There is very little that I recall about my friendships with Sam and Emma. Besides one good memory, all the rest are bad. My friendships with both of them lasted until just after the Easter during our first year of university. Although we never officially fell out, as an actual adult, I am shocked that it was the two of them who fell out with me. Yet, there wasn’t a specific occasion that I can point to and say, “This is the day our friendship ended.” You might think based on what I have said so far, that our relationship just fizzled out, like so many do, but that wasn’t the case. As a young adult, I wondered what I did to make the two of them despise me so much. As an almost middle aged adult, I realise that they were both just awful, selfish, human beings. If I had a list of people I truly hated, they would be very close to the top of that list.
If up until what I just told you, you suspected that me and Sam fell out because she sent a gang of would be rapist to my room, to get them out of here own, then you are right to suspect that, after all, it should have been a massive red flag, signalling to me that this woman was to be avoided. Yet, I ignored it. I was so naive and trusting, despite everything that I had already been through at this point. It was completely a mistake on my part that I continue to engage with Sam. By no means was I stupid either, I wanted to trust people. You could argue that it is better to trust people, than to view everybody through a lens of suspicion, and at nineteen, I would have most definitely argued this case. Today, at thirty four, knowing where trust gets you, I would advise you firmly to make your default setting suspicion, and be pleasantly surprised when you are proven wrong.
I never judged Sam for what she did to me that night, at the time. Yes, I would have handled the situation differently, but maybe in the heat of the moment she hadn’t been able to think clearly. Now, I do judge her for it. My real anger at the time, though I never showed it, or vocalised it, was at the boys, GP and Mikey, for walking past a group of men, fully aware of why they were at my door, and doing nothing to help me. Maybe they were afraid, I reasoned, and maybe they really were, but there was so much they could’ve done to help me without personally confronting the men themselves, for example, contacting the security guards.
The irony of my completely non judgemental attitude towards Sam and Emma is not lost on me. Apart from that one good memory, all my other memories of our interactions involve them judging me. The stuff they judged me for was bizarre, and sometimes not even anything to with me, and even stuff they also would, or couldn’t, do.
The only way I can describe this pair of absolute human trashbags, is that they seem to be mirroring the behaviours of entitled, upper middle class, middle aged adults, who had done nothing but be pushed out of another human being to give them their comfortable life and entitled mindset. I imagine, the people they were mirroring the behaviour off were their parents.
Their friends and boyfriends were exactly the same.
Sam’s boyfriend was around our age, but he looked double that. He was grossly overweight and really unattractive, and although I never pointed it out, other members of the penthouse crew, and the group from the second floor, did. They also pointed out, as did I, that he was emotionally abusive and controlling, but Sam wouldn’t listen, and even dragged one of the other girls boyfriends into it, which was true, the other girls boyfriend was abusive, but the stuff Sam was calling him out on, was the same stuff she was admitting to her own boyfriend doing, while defending him. To make matters worse, she complained about him constantly, which only made the other girls go after him even more. He would nag her not to go home to see her family on the weekend, so that he could stay over, which she blatantly wanted to do, and for her it was doable, as her family lived in Kent and she drove and owned an expensive car. Then, when he stayed over, we could all hear them having explosive arguments that lasted for hours. After a few weeks, he started staying over during the week nights too, which began affecting Sams university work and attendance, as well as everybody else’s, on our side of the floor. He worked on the underground, and had to be at work ridiculously early in the morning. Instead of setting his alarm clock for the time he had to wake up, for example 5 am, he would set it for hours earlier, for example, 2 am, then snooze for 3 hours on purpose, and it was a proper, old school, very loud alarm clock, not a mobile phone alarm. You could hear that alarm all around our half of the floor. Around Christmas, we all discovered that he was an alcoholic and gambling addict, and he was in a ridiculous amount of debt, which by no means makes you a bad person, but the reason we found this out was because he was abusing Sam financially as well.
Emma on the other hand, kept her relationship with her boyfriend private, so much so that I don’t remember a thing about him. I also remember very little about her best friend from home, who also stayed over regularly, other than he was a boy, and bizarrely judgemental, just like her.
