"The People We've Come To Hate"

At 9:40am on a typically English ice-cold morning, two streets away, Madeline was just waking up. Madeline Sandshaw was one of my closest friends and probably the only one who knows the most about my life without me having to tell her verbally. I’ve known her now for the better part of five years. She’s classy and sophisticated, with a brain “to die for”. I had already been awake for close to twenty minutes when we postponed our trip to the city by thirty minutes.

She was early by ten minutes, when she knocked on my door, and I was nowhere near ready, so I rushed around the house and she stood there in silence.

A bus ride and metro ride later and we were there. We wandered down Northumberland Street as Madeline smoked her way through a ‘Marlborough Light’.After our quick break at the ‘popular’ Starbucks, the conversation turned to our friend Skye Manning.

“I’ve kind of given up on Skye.” Madeline told me, as she sipped on her ‘tall mocha to take away’ (she once proclaimed ‘mochas’ as man’s greatest invention.)

“Every time I try to talk to her it’s always Aidan that she talks about, whether I’m talking to her or not, he always becomes the subject we talk about.” I couldn’t do anything else but agree, even though I hated doing so because I once loved Skye non-platonically. We both loved each other non-platonically, strangely at the same time, but neither of us had the balls to do anything about it. It was only a few weeks ago we admitted this to each other, when she and Aidan were going through one of their weekly rough patches.

“I know how it is.” I replied in agreement, “but you don’t have to go to school with her and see her talk about him everyday, every single day, and you don’t have to watch him break her heart as he wanders off into the hallway with Nathaniel.”

“I suppose. I love her I really do but I, but...” Madeline struggled to find the words she was looking for, “…but I don’t know anymore, their relationship seems to be wrong, but saying that the relationship I am in, or I’m not in, at the moment is in tatters.”

I had a thought: was Skye turning into one of those people Madeline and I hated, the ones that obsess over their partners until their partners break up with them? I would always be there for Skye, but I felt like things were eventually going to come to head. We were talking about Christmas over an MSN Messenger conversation and she suddenly interrupted with, “do you think I’m ugly? Aidan says I am and he only went out with me for my good personality.” I don’t even know why I replied.

Madeline and I carried on walking until she broke the silence with, “I don’t mean to bitch about her, but there’s nothing else I can do when I’m seeing one of my oldest friends being sucked into a relationship that I can see ending in disaster.”

I nodded. I was still thinking about Skye possibly turning into one of the ‘obsessive partners’. How could the once innocent, sweet, and kind girl I knew turn into one of the ‘obsessive partners’ that I read about on the Internet? It just didn’t feel real.

That afternoon, after Joe, Madeline’s on/off/on-again/off-again boyfriend drove us home, I spoke with my friend Jason Matthews; the biggest whore I know, for a man anyway. At a party not too long ago, I, and four other people, walked in on him fucking some virgin’s brains out. When I asked him about it later he said, “She was as tight as, as tight as,” there was a pause as he tried to think of something really tight, then, I filled in the blanks for him.
“A virgin?”
“Yes, a virgin.” He replied.

He said he’d also noticed a change in Skye. “She seems to have become more distant from our group of friends and more dependant on Aidan.” Just like before I couldn’t help but agree, even if it did hurt me in the process.“It hurts me to say it,” I said, “but I have to agree. To me, it seems like she needs Aidan’s approval of everything she does. If I had arranged to go into the city with her, and Aidan wasn’t happy about it, she’d make up some excuse as to why she couldn’t go.” She’d done that so many times, I remember them all though.

“Yeah, she did that with me. Now, I just don’t invite her anywhere. Anyway Noah, I’m meeting up with Victoria again, I know, I know, you don’t have to say it.” He replied.

“Yeah, I know I don’t have to say it, but I will anyway, you’re fucking crazy! She cheats on you every time but you just keep on running back.”

“But Noah, the sex is so good. Her parents caught us in their bed the other day, it was hot stuff dude.”“Okay, that’s all I can take, I’m still fragile from my morning mocha. Speak to you soon.”

I put down the phone. I wondered: was it this same obsession that made Jason keep going back to Victoria, and would it be the same obsession that could make Skye go back to Aidan, no matter what?

I made myself an instant coffee; you only get the good stuff from Starbucks around here. After thirty minutes of research on the Internet I learned nothing. Ignorance is bliss I guess.