You know it could have been one of the happiest moments of my life when I found out that a childhood friend of mine is coming to Cape Town. But, I’m not up for her. She could go to hell for all I care and I still wouldn’t give a rat’s behind about her whereabouts – they don’t concern me in any way. She should just remain where she belongs – in the past. That’s exactly where I want her.

At least then I can know that no girl is poaching my man (not that Sebastian would go for her skanky ass, her standards are too low for his liking anyways!). Now that I had time to think of it, I actually think Noxy always had something against me; she had problems with my family, how I always had boys chasing me, the clothes I wore, I mean the girl was envious. Practically everything that was connected to me she was against it, always.

“How I wish I was you Zee,” she would say, “I mean your mom and dad – look at them, they never fight. Even a fool can see the love that shines out of your dad’s eyes whenever she is looking at your mom. A happy peaceful family Zee. I would do anything for that. Anything.”

What has she got to say now that all that fallacy she believed about my parents being “happily married” has been exposed what it really was? A sham, a charade; a sorry excuse for a marriage that never really was. I wonder sometimes if they ever really loved each other. But those great years together, nobody could fake that. As if I don’t have enough to deal with, now this.
Is she here to laugh in my face? To have her victory lap and celebrate the fact that my parents are also another statistic of the ever-increasing divorce rates in South Africa? Yeah right, she is the type of girl. She is a psychopath who never misses a chance to brag and mock at those who have fallen from the gravy train.

“It’s about time you bury the hatchet and forgive her,” Tee said when I told her.

That’s what mom told me too. She doesn’t know the real reason we are no longer friends. No wonder she thinks it’s something you can just forgive and forget and then everything will be cool. Life goes on!

It’s as if Tee and Mom have been having tea and biscuit lunches together the way she and her always speak the same thing. The only difference is that mom used the bible to try and convince me to forgive her: “Didn’t that man in the “Parable of the Lost Son” forgive his son who had so terribly wronged him?”

“Mama, you and your Bible please…”

“Oh! You think that one is far-fetched, huh? How about this one: Didn’t Mandela, a man who had been condemned to spend all his life in prison for doing absolutely nothing wrong, spend 27 years only to come out willing to forgive his perpetrators?”

“I can’t forgive her Mom!”

“Why can’t you?”

“Mom, please, you are pushing too hard.”

I am just not ready to forgive her yet. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to do that. A leopard never changes its spots, so goes the old cliché.

Maybe it’s because I don’t want her to see me in this shoebox of a house. It’s so small I sometimes feel like I am being suffocated; a year living in it but still I haven’t accepted it as part of my fate. I can’t allow her to see me in it. I can already see her posting and tagging all her friends telling the whole world how deep we have fallen in the life of poverty that we can’t even afford simple DSTV.

That one is worse than the best paparazzi in town. I will be the laughing stock, yet again. Especially now, that she will be living in Camps Bay like a mini-princess.

I didn’t even see the brat during the festive season. Apparently she was in a holiday in Egypt with her father (a high ranking politician). I can’t have her gloating to me about things that are far beyond my reach like overseas trips. That one can blow her own horn better than the best Skhothanes in town. She thinks she is the ish.

“I can’t wait to see you,” she said on the phone forgetting, or rather pretending, that nothing has happened between us. Only if she knew that I haven’t forgotten what she had done to me, and there is no way in hell I would allow her back into my life. She is like a fire that had once badly burnt me; I will never get close to her ever again…

I know better. Once bitten, twice shy.

ZZ xxx