[sinclairfan]

FOREST PRESERVE CLEARING

My name is Kelsey.  I'm 21 years old now, and have lived my whole life in the Western suburbs of Chicago.  I recently learned something which I had heard about but didn't believe until I lived it--that the worst catfight a girl can get into is with an ex-friend.  I got into a catfight with a girl my age named Amanda near where I grew up, and wanted to write about it, so I could understand what went wrong.

First, about my friend Amanda.  She was a super-smart girl in the same school as me.  Same school, but not the same classes--Amanda was always a couple levels more advanced than me, which is why I call her my friend, not my best friend.  She was also super-pretty--straight blonde hair, perfect body.  My hair is thick and brunette--and, while it was never frizzy, I could never get it as straight as Amanda's blonde hair appeared to stay naturally.  I guess, looking back, it's fair to say I was jealous of Amanda's looks and her smarts.

We were in a circle of 9 girls who were one rung down from the circle of Popular Girls at our high school.  The Popular Girls sat at The Popular Girls' lunch table, made up the core of the school Cheer Squad, and hung out at the local Mall.  Our group of 9 friends, including Amanda and me, were The Alternates.  This unfortunate, and self-reinforcing, nickname had gotten started in middle school when a flu bug was circulating thru our school, leaving some tempoary vacancies at The Popular Girls' school lunch table.  A couple of us in The Alternates were invited to fill the vacancies at lunch while the flu bug persisted, but were demoted (back to our own lunch table) as soon as the flu bug ended.

We thought we were being hip and ironic by calling ourselves The Alternates.  But The Popular Girls actually had a monopoly on all the things that mattered at our school--status, Student Council elections, Homecoming and Prom Queen--and so name "Alternates" became maddeningly appropriate.

Occasionally tensions would flare between a Popular Girl and an Alternate.  They would "settle things", alone, at a local Forest Preserve.  We had found a little clearing there which you could get to via a secret footpath.  In the early 2010s, before YouTube got popular, the two girls who had the beef would go back there with one or two girls with a cellphone, and they'd film and post the catfight do that everyone could see what had happened during the fight.  Then the video of the catfight would get deleted.

As we got older and graduation loomed, the days of posting fights like that on YouTube ended.  The first reason was that college Admissions Offices started investigating your social media footprint when you applied--and if there was one thing a Popular Girl did not want to jeopardize, it was her admission to the college of your choice.  The second reason we stopped posting the catfights, tho, was that the Park Service was figuring out the clearing was there and what was going on there.  One spring, the footpath to the clearing had been filled in and graded to make it more difficult to get there.  We had all been back there so often (there had by now been A LOT of fights back there) that we knew 1 or 2 other ways to get there.  But we knew we needed to be way more discreet about our fighting.

Anyways, high school ended in 2016, and all of us, Popular Girls and Alternates, went off to college.  Including girls like me, for whom 4-year college probably wasn't the wisest choice.  I'm not a traditional reader or scholar, as evidence by my not even getting into any of my in-state school choices.  I accepted my admission to a small private school in Iowa, and this is where my friendship with Amanda, my fellow Alternate, comes in.

Amanda got accepted to The Big School in Iowa--U of I.  She was reluctant to accept, because of the logistical/travel details, until she heard I was also going to school in Iowa.  Different school, but total Road Trip potential.  We were both young, starry-eyed, and anxious to put our humiliating Alternate identity behind us.

In August 2016, we packed up Amanda's car, and headed off to college in Iowa.

By May 2017, I was on academic probation at my Iowa college, and my parents refused to let me go back.

By June 2018, my former friend Amanda and I had a vicious catfight at The Clearing.

Here's how that happened.

To be continued.....

[DS79]

I am curious what happened then...

