engineered. All this news was positive, but I had my own bitchy side and badly wanted her to suffer results for her mean behavior. (Not that I was active in this desire; it was more like an annoying melody that kept repeating in my ear.) Some time passed without my distantly tracking her. And then one day I googled Caroline and saw a photo of her in a turban with the news that she’d passed away. Was I sad or gratified? Neither, really. Perhaps I felt a little smug about outliving her, but frankly it was simply information about a person I’d known long ago who was no longer in my life and no longer mattered. I didn’t really care anymore.