Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  When she was seventeen, Katherine had her first ever true fight with her best friend. It was not a disagreement, an argument, or a differing of opinion. It was not an annoyance, a roll her eyes at his antics behind his back, or even a stare at the doorway through which he had departed far longer than she should while she sighed and contemplated yet one more thing that just did not add up about him. She had experienced all those things a dozen times or more (sometimes daily) in the years that she had been friends with Caleb.

  It was normal to disagree with someone. It was normal for the people around you to do things that you found annoying and for them to be annoyed by you in turn. Even arguing functioned in Katherine’s world as normal (Grammy Vance always said that if you had a friend that you were afraid to argue with what you were really afraid of was finding out that they weren’t really your friend).

  That being the case, it didn’t bother her when any of those normal people trying to live their lives in an entwined fashion bumps in the road came to be. This, however, was not one of those occasions. She let it go the first time because she didn’t actually process Caleb’s behavior for what it was until after he had already ducked out of her living room and headed for home. She was so slow to give a name to what he had done for two reasons. The first reason being that he had never (in all the time that she had known him) done such a thing before. The second reason being that it made her actually physically sick to her stomach to put it into words.

  She sat (for more than a few moments) blinking at her front door in her confusion with nausea warring with reality before shaking her head as if to clear it and telling herself that there was something wrong with her hearing or she hadn’t been paying attention properly. Those were the only possible explanations because she hadn’t heard or understood what it was that she thought that she had heard and understood. She knew that because it was Caleb (and she had seven years of knowing Caleb at her disposal). She knew that there had to be something off with her perception of the scene she had just been a part of because seven years of knowing Caleb told her that that wasn’t something that Caleb would do -- not to her, never to her. There was a line that had always been present -- a little finer and harder to walk, perhaps, than she maybe should have been comfortable accepting, but a line (none the less) that her best friend had never before crossed. He wasn’t crossing it now either. He couldn’t be. If it hadn’t been done in the early days of those first seven years, then what possible reason could there be for him to throw himself so blatantly across it now?

  She would have let it go except for the fact that it became a whole lot more difficult to explain away or deliberately interpret as some sort of a miscommunication when it happened again (and again and again until it turned into some sort of standard operating procedure for her best friend). She found herself staring at the doorways through which he had departed no longer contemplative or processing some new addition that she needed to make to her notebook. Instead, she was staring in the shock of contemplating what it was that had replaced her best friend (or possessed him or caused foreign influence on his brain) or whatever it was that was happening because her Caleb did not act like that.

  She still didn’t say anything. It was initially the shock, then it was the trying to figure out what it was that she was missing that was making her think that he was doing what he couldn’t possibly be doing (commonly referred to as her denial stage). Then, it was her being so busy trying to fight off the nausea that had taken to seizing her system every time she was anywhere near him (and despite this shift in his behavior they were still going on as if things were normal between the two of them at the start and were thus around each other a lot) as she braced herself in preparation for hearing him do it again.

  Until, one day, she found herself staring at an empty doorway again, and she finally gave voice (quietly muttered in an undertone, but out loud nevertheless) to the appropriate label with which to define what was happening.

  “He’s lying to me,” she told herself in that half choked off whisper, and the exterior recognition of the words did something to the turmoil that her thoughts and reactions had become. It was as if the words opened a release on some sort of a pressure valve and all of the tension that had been building up in her came flowing out with them. What remained had either not been there before or had been so deeply buried underneath all of the other emotions that had been vying for her attention that she had not been able to recognize it.

  She was no longer shocked, she was no longer determined to explain away, she was no longer filled with revulsion to the point of nausea, and she was no longer interested in giving Caleb the benefit of the doubt. She was over and done with all of those things. She was over and done with staring at doorways like a ninny as she tried to gather and organize her thoughts. She was over and done with biting her tongue and telling herself not to say such and such because it wasn’t an argument that she wanted to start. What she was angry -- really, truly good and angry.