For example – one evening, after being at uni all day, I was doing work and decided to take a break. On my way to uni that morning, I had gone to the supermarket and bought a litre carton of orange juice. As I was at uni, I was drinking it out of the carton. I didn’t finish it, as I soon started chain drinking coffee, and went through a couple of bottles of water too. The carton had been out of the fridge all day, so it definitely wasn’t going to be ok to drink the next day, so I was still just drinking it straight out of the carton. If his criticism had been that the juice had been out of the fridge all day, then that would’ve been valid, but it wasn’t. During my break, with the carton still in my hand, I went to see what Emma and her friend were planning on doing that night. It was Friday, and I could hear them getting ready for a night out, due to her room door being wide open.
“Are you drinking that straight from the bottle?” He observed.
“Yeah,” I shrugged.
“You’re disgusting,” He commented. “Think of the germs from your mouth that are going into that bottle.”
“Think of the germs from my mouth that would be going into a glass if I was drinking from a glass,” I counted.
“It’s not the same. The glass is your personal glass of juice. Nobody else drinks from your glass, and you finish the glass,” he persisted.
I shook the almost empty carton, “This is my personal bottle of orange juice. Nobody else drinks from this bottle of orange juice. I am about to finish this bottle of orange juice.”
“You’re disgusting,” he repeated, then looked away dramatically, signalling that he didn’t want to speak to me anymore.
Emma herself called me disgusting twice over food.
The first time, was for following a very basic, simple, pasta sauce recipe, to the letter.
The second, was because I don’t add milk to scrambled eggs.
On neither of these occasions, was I cooking for anybody but me.
She also had a proper go at me for another food related incident, that had nothing to do with me, other than food that belonged to me was stolen.
I had been home to Liverpool for roughly ten days, from the Friday of one week, to the Sunday of the next week, and had prepared for my late night return by buying food that could go in the freezer, then be cooked quickly. This included a packet of potato waffles, because you can cook them in the toaster, but you have to defrost them first, again using the toaster. When I arrived back at halls, I dumped my bag in my room, hurried to the toilet for a much needed wee, scrubbed my hands raw, due to all the excessive touching of public transport, then headed into the kitchen. I had just open the freezer, when somebody else entered the kitchen.
“Are you looking for your waffles?” It was Emma. She was standing in the door way, leaning against the door frame, the heavy fire door resting against her foot, with her arms folded across her chest. It is obvious to me now, that she had been waiting for me to go into the kitchen from the second she heard me return.
“Yes,” I answered, confused.
“I threw them away,” she informed me, her tone becoming harder.
“Why did you throw my food away?” I managed to sound calm, even though I was upset. I was starving, and now I had practically nothing to eat.
“You put them in the fridge last Sunday night, and by Wednesday they were blue. Why would you do something so stupid? Are you really that stupid? You’re such a moron,” she ranted.
Growing more upset and confused, I tried to reason with her, without turning this strange interaction into an argument, “Emma, I’ve been in Liverpool since last Friday night. I’ve only just got back. I told you I was going, remember?”
“Yes, of course I remember. It’s you who’s behaving like an idiot, not me. You could’ve made people sick?” She accused.
“Emma, I couldn’t have possibly moved them from the freezer to the fridge last Sunday, because I wasn’t here,” at this point, it occurred to me that Emma and Sam didn’t use the communal fridge or freezer, because they had their own in their rooms. “Why were you in this fridge anyway?”
“Don’t do it again,” she chided. Ignoring my question, she left the kitchen.
At the time, I genuinely thought she was intentionally being nasty to me.
This belief seem to be confirmed, after the Easter holidays, when we had a similar but much more serious conversation.
However, a couple of years ago, I read this really interesting article, about how toddlers view the world and the people around them, which may cause behaviours that we might perceive a selfish or bad. This article said, that children under the age of five don’t understand that you don’t automatically know what they know.
They gave this example. An adult and a child under the age of five are in a room, with a red box, a blue box and a ball. The adult puts the ball in the red box, then leaves the room. A second adult enters the room, and moves the ball to the blue box. They asked the child which box the other adult will look in for the ball, when they return. The child will always answer, “The blue box.”
This made me wonder, (and when I say this, I don’t mean it nastily, because you all know, I have brain related problems) whether Emma could have never outgrown that stage of cognitive ignorance, therefore, she didn’t understand that people don’t automatically know what she knows.
The last non serious thing that I remember Emma independently judging me about, was about how I applied my eye make up. We were both getting ready for an event, in her room. While she was curling her hair extensions, I was using her mirror to do my make up. I hadn’t noticed her watching me, until she spoke.
“Why do you do your eye make up backwards?”
“What do you mean?” I enquired.
