All Important Conversations Happen in the Bathroom

Let me apologize in advance because this story is just going to be a load of drama. Let’s start off with the fact that my two closest friends had been fighting for a while, I say fighting it was more of my Slytherin friend ignoring my Gryffindor friend and not telling anyone why she was mad at her. So the Gryffindor had asked a guy to go to the dance with her, and the Slytherin who was friends with the guy asked him to bring her as a friend. I was kind of annoyed since she knew that the Gryffindor had asked him, but it got worse. At the dance her and the guy stood with us, not dancing, for about one song and then they went off to a corner and were grinding for the rest of the night. We mostly ignored them, but I’m a Hufflepuff and I don’t deal well with people hurting my friends. Toward the end of the night I asked the Slytherin to come to the bathroom with me and there I told her that I couldn’t deal with the way she kept treating people. I told her that I couldn’t be her friend and that I had been thinking about it for a while. She kept a straight face but tears were forming in her eyes, she just calmly said, “Okay” and walked out. I walked out behind her and I went outside to wait for my mom to pick me up. All the way home I thought about what I said and how I sounded like I hated her, which wasn’t entirely true. As soon as I got home I went upstairs and sat down on my bed with my laptop, still wearing my dress, and wrote out a message explaining that I didn’t hate her and that I had valued our friendship, but I still couldn’t be close to her if she treated people badly. Once I came back from changing into pj’s she had responded, saying, “I understand and respect your decision. It’s up to you what you want though. I still love you”. I just wanted to write back “I still love you too” but I couldn’t bring myself to type the words. I decided to just close my laptop and go to sleep.

That weekend I was an anxious mess. I couldn’t stop thinking about how it was partly my fault that this happened, my Slytherin friend was thinking about not going to the dance and I told her that I wanted her to. I also felt like a jerk because I just cut off one of my closest friends, but I also didn’t want to just go back to being her friend right away because I still didn’t think what she did was okay and I felt like it would make it seem like our friendship was something I saw as something I could throw away whenever. I had made plans to sit with other friends at lunch since I usually sat with the Slytherin. I was terrified of what might happen on Monday, because I know she can get mad and get people to agree with her and I didn’t want all of my other friends to hate me. There was also a little voice that kept saying “maybe I deserve all my friends hating me since I was such a terrible friend”. I got to school on Monday and everything was fine, we kind of just avoided each other. We kept ignoring each other for that week, and luckily we didn’t have many classes together, but it just felt like something was missing.

Last period that Friday, a week after the dance, she started acting like nothing had happened. We both went to the bathroom, apparently all important conversations take place in the bathroom, and I stopped her from talking and asked “Why did you do it? Did you have any reason other than just to spite the Gryffindor?” She just shrugged and replied “Pretty much”, and then I followed her out of the bathroom to the gym. I walked on the treadmill while she lifted weights with some of her other friends. I spent the entire period confused, I was so happy to have her back but she still hurt my other friend. I kept walking on the treadmill listening to the annoying pop music blasting through the speakers. I would look over at her occasionally and I was trying throughout the period to figure out what I wanted to do. After gym, we both went back to the bathroom and I decided to just ask her if she even felt bad. She told me that she did, but she wasn’t going to apologize to the Gryffindor. I figured that it was better than nothing. If I hadn’t asked her whether or not she felt bad I know that I would have felt like I was betraying my Gryffindor friend by going back to the Slytherin.