  Caleb didn’t seem to have a clue -- the dense, best friend lying to idiot that he was went on for weeks without seeming to notice that Katherine was inwardly seething. He just kept right on lying -- really lame lies of the “I cannot believe that he actually believes that I just bought that” variety. Sometimes, Katherine thought she was almost (almost) angrier over the lameness and transparency of the lies than she was over the lies themselves (but she was pretty ticked off over the lies in the first place so it was a tough call).

  It was insulting (in a bizarre sort of way that she chose not to dwell on too closely except to acknowledge the fact that she did, in fact, find it insulting) that he wasn’t even trying to be a better liar. That was a whole different can of worms to be opening in her head as she wasn’t really sure what she thought about the fact that she was finding herself assessing her best friend’s ability to lie to her and half wishing that he was doing a better job just so that there would have been an actual chance of her not noticing the lies. That was more messed up than she cared to be dealing with and led her conveniently back to being angry at Caleb for putting her in the position of having those types of thoughts swirling around in her head in the first place.

  The fact that after seven years of friendship (to the point where Katherine had been confident that what she really had was the status of being family) Caleb’s opinion of her was that a) it was acceptable to lie to her, b) he didn’t need to be displaying any signs of remorse or tension or even second guessing over lying to her, and c) she was either so gullible or so completely lacking in intelligence that she was never going to notice that he was lying to her. To say that those things bothered her would be an understatement of massive proportions.

  What those thoughts most definitely did not do was give her any sort of motivation to get over being angry. She dwelled; she dwelled big time. She inwardly seethed and outwardly raised eyebrows while asking casual questions that were no longer casual questions but carefully laid traps so she could see just how much lying he was willing to do to cover up the previous lying (and so forth and so on into what seemed to be laid out in front of her as a never ending path of lies that she was just supposed to go merrily tripping down because she was, apparently, just Katherine -- and lying to just Katherine didn’t matter).

  She started avoiding him -- unconsciously, at first, and then with intention. She didn’t care to be around him if that’s how things were going to be. She told herself on the days when she had started to pick up the phone or head down the path toward Caleb’s house before she remembered just how things stood between the two of them that she wished that he had just dropped her; that he had flat out told her to her face that he didn’t want to be her friend. She thought it would have been easier for her to deal with than this . . . whatever it was that it was.

  Instead, what she got was an ever increasing series of hurt looks and puppy dog eyes from Caleb as if she had kicked him and left him by the side of the
road to get hit by a car or something. If the anger and seething had been something that escaped his notice, then her avoidance was something that did not. The fact that he kept looking at her like she was somehow going deliberately out of her way to cause him hurt didn’t do much to curb her anger over the situation either.

  She was tired of it. She was tired of being angry, and she was tired of being angry at herself for not having Caleb around anymore. She was not going to feel guilty. He had started it (as childish as the words might have sounded). Maybe she should have called him out on it, provoked the conversation, and gotten everything out in the open, but she wasn’t going to do it.

  She had spent years not prying. She had spent years trying to maintain the line between her curiosity and his privacy, and she thought that she had been a really good sport about it all. If this was the way that it was going to be, then that was fine. Maybe they needed the split anyway. They were seniors; things were going to change. This might just be the first step. She had been being all codependent anyway. She had been depending on Caleb and Sylvie and Mr. and Mrs. Twist, and maybe she shouldn’t have been. Maybe she needed to remember that people didn’t always stick around and that sometimes the people that you were supposed to be able to trust ended up being not so worthy of it. The days when those thoughts were featured were the days when she really hated being a teenager with the attendant propensity toward moodiness and angst.

  She didn’t like the hole the sort of split with Caleb left in her life; she didn’t like her inability to focus on anything other than how angry she was when she was around him. Thus, her avoidance without an out and out admittance to him that she was avoiding him (there was always some carefully constructed and even allowably reasonable explanation available for why she was blowing him off).

  He noticed. He frowned. He pouted a little and used the hurt puppy expression liberally (and completely unfairly in her opinion). The lies increased in frequency, and they became (even though she would previously have declared that such a thing could not possibly be possible) even more lame than they had been before.

