Relationships is a Funny Word

“Sounds like a real winner,” Tina declared.

“He wasn't always like that,” I defended. “Most of the time he was a lot of fun. Very clever.”

“How bad was he when he was bad?” she questioned.

I looked at her blankly. “I just told you what he did to my car. That wasn't enough?”

She gave me a frustrated look. “Right but was he always like that when he was bad or was that something special?”

I hummed and hawwed a bit. “He would do some weird things but, at the same time, this was special.”

“Okay.” She relaxed a bit. “Cause it was starting to sound abusive. If he'd been your girlfriend, I'd say you should dump her.”

“Have you ever had a boyfriend like that?” I asked.

Tina shook her head no. “I've had... friends that had bad relationships and its hard, hard to see them when they're in them and hard to get them to end them.”

“Because you're not in the relationship you don't understand,” I added.

“Yes! Exactly!” she agreed. “And they are exactly right, we don't know the situation. Like your story, your mom giving you the advice but she didn't understand right? That one moment wasn't going to break up your friendship. It could have, maybe it should have, but it didn't.”

“You still see him?” Dave asked. I nodded. “Good times? Just sitting around reminiscing about old times, huh?”

I thought back on my last conversation with Eric and the circumstances surrounding it. “Talk about old times, yes. Fondly? No, not really. He's... insane.”

“So you're not friends anymore?” Tina checked. I confirmed this was the case. “Good! At least he's not dragging you down.”

“He tries, he just doesn't succeed.”

Our conversation stopped suddenly with the sound of a scream. I've been around trouble enough to recognize a serious scream when I hear it. For that first moment we froze, as if we were trying to believe what we were hearing. When we saw the look on each other's faces, we knew we weren't imagining it.

I was the first one out the door.