“You’re meant to put your eyeliner on before your eyeshadow,” she explained, as though it was an unwritten Law.
“I put mine on after I do my eyeshadow,” was all I could think to say.
“I know,” she huffed. “I just watched you do it. That’s how I know you’re doing it wrong?”
“Ok,” I shrugged.
How somebody else applied their own eyeliner, seem like such a weird thing to need to control. Yet, she brought it up constantly throughout the night, trying to get people to agree with her.
When I first met Sam and Emma, my opinion was that they both seemed nice. They had invited me, a complete stranger, to come to the freshers fair with them.
But then, while we were there, they told me to go home, or go on alone, if I didn’t want to stay with them while they spoke to a man who was making sexually inappropriate comments towards me.
They did similar stuff to me every time the three of us were alone. They would invite me to, and even insist, that I do stuff with the two of them, and then treat me like a third wheel and/or an emotional punching bag. Eventually, due to this, I started declining their invitations to do stuff with them, if it was just the three of us.
An example of this behaviour, is the only time that I ever went to the supermarket with them.
I had come home from uni that day for lunch, which I never did, as I attended uni at the Cathill campus and lived at the Trent Park campus, but I had forgotten equipment that I needed to complete a piece of work that day.
Sam heard me return, and knocked on my door a minute later. Her and Emma were going to the supermarket that afternoon, to do a “big shop” and she said that I should come with them, so that I didn’t have to struggle home with my own shopping. I really appreciate the gesture, but at this point, I was doing small shops as and when I needed to, and was planning to go back to Cathill after I finished my lunch. When I explain this, she started accusing me of being bad with money, because according to her, small shop ls worked out more expensive. Feeling like a child who didn’t know how to spend money properly, I agreed to go.
Note: This shop actually ended up costing me more wasted money than a small shop would have, as unlike Sam and Emma, during my first year at university, I couldn’t afford my own personal fridge freezer, so I had no choice but to use the communal ones. As I am a vegetarian, I actually brought both vegetables and dairy products, which apparently nobody else did, so they would constantly steal mine. For those reasons, after this shop, I was robbed, in bulk.
Almost as soon as we got in her car, Sam started going on about how I really need to learn to drive, because it wasn’t fair depending on other people.
“Who do I depend on?” I asked.
“You’re depending on Sam right now,” Emma replied.
“Sam invited me,” I pointed out.
“Because she knew you had nobody else to help you,” Emma insisted.
I was so furious, that’s in order not to lose my temper, I had to say nothing at all. Even though, Emma didn’t drive.
Later, on that same journey, Sam started aggressively screaming at another driver, who had stalled their car at the traffic lights. She was swearing and slamming her hand down on the horn, as well. How I managed to bite my tongue, and not tell her I thought she was too immature and dangerous to be operating a vehicle, I don’t know.
Really though, all these tiny acts of nastiness pale in comparison to my next story, and my next story pales into comparison to each of the worst things these women separately did to me.
Those two stories I will tell you when we get to them though.
My next story is the last in this post.
It left me very shaken and afraid, and taught me that rape alarms are pointless pieces of equipment, meant purely to make you feel safe.
Me and JZ had been given “personal attack alarms,” basically rape alarms, that looked like marker pens, by the police. The reason they looked like marker pens, were so that our attacker wouldn’t drag them off us, before we could set them off. The way you set these alarms off was by pushing the “lid” down onto the “pen”. We were instructed to keep them on our persons at all times.
“We’re not expecting him to come after either of you,” my victim liaison officer had tried to reassure me. “It’s just a precaution in case he does.”
I took her instructions seriously, seeing as I had already received several death threats, none of which were from my rapist, surprisingly. They were from other people who were determined to protect him, and shockingly, the same people who claimed not like him before he raped me.
Everybody knew what had happened, not only due to the same people, but also my rapist him self, telling everybody about it.
The first night of having my alarm, I accidentally set it off in the kitchen. I was juggling it, and my just wash kitchenware, and as I tried to open the heavy fire door, it squashed the alarm into my stomach, forcing the lid down. Due to already being on edge, it startled me, causing me to drop my kitchenware.
The kitchen door slammed shut again, obscuring the view into the kitchen from the corridor.
A second later, Sam had come to her door, and was screaming and swearing at me to turn the alarm off.
Another second later, and Emma was doing the same.
Neither of them came into the kitchen to check I wasn’t being attacked.
Nor did anybody else.
The psychotic girls guide to surviving the human apocalypse 