MUSINGS: The Price of Staying Close

The Quiet Cruelty of Teenage Girls

We met before we knew what it meant to choose someone. Preschool. Plastic chairs, grape juice in Dixie cups, finger paint and carpet squares. There are photos from those years—her and I sitting side by side with our legs tucked under us, smiles wide, eyes already measuring the room.

By middle school, we were circling each other with more purpose. Her name carried a kind of weight in the community, but not for the usual reasons. Her family wasn’t prestigious in the Brentwood Country Mart sense of the word. Her father was a scientist—MIT or Caltech, I could never remember—brilliant, cold, vaguely condescending to everyone. Her mother was in philanthropy, the kind of woman who sat on museum boards and wore peasant blouses in expensive fabrics. They didn’t have money, not real L.A. money, not in the way that dripped off other kids at school. But they had intellect, and old books, and artifacts from global conferences. Their house was cluttered with beakers, tribal masks, framed equations, and a persistent smell of jasmine tea.

She went to Marlborough—prestigious, elite, all-girls. The kind of school where the students carried leather planners at fifteen and already had business cards for their summer internships. I went to public. She never said it out loud, but she looked at me like I was something feral she found on the side of the road. She always had that look—a little amused, a little superior. Like she was pretending to slum it.

Still, she knew exactly where she stood. The fiscal divide between her and the other girls at Marlborough clung to her like a second skin. She was always calculating, trying to close the gap with polish and poise. She’d borrow things she couldn’t afford—a friend’s designer clutch for a school event, a cousin’s Chanel flats—and carry them like they were her birthright. There was an uncanny ability to imitate wealth, but there was a tightness to it, a quiet desperation you could feel if you watched her closely enough.

From the outside, she was perfect. The kind of girl parents whispered about with admiration and a little envy. The one who always raised her hand first, whose parents showed up early and stayed late at every school event, volunteering with polished smiles and soft-spoken thanks. She was the poster child for “good girl”—pristine dresses, neat ponytails, and a record of achievement that gleamed like a trophy.

Her parents crafted her image with military precision. Her father, the cold, brilliant scientist, expected nothing less than excellence, and her mother, the poised philanthropist, curated their social presence with the same care she did for her vintage peasant blouses and silk scarves. Together, they built a façade so flawless it was almost impenetrable. At board meetings, charity galas, and parent-teacher conferences, they presented her as the embodiment of discipline and grace—a far cry from the manipulative, calculating girl I knew.

But that innocence? It was by design.

Behind closed doors, she was something else entirely. Cunning. A strategist with a mind sharp as a razor. She learned early how to bend people’s perceptions without breaking them—how to smile sweetly while plotting moves that would leave others exposed and vulnerable. I used to catch glimpses of her true nature in the smallest moments: the way her eyes flicked over a room, not with curiosity but with calculation; the way she let a conversation hang in the air just long enough for someone to trip; the way she could play victim so convincingly that even those closest to her would second-guess their own doubts.

Her greatest weapon was this gap between who she was expected to be and who she really was. The perfect daughter, the model student, the “nice girl” no one suspected. Adults saw her as untouchable—too polished, too poised, too “good” to cause trouble. That shield protected her from scrutiny even when she was quietly tearing people apart. Teachers, parents, counselors—they all bought the act. To them, she was the girl who always said please and thank you, who organized bake sales and led study groups. No one could imagine she was the same girl who manipulated boyfriends, whispered rumors, and left a trail of fractured friendships behind her.

That gap was the source of her power. Because while the world saw an angel, I lived with a ghost who haunted my every move, who thrived on control and invisibility at once. She was always three steps ahead, playing a long game no one else even knew was underway.

We got close anyway. Late-night phone calls where she’d whisper secrets like they were stock tips. “You know Ali and Jake hooked up, right?” she’d say, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “But she doesn’t want anyone to know because he has that weird thing with his lip.”

I laughed. I always laughed. I wanted her attention like a drug. It made me feel like I was part of something exclusive and coded. But even then, I could tell she was performing.

“You know,” I said once, one of those rare afternoons we spent alone in her room, the windows wide open, the sky white with heat, “you don’t speak like someone from L.A.”

She looked up from her notebook. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. You sound like someone in a movie pretending to be from here.”

She smiled tightly. “Maybe I just sound like someone who doesn’t want to live here forever.”

She was always dressed like an adult. Starched blouses, polished shoes, the faintest trace of lipstick even at fifteen. Everything about her was considered. Her outfits. Her posture. Her silences. Like she was rehearsing for a role no one had offered her yet.

