I have a tendency to attract strange women, angry women, and insane women, but it's not often that the woman I've attracted is a mixture of all three with a large dose of negativity added into the mix. If you've ever seen Debbie Downer, a Saturday Night Live character performed by Rachel Dratch, then you've got a vague idea of what Angela was like, but to get the full picture, you would need to mate Debbie Downer with Freddie Krueger. With that mixture, you've got half the crazy that Angela turned out to be.
Angela was severely anti-social when I first met her, not because she really hated people, but due to her own social anxieties. It was to the point that, when she actually met a group of new people, she had a tendency to speak to them in farm animal noises rather than actual words. Her lifeline to the real world was kept alive through the people that she had known beforehand, as she would speak with them, and her teachers, and other students in her classes when there was some group work to be done or a presentation to do, but whenever she found herself in a group of me and my friends, her responses would be only "meow!"
I think I saw something in Angela's anxiety that reminded me of own, and I took it upon myself to try to reform her, like in one of those cheesy teen comedies where they give someone a makeover and then by the end of the movie they've actually become friends and then the person who took it upon themselves to "better the life" of the "less fortunate" ends up looking like an ass and feeling terrible but it all works out anyway. I think that's what I was going for.
Anyway, I started sitting near her, not with her, on the bus and in classes, just close enough that I could speak to her (and she could respond with a high-pitched mewling). When she would make her animal noises at me, I would just continue on talking as though she had said "yup" and nodded, pretending like she wasn't completely insane.
Eventually she started speaking actual words to me, though I had to suffer through a long period of her saying only "HI!" and waving frantically, but it was still a step up from meowing.
A side-effect of my kindness, that I very much did not foresee, was that she would become incredibly attached to me. I think it was something akin to erotic transference, like when a patient grows so attached to their therapist that they believe themselves to have fallen in love.
It may have seemed like an insanely long period that she was speaking to people only in random noises as though she were the victim of a perpetual case of turrets, but I'm sure it only seemed like a long time because it was so bizarre. In actuality, when she started getting invited to parties with the rest of my friends, she started speaking with actual phrases.
I was able to ignore how clingy she was getting at first because, when she would interrupt one of my conversations with someone else to scream "HI!" and wave frantically, I could just turn to her, scream the same, wave, and continue on in my conversation.
There was one afternoon that a local band, composed of students, was performing at the school. Since it was during my lunch period, I had decided to go and check them out. I hadn't been there for more than five minutes before Angela appeared beside me and started tugging on my sleeve. I assumed that she was just trying to say hello, so I smiled and raised a hand to wave, and turned back to listen to the music.
That's when she started to tug on my sleeve again and pulled a little on my arm. I turned to see that she looked very distressed about something, but I wasn't really sure what it was, so I leaned forward and asked her what was wrong. She responded with "we have to leave!" and, when I asked why, she just repeated that we had to leave.
I told her that I wanted to listen to the music, but she continued on insisting that we had to leave. I told her that most of our friends were sitting in the quad, and she could go and meet up with them and I would be along shortly, but she was very insistent that we both leave, so I started to worry that something was wrong. I asked her if anything was wrong, and she said "no, we just have to leave!" and I rolled my eyes and told her that I wanted to listen to the music.
After a few more minutes where I insisted that she just meet up with our other friends, and she insisted that I go with her, I realized that it was a losing battle, and I had to go with her.
When we got to our normal lunch area, we found that most of our friends were absent, as they were enjoying the band's performance, so it was just me and Angela for lunch. I asked her what was so important that I couldn't stay and watch the band, and she told me that she didn't like the music. Which, really, would explain why she couldn't stay to watch the band, but I don't see why I needed to be forced to go and sit in awkward monosyllabic conversation with her just because she didn't like their sound.
What had started with what I thought of as an act of kindness on my part had turned into the only friendship that she could count on, and I really wasn't prepared for that level of dedication from anyone. That dedication would eventually turn into an obsession that would one day create the seagull incident.
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