told her and her mother that spring.
But right before her graduation, she found out the truth.
Her father wanted to move there because he’d started seeing a woman in Miami, who he’d met on a business trip, and this woman was pregnant and expecting his child.
Karlie didn't meet her sister until she was almost three years old, when her father filed for divorce and moved in with his girlfriend.
“It really messed me up,” Karlie says, taking a sip of her wine. "I mean, I couldn’t trust men for a long time, and that was when I was supposed to be dating and meeting lots of them. You know, in college…”
“Where did you go to school?” I ask.
“University of Florida.”
I give her a slight nod, which she takes as judgment.
‘If you remember, I was a scholarship kid. My parents never really had much money. I mean, my dad sold insurance, so we were comfortable but not like all the other kids at our school. And when it came to saving for college, he didn't really do that. He had a pretty bad gambling addiction.”
"University of Florida is a really good school,” I reaffirm her.
“I know that that's what you think, but that's not what your friend Ellis would say.”
“Oh, who cares about her?”
"You do,” Karlie says. “Why else would she be at your dress fitting?”
I shrug and look down at my plate. My cheeks blush from embarrassment.
“She's not really my friend,” I say after a moment. “She is just someone I have been friends with for a long time and that's how it has always been. I don't know, it's hard to explain. Our parents are friends and we have all of these other friends in common…”
I let my voice trail off.
After a moment I look up at her.
I don't know if she's judging me, but I am judging myself.
Why am I friends with someone that I don't really like? I wonder.
“Anyway, I don't want to make you feel bad,” Karlie says. “I'm sure that Ellis has a lot of redeeming qualities.”
Her voice is drenched in sarcasm.
"She was really mean to you,” I admit. "I am really sorry.”
“Why?" Karlie asks. “You had nothing to do with that.”
“I know, I just feel shitty about it. I should have stopped her. I should've stood up for you more.”
We sit quietly for a few moments thinking back to that horrible time called high school when your whole life seems to be both run on an accelerator and with a brake at the same time.
Every little moment is super charged, every little interaction with a friend or foe, making time pass both impossibly quick and slow like molasses.
Ellis was a bully.
There's no other way around it. She treated everyone like dirt beneath her thousand dollar heels especially the scholarship kids.
She was one of the most popular girls at school and one of the reasons for that is because she was so stuck up.
While everyone else was trying desperately to find a group to fit into, a clique of friends where they could be at home, Ellis walked around with her nose in the air as if none of that mattered.
She was above all that, and it was up to everyone else to want to be friends with her.
The thing is that that worked out. Everyone wanted to be friends with her because she was this unattainable goal.
One of Ellis’s strong suits was finding the thing that you were most insecure about and focusing in on that to make you feel like shit.
With Karlie, and other students on financial aid, she would make fun of their clothes and makeup and hair.
If you stood up to her, like Karlie did, that only made things worse.
“She made fun of me for a lot of things,” Karlie says, “but it's the jokes that she made about my weight that hurt the most. I can’t help the fact that all of my hormones were out of whack and all I wanted to do was eat all the time. My weight was one of my biggest demons and she just made me feel a hundred times worse about it than I already did.”
"I'm really sorry,” I whisper, not knowing what else to say.
“She did it again today,” Karlie says.
I look up at her, furrowing my brows.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“That's how I found out that you were here. I saw her out front and I had hoped that she wouldn’t notice me, or at least not recognize me, but unfortunately,