I watched the way she watched people—tracking them, absorbing them, filing away information she could use later. She would float between friend groups like a diplomat, effortlessly fluent in all their languages. But if you looked too closely, there was always something off. Her laugh was half a beat too late. Her stories never quite added up.

And the boys—it was always the boys.

There was Ezra, who I had a crush on for two years. I told her at a party while we sat on the porch sharing a bag of sour candy. Two weeks later, they were making out in his car. She claimed it just "happened." Then Ben. Then James. I stopped telling her who I liked. She figured it out anyway. It was like a game to her. One she always won.

I remember a party our junior year, standing in the backyard of some senior’s house in the Palisades. Fairy lights strung across the trees. The air thick with weed smoke and hormones. I saw her talking to Adam, my then-boyfriend. Her hand on his forearm, laughing like he’d told the funniest joke in the world.

I pulled her aside. “What are you doing?”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

She tilted her head, feigning confusion. “You’re being paranoid.”

But I wasn’t.

Still, I stayed friends with her. Because some part of me believed that proximity to her gave me value. That if I could just figure out how she operated, I could protect myself. Maybe even become like her. Untouchable.

But over time, I began to see the truth. She wasn’t just operating—she was studying me. Watching the way I moved through rooms, how people responded to me, what made me light up, what made me shrink. She catalogued everything. Not to admire me. To disarm me. To better impersonate what people liked about me without ever giving anything of herself away.

And there’s something sick that happens when you stay too long in a relationship like that. You begin to mistake cruelty for sophistication. You start measuring your worth in how much someone who hates you chooses to keep you close. I was her mirror and her buffer and her cover. And she was the wound I kept reopening because I didn’t know how to let it scar.

We braided our lives together so tightly that I stopped being able to tell where she ended and I began. I started to doubt myself in small, stupid ways. I'd second-guess my memories. Was I overreacting? Was she really flirting, or was I just insecure? I would write drafts of texts to her late at night and never send them. I told myself I was too sensitive. That I needed to grow up. That this was just what female friendship looked like.

The cruelty between teenage girls isn’t just in the big betrayals. It’s in the silence, the glances, the carefully crafted smirks that hide knives. It’s in the way you compete for scraps of attention, in the whispered gossip designed to fracture trust, in the exhausting effort to be both noticed and invisible. And she wielded all of it like a weapon, mastering the battlefield I didn’t even know I was fighting on.

The final break came after Adam and I broke up. Messy. Teenage devastation. She didn’t say much at the time, just nodded with that neutral expression she used like armor. A few weeks later, I found out she had flown to visit him at his college. On the East Coast. Quietly. No one knew.

I confronted her.

“Why would you go there?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

She looked at me like I was a child.

“It wasn’t about you,” she said. “I needed a change of scenery.”

“He was my boyfriend.”

“Was.”

That was it. No apology. No explanation. And then she disappeared.

Her parents moved back east that summer. She went to a small liberal arts college with old buildings and curated brochures and never looked back. She left no trail. Deleted her Instagram. Changed her number. She didn’t just vanish from me—she vanished from all of us. It was like she had orchestrated her own disappearance. A final act of control.

Sometimes I wonder if she was real. If the version of her I knew was just a mask she wore until she could become whoever she wanted to be. There was always something imposter-like about her—not in where she came from, but in how she inhabited it. Like L.A. was a set, and she was just hitting her marks until she could move on to the next scene.

She hated this city. She hated the artifice but mimicked it with expert precision. She hated the wealth she didn’t have but chased it like a religion. She hated me, I think. But she needed me as long as I still looked at her like she was the most fascinating person in the room. As long as I played the part of the loyal, slightly lesser best friend. The sidekick to her antihero.

I don’t miss her. Not really. But I think about her more than I should. The way you think about a con artist who nearly got away with it. The way you remember a bad dream that stayed with you long after you woke up.

Because for years, I believed she was my best friend. Maybe she was. Or maybe she was just someone who knew how to hold a mirror up to what you wanted most—until she didn’t need you anymore. And the more I thought about how she had up and moved like she had never been here, the more I started to wonder why. What kind of person erases an entire life so completely?

I realized that if she pretended none of us had ever existed, then in her retelling, we hadn’t. We were just placeholders in the narrative she shed like snakeskin. In her new world, she was free to reinvent herself—without the burden of people who knew the truth. Which meant, in the eyes of that new world, we never counted at all.