A Chilling Friendship - Part I

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 1 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

 

Now that she’s dead, I can write about her without fear of lawsuits or reprisals. She was my best friend who became my worst enemy. Her name was Caroline Adler, and just thinking about her makes my stomach grow cold.

We met when we were in our junior year of high school, both of us misfits among our peers — she, because she was highly intellectual and had a weirdly monotonous voice that made it difficult to follow what she was saying; me, because I’d been in a near-fatal car crash the year before and had a still-raw scar that cupped my right cheek. (I was weird for other reasons, too, a daydreamer who couldn’t do math to save myself and constantly doodled faces in the margins of my notebooks.) We both loved classical music, perhaps the one thing that drew us together, because I was submissively quiet and let Caroline’s words wash over me while she did all the talking.

The bond we formed in high school continued over the years, taking us through various relationships and marriages, the birth of children, the attempts at a number of different professions. All this is to say, we were fast friends, almost sisters, until we weren’t.

The troubles between us began when I left an eight-year marriage and moved back to the States from London. Even from the first moment, it was understood that I should live in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Caroline lived, and not in New York City where we’d both grown up and where my parents had a brownstone in Gramercy Park with ample room for a returning daughter whose life had fallen apart. Caroline welcomed the move. In fact, for the first few weeks, while I was getting on my feet, I stayed with her in the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Ronnie Goldman, a mustachioed young man who claimed he was writing a novel and whose very thin red lips reminded me of a vagina.

I was pretty innocent back then, despite the fact that I’d weathered a marriage to a man old enough to be my father and was now on my own with a two-year-old child, an adorable, dark-eyed little girl named Sophie. I had no idea what I looked like or what sort of effect I had on other people. My husband had been very controlling and I was used to doing exactly what he told me, although I was also a drunk, which meant I was exquisitely sneaky and underhanded, quite capable of slinking around and leading a double life no one, not even my closest friends, knew about.