At first, the stories came out innocently enough. In class she always sat next to these two guys, Nick and Kevin. I just realized these names are the same names as the Jonas Brothers. Awkward. Or, as I'd like to think of it, the same names as two members of the Backstreet Boys. Okay, that's not much better. I used to love the Backstreet Boys until Nsync came out, and then I totally loved Nsync. I chose sides. Nsync won. Anyway, I thought she was good friends with Nick and Kevin, just like how everyone else in class thought. They were always together at school functions and always sat together in class.
But, I soon learned that she was indeed not so close with them. She would always say, "They're my brothers. They're my brothers." It made me think they were close, but that wasn't reality. I was the one who always hung out with her and studied with her. She hung out with them maybe on weekends and that was if she tried to get something together, almost forcing them to spend time with her. She began to tell me how she actually wasn't close with them, especially with Nick. Nick and her started to get close at the very beginning of pharmacy school, and then Nick started to pull away from her after he started dating Katie. Helena said that Katie wanted to get into pharmacy school and needed some help with the PCAT or something so Helena told her to email Nick. Helena also said that she thought Nick and Katie would be a good match so that's why she introduced them.
However, Nick started pulling away and talking to her less. Helena even told stories about how Nick would ignore her because Katie told him to. Since I was her friend, I thought Nick was just being controlled by his girlfriend, and I didn't really know what was going on. I thought Nick was a bad friend because she made it seem like he just wasn't a good friend. I even told her that maybe Nick and Kevin don't know how to be a friend. Oddly enough, she always prefaced and ended these stories with, "Oh, but he's my friend. I just get upset. I don't mean anything by it. I don't want you to think badly about him." Really? If you tell enough of these stories, it makes other people think badly about that person, but at the time, I was just trying to be understanding. I do understand that sometimes people need to vent and that they don't really mean what they say. It just took me a while to realize that she wasn't a good person who just needed to vent; she complained about everyone she knew.
To try to balance it out, she would talk about things she said that weren't good and how she knew they weren't good and maybe even how she felt badly or sorry that she said those mean things. One time she told Nick to never ever talk to her about Katie again because she so sick and tired of listening to it. Yes, she was always the victim. Everything was being done to her. It was everyone else's fault that things weren't going her way. When I started becoming friends with Nick, it started strangely enough. I noticed that Nick would make complaints about her. I think at first I almost blew them off because I knew he was sort of a blunt person. Then it dawned on me that I could talk to Nick about the complaints I had about her. Guess what? We had exactly the same issues with her. When I started becoming friends with him I was already feeling down, wondering why this friendship I had with Helena was so darn difficult. Was I doing something wrong?
I really tried being her friend because she told of how her friends always left her. She would introduce two people that were friends with her, and they would both click with each other better and leave her out. Her friends always left her. That right there should have been the big warning sign. LOOK OUT! DANGER UP AHEAD! STOP!! RING THE ALARM! But no. What do I think? Oh, poor Helena. All her friends leave her. She has no close friends. Awwwwwww. Well, boo freakin' hoo. All those people stopped being friends with her because it was too damn difficult trying to be friends with her. When Nick and I started comparing notes, we realized that she was a bad friend to both of us. His reason for not being close with her anymore was because she got insanely jealous of his relationship with Katie and did some awful things. To this day we don't know if Helena had some kind of crush on Nick or not because she still can't seem to let him go.
She was always gossiping about people in class, complaining about her "friends", was supernaturally loquacious to the point we couldn't study together anymore, discussed major family issues, had no problem preaching about her religion but huge problems living her religion out, and this was all just the icing on the cake. I haven't even gotten to the cake part yet. Sometimes when I talk about her out loud, I feel like it's just word diarrhea. It just comes out running all at once. It's dirty and messy. It smells bad. I've been conscious not to do it, but it slips out once in a while. Next time I'll get to the cake part.
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