[catfightlover40]

"Posting fights on Youtube ended, to avoid having our social media footprint investigated. Little did I know it was actually the feds busting my parents for getting me into college" because, you know, topical

[sinclairfan]

RUMORS

Things started going south between Amanda and me in July 2017, when she started to realize that I was serious about not going back to school in Iowa.  Having me "there for her" as a Road Trip buddy during Thanksgiving Break, Christmas Break, and Spring Break, not to mention having the SUV space, had become a type of security blanket to her.  Even though she was going to a much bigger school than me, I don't think she was having much luck making friends, at least close ones, in Iowa City.  (Not that I was doing much better in the post-high school friends department--perhaps the toxic social environment at our high school was taking a permanent toll.)

And things just got worse in August when I stayed home as promised, and Amanda returned for her sophomore year.  Amanda was in suite housing, and confided in me via text that her first night back at school, one of her suitemates at climbed into her bed at 1am--and not to sleep.  Amanda hadn't resisted, but she said the other girl was very aggressive and was taking liberties with Amanda that hadn't been discussed as much as they should have been between two girls who now had to live in close quarters for the next 10 months--plus 2 years, if they didn't want to restart the process of finding new housing arrangements.  The cherry on the sundae was that Amanda and her new "special friend" were hiding their sleeping arrangements from their 4 other suite-mates, just escalating the tension in the suite.

I, on the other hand, was adjusting nicely to the post-college chapter of my life.  My dad found out about a licensed pharmacy tech program run by one of the local drug companies.  They paid you to work in one of their gigantic drug sorting and shipping warrhouses, and gave you classes and tests to get licensed to handle the drugs.  The pay was way over and above anything I expected to earn in my lifetime, never mind before age 20, and for thr first time in my life I was actually acing exams.  I think Amanda was jealous that my bank account was growing, and that I had sidestepped what she now (correctly) perceived to be the scam of endless student debt.

As the weeks passed, and Amanda neither ended, nor disclosed to her suitemates, her bed-sharing arrangments with her aggressive roomate, I tried to encourage my friend to get a backbone and take control of the situation.  I must not have been very tactful about the topic--or, more likely, I may have struck a chord--because Amanda twisted my words, deflected, and asked what my problem was with LGBT people.  We ended up bickering about it, I've since come to suspect with Amanda's mysterious and aggressive partner goading her from the sidelines, and the topic took an ugly turn towards our high school Popular Girls vs Alternates "catfights at the Clearing".

Specifically, Amanda suggested that when we would go back to battle a rival from the group of girls who were socially tormenting us, it had been all along to "roll around in the hay", literally and figuratively, with another girl.  That the "fights" were never real, actual fights, but were just same-sex experimentation.  Amanda challenged me to "confess what really happened" between me and a Popular Girl opponent after the cellphone filming the event (the fights, which Amanda implied were only foreplay to the real Main Event) for YouTube was turned off.  My protests to Amanda that I had nothing to confess were used against me as evidence of my "guilt"--that something unspeakable had occured that I was hiding.

At first, Amanda's badgering of me on the topic was just annoying.  But one day in November, she dropped a bombshell on me.  She told me she had saved a video of one of my filmed catfights.

When the fights starting getting deleted from YouTube due to our fears about our digital futures, some of us had lamented the deletion of an important part of our coming-of-age.  One of us who was particularly tech savvy had found out a way to digitally save a YouTube video which you had reason to believe was doomed to deletion on the site itself.  There were all sorts of rumors that several of us were (unwilling) stars of recorded catfights that were being passed around various underground digital networks, but when college came and none of the rumors materialized into anything tangible, we all sort of forgot about it.

Until Amanda shared with me a 2-minute video of me catfighting a Popular Girl, from senior year, at the Clearing.

And started threatening to track down and contact the Popular Girl in the video to ask what she and I had done after the fight, after the cellphone was turned off.

There was nothing to find out.  I remembered the fight.  The fight was a draw.  She and I had simply brushed ourselves off, and walked back home.

But Amanda wouldn't let it go.

I was starting to get mad.

To be continued.....