Lessons Learned

I wrote this for a game of story tag I'm playing on another site & thought I'd post it here-

I've always prided myself on being able to read people well, and overall, I've been pretty successful. But every once in a while...

It all began the summer before my freshman year of college. A close friend of mine from high school called me to talk. She confided in me that her father had hit her. A couple months later I would find out she lied, but at the time, I got very concerned. I went to my mom and asked her if my friend could stay with us and told her the circumstances. She said ok, and I told my friend to come stay with me. She had several bruises and she'd voiced some concerns about her younger sister, so I advised her to get herself checked out at the local family medical clinic and to ask that they take pictures of the bruises in order to have a legal record of the events. I paid for her check up.

Anyway, I really liked and trusted this girl. Ironically enough, earlier that summer she and her boyfriend decided to play a prank on me. He called claiming to be my secret admirer (she was feeding him information about me) and flirted with me. When she got uncomfortable with his familiarity they told me the truth. Later he called me again and stopped by my house to introduce himself. I wasn't all that impressed. I wasn't sure if she was in the know, so I told her.

When time for school came, she didn't have enough money for books and so I paid for them for her. We also let her use my car and my sister's car and treated her like family. I would loan her money for gas or books when needed, she was welcome to our toiletries and our refrigerator.

And then strange things started happening. $10 here, $20 there started disappearing. I thought at first that maybe I'd misplaced my money...and then my little sister started reporting money missing, too. And my friend wasn't spending the night very much anymore...she'd take my car or my sister's (without permission) and she'd go to her boyfriend's house and we wouldn't see her till the next morning.

One day my sister came home and asked us to stay away from her vehicle. She was having problems with it and couldn't drive it, so she hadn't renewed her insurance on it yet. Because of the laws in IL, she didn't want us on the road driving an uninsured car.

And then my mom came home and asked my friend to spend the day with her. They stopped off at the bank, she cashed her check and asked the bank to give her most of her money back in $100 bills. She counted it out and then put it back in the money envelope from the bank and slid it into her purse. After that, she took my pal to the arboretum and then out to lunch. Afterward she came home and dozed off on the sofa. When she woke up, my friend was gone. She counted her money, she was a couple hundred dollars short. My friend had waited till my mom had fallen asleep, then stole the money right out of my mom's purse.

We wondered if maybe her boyfriend had picked her up until we went to the parking garage and found my sister's car missing. This girl had made a copy of my sister's car keys, stolen money out of my mom's wallet, and had been systematically stealing from me for a couple of months...and now, to add insult to injury, she'd stolen my sister's car!

So we called the police and reported it stolen. And then I called her cousin who worked with us. I told her what had happened and asked her about her young cousin. It turned out that the boyfriend she'd been dating had been the cause of most of this crap. The bruises she'd had when she'd moved in? Her boyfriend did that. Apparently her parents had figured out he was bad news and had forbidden her to see him...especially in their house (they'd had sex on the hood of the car across the street from the house & had sex IN the house while she'd been babysitting her younger sister). The money she'd stolen? She'd used to either get gas to see him or to buy him things. The parents never fought to make her come back home because she'd become toxic since dating him...and they still had 2 young kids at home and were terrified of the lies she'd tell...and that it might get the other two taken away. As for the boyfriend? Apparently after I'd told her that he'd met with me after the prank, he convinced her that I'd thrown myself at him and that I wanted him and was jealous of her.

After talking to her family we gave her two options...go home or move in with her cousin's family. She was no longer welcome in ours. We also told her that she was lucky she showed up when she did because if the police had caught her on the road driving my sister's car, she would've been in jail, charged with grand theft auto...and then we called the police to cancel our report.

No matter how well you THINK you know someone, you have no idea who they truly are till you live with them. I could tell you more about what happened once she moved in with her cousin...it was all brutal...but instead I'm just gonna say that Happily, I heard about 10 years ago that not only did she finally wise up and get rid of the boyfriend eventually, but she worked to make amends with her family, met a good man and got her life back together and got married. I'm happy for her, but now I'm also more cautious.