Discovering My Best Friend’s Dangerous Secret Life

After thirty years of friendship, I didn’t know her at all

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

My friends have always been the family I choose. 

In my family of origin, I had to tiptoe around my narcissistic mother’s tantrums and endure my obnoxious younger brothers’ relentless harassment. As I child, I hid in my room reading and trying to stay under the radar. In high school, I joined all the clubs and got a job so I could stay away. In college, I lived on campus, got pregnant my junior year, and married my boyfriend; I never lived at home again. 

I met lifelong friends in the dorms. I could not trust my family, but I trusted my friends implicitly. They were my confidants, my advisors, and my emotional and logistical support system. I was an open book with them, and I always thought I knew my closest friends as intimately as I let them know me. 

I was wrong, but decades went by before I found out.

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2013

My best friend hadn’t answered a few time-sensitive emails. I hated to pester her because sometimes life happened—we were both busy professionals raising teens and young adults—but the deadline to purchase tickets for our twenty-fifth college reunion was imminent, and she had said she’d let me know whether to buy her a ticket when I got my own. Finally, I texted her a nudge.

Later that night, she still hadn’t answered. Where the hell was she?

I knew she’d get back to me when she could, and I didn’t want to be needy. Our reunions always sparked nostalgia, so I pulled out my old photo albums both to reminisce and to distract myself from her silence. 

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1984-1988

I met Tammy our first day in the dorm. We’d grown up only half an hour apart and bonded over common stomping grounds and rival high schools. We were in calculus together when an assistant basketball coach came into class dangling a windfall of $5 an hour to tutor the players in math, and Tammy convinced me to sign up. We became friendly with the players and started going to watch their games.

Tammy and I had similar curvy builds, round faces, and dishwater blond curls. People often thought we were sisters, and the players sometimes misidentified us. Someone asked me for weed one day—apparently, Tammy had been procuring it for them. I made it clear to him I was the wrong tutor and went straight to Tammy. I was not going to endanger my scholarship.

Your life, I said, but keep it away from me. 

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Looking at a photo of Tammy with one of the players, I heard my other friend Lisa’s voice in my head: 

You should be careful. She’s stealing from the bookstore, too.

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I met Lisa in class. Both psychology majors, we studied together a lot, then began hanging out socially when I switched roommates and landed in her dorm spring semester.

Lisa worked at the bookstore with Tammy, but I have only one photo of the three of us together because Lisa was so wary of Tammy. Tammy’s other money-maker besides selling weed and tutoring math, was pilfering and selling unsold clothing relegated to donation. She reasoned it was a victimless crime, and no one would ever miss a few pieces here and there. No one ever did.

I know, I’d say to Lisa. Everyone knows. 

I’m not proud of this now, but everyone was benefiting from Tammy’s steep discounts, so no one blew the whistle (including Lisa).

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Rosie, a perky Cuban from Miami, lived down the hall from Tammy and me and invited us home for spring break. 

Are you sure that’s a good idea?

Lisa hardly knew Rosie. She just didn’t like that I was going with Tammy. 

This trip and these photos remained my favorite memory from freshman year…

Rosie flew home while Tammy and I combined funds on a tiny, rented Chevy with three classmates who needed rides. Twenty hours in a clown car with five people and luggage sounds like medieval torture now, but we joked and laughed and sang all the way down. 

Rosie’s family was big and loud and friendly. We spent our days frolicking in the waves, people-watching on South Beach, and turning away men who kept trying to sell us hash and coke (Tammy turned them down, I made sure to tell Lisa). And one epic night, we broke out the Aqua Net and baby blue eyeshadow and purple lipstick, teased our curls to three times their normal volume, and pilgrimaged a half hour north to the mecca that was Fort Lauderdale, FL, in the 1980s.

It took two hours to crawl down the one-mile strip in the clown car, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Sly Fox blaring from the radio, singing at the top of our lungs, yelling at boys out the windows, flashing our tits, laughing, feeling electric.

Kids on top of kids filled every available space: boys with muscle shirts and mullets, girls with big hair and Flashdance headbands, sunburnt and tipsy, spilling out of clubs, hanging out of hotel windows, stumbling around, singing school fight songs, dancing with strangers. I can still smell the air: salt and sea and sweat and booze and Old Spice and Love’s Baby Soft, swirling around us, intoxicating. 

We met some cute boys from a school in Virginia who took us back to their hotel room for shots. We floated back to the strip, and then someone, maybe me, said wait here, I’ll be right back, and I never saw them again that night.

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She ditched you in a strange city! 

Lisa couldn’t believe this wasn’t my last straw.

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I found my way back to the Virginia boys, who greeted me like their long-lost queen, let me use their phone to make a long-distance call to Rