A Chilling Friendship - Part VI
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 6 of a TEN-PART FICTION STORY
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Well, it wasn’t that I was pregnant. It was that I had been pregnant. Three months had passed without me having a period, but I paid no mind to that since, as far as I could tell, Ray hadn’t ejaculated, and since I was in such poor physical health, it wouldn’t be surprising to miss a period. One Sunday, however, I began hearing a voice in my head that repeated over and over, You’re in danger, you’re in danger. It wasn’t unusual for me to hear warning voices, but I decided to ignore this one – what, after all, could I do about it?
The next day I began bleeding. Heavily. I was due to work at Sophie’s daycare center (which was communal), but by the time I got there, I was going through a Tampon every three minutes. One of the other mothers looked at me and said, “What’s the matter? You look awful!”
I told her about my heavy period and she said, “Maybe you’re having a miscarriage?”
That was when the penny dropped.
Someone else recommended a gynecologist, and I put on a Pamper and drove straight there. The gynecologist, a man, sent me home with a prescription for drugs and told me to stay on bedrest for the next three or four days. Of course, the first thing I did after seeing him was tell Ray, who was kind enough to come over and take care of me. (He was furious that I’d gotten rundown enough to have a miscarriage – he would have insisted on keeping the baby.) Ray, bless his heart, told Caroline, who all along had been oblivious to the nature of our relationship. And, although she tried hard to hide it, Caroline was not happy.
If any one female should have a romantic connection to Ray, it should be her, Caroline, who’d waited all these years.
But instead it was me, a newcomer, who was also Caroline’s best friend. And Caroline, as I knew, formidable in her role as educator, didn’t take well to adversity. (Once, when our mutual group therapist told her she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, she got up and slapped him in the face.) It was then that Caroline’s attitude toward me began to change.