It Happened To Me: I Confronted The Girl Who Turned All My Friends Against Me In High School And Asked Her Why She Made My Life A Living Hell

When I told my former "friend" Sue how I felt about her bullying me relentlessly, she claimed she “didn’t remember.” But karma is taking care of her.

Happy Weekend!

I have just one question for you today (which, completely coincidentally, tangentially relates to Cathy's story below). Here goes:

What would you do if an old family friend kept gaming the system using fake emails and free trial offers to subscribe to your website without paying? But then whenever they talked to you, they just complimented the site and acted like everything they were doing was above board and even benevolent. I'm sure they don't realize that I see it. (I'm obsessed with this project and I see everything. That's one reason I am so in love with you all who are supportive and open your emails and write your comments and show your friends and pay your bill. You don't have to do all of those things, certainly, but if you do, I know who you are and I deeply thank you.)

I could offer this person a gift subscription. I could tell them I know what they’re doing. I could ignore it and do nothing and smile (not me at all, as you know). What would you do?

I love you and I will see you comment-style whenever you’re ready!

Xox always, Jane

High school me. How could anyone be mean to a face like this?

By Cathy Alter

The morning began just like it always did—blowing out my bangs, putting a yellow Goody comb in my back pocket, and boarding the school bus. My best friend, I’ll call her Sue, got on the stop before mine and always saved me a seat next to her.

But this morning, something was off. Even though we had spent hours on the phone the day before, watching “General Hospital” from our respective dens and then debriefing on lord knows what, Sue had her legs across the pleather seat, preventing me from sitting down.

“Come on,” I said. “Move it.”

“No,” she said, staring straight ahead.

I’d known Sue since kindergarten. She was always joking, making me laugh with her uncanny imitations of our teachers or passing me a note in class that read, “dildo,” a word I had yet to learn. But sometimes her humor came tinged with cruelty. Was this one of those times, I wondered?

“Cut it out,” I told her. “Let me sit down.” I began to lower my butt onto her shins.

Sue refused to move her legs. She was not smiling. I gave up, found another seat, and figured she’d stop whatever game she was playing when we got to school.

But she did not stop. For the next two years, the game continued. When it started, I was in my junior year of high school, already targeted for being too tall, for not wearing the correct brand of clogs, for getting good grades, and for sticking up for kids who had it worse than me. At that raw and vulnerable age when all I wanted to do—when all any of us wanted to do—was to blend in, Sue had turned me into a social outcast.

And worse, she took with her some of the meanest girls in our grade as her cheering section. For reasons only she understood.

A bully sandwich!

Before a trio of social psychologists coined the term Queen Bee Syndrome, Sue was the queeniest. She had a knack for locating your tenderest of spots —a raging pimple or a bad hair day or a flat chest (guilty, guilty, and, sigh, guilty)—and then holding the poor fool up to ridicule for the rest of the day.

Sue was the sun in our small universe and our friend group revolved around her like starving planets.

I have blocked out so much of what happened to me during those two years of high school. I can tell you the names of the girls who tormented me but no longer remember the words they used. In the hallways, in the classrooms, on the track team, on the school bus, I was truly alone. Even my friend group abandoned me, afraid of risking the public wrath of Sue and her minions.

We never do really leave the high school cafeteria.

Even as an adult, I still recognize the former jocks, burnouts and prom queens — older and perhaps more mellowed but with their “Breakfast Club” essence intact. So I traveled back to Connecticut to attend a get-together attended by some of my perpetrators.