  It could, she supposed, go on like this between them indefinitely until both of them just got so sick of it that they decided that the other person wasn’t worth it anymore, but that hurt more for her to think about than being angry did (and it didn’t get that far).

  She should have realized that it was a set up; they hadn’t hung out one on one for so long that she should have realized something was up -- she was, however, too busy trying to not be so angry that she was nodding her head and mumbling acquiescent noises without paying attention to what it was that Caleb was saying. Before she knew it, it was just the two of them out on the path through the woods between their homes. Her first thought was that it was strangely appropriate (even though it was also storybook clichéd) that any friendship ending showdown happen in the same place where they had first met. Her second thought was that they were somewhere private -- no witnesses, no one to overhear, and no one to intercede.

  Caleb started first. “What’s your problem?” He demanded sounding mostly hurt but a little angry as well.

  Any thought that Katherine might have had about having a calm, level headed conversation disappeared in an instant.

  “What’s my problem?” She demanded back.

  “Yes,” he told her looking at her with an expression that she could only describe as disappointed. “You’ve been avoiding me for weeks. If you have a problem, then you’re supposed to be able to tell me. I thought I was your best friend.” He told her plaintively putting the kicked puppy expression back into use. She was having none of that. She laughed in his face.

  “Really?” She crossed her arms and settled into an aggressive argument stance. “That’s rich coming from you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He responded, but Katherine caught the momentary flicker of panic behind the hurt. He did know.

  “It means, my supposed best friend,” she made a small effort at cutting down on the sarcasm practically dripping off of those words but gave it up as a worthless endeavor. “That maybe you should apply a few of your own words of wisdom about having a problem and being able to tell me.”

  He hesitated for a moment; she could almost see the internal battle raging behind the screen of his eyes, and she stayed quiet in anticipation that maybe he would come to the right decision, say the right thing, and make it all okay between them again (even though she wasn’t quite sure what the decision or those words would have to be to make that happen). She didn’t get the chance to find out. It was like watching some sort of a blank wall drop down to cover any further expression from his eyes before he told her the lamest lie in what had been a list too lengthy to count of really lame lies.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fine,” she was out of patience with him. She wasn’t going to do this to herself anymore; she didn’t want to do this to herself anymore. “I’ll spell it out for you.”

  “Kady,” he started, but she didn’t want to hear the nickname. She didn’t want to see the puppy dog expression or hear the hurt in his voice. She just wanted to say the words that were screaming at her to let them come bubbling up out of her throat. She wanted them spoken and unable to be taken back (and she wanted him to have to give her an answer). Then, at least, she would know. They would both know where they stood. That (even if it ended things in some awful way) would have to be better than their current limbo. Wouldn’t it?

  She took a deep breath, and she let go. She let go of everything she had been thinking and feeling since the first moment she had realized that her best friend was (with intention) directly and to her face lying to her. She coughed up the anger, the original hurt, shock, disbelief, and the desire to make excuses for him as well as her deeply buried dark thoughts about what it was about her that he must find untrustworthy. She let them all rise to the surface and form words that she didn’t try to mitigate or censor. They formed themselves into coherent thoughts in coherent sentence patterns that actually managed to make an appropriate transition between what she wanted to convey and what actually came out of her mouth.

  “You’re lying to me, Caleb,” she began looking him straight in the eye and refusing to withdraw her gaze. “You’re looking me right in the eye and lying to me. You even know that I know that you are lying. Why bother with the pretense?” She asked but neglected to pause for a response. She didn’t want one -- not until she was finished. For some reason, she knew that this needed to all come out in one long drawn out semi-cohesive thought. “You aren’t even a good liar. They are sloppy, lazy lies that don’t even make sense. I can’t decide whether it makes it better that you’re a lousy liar or if it just makes it worse that I’m so far down the scale on the list of things that matter to you that you can’t even be bothered to lie to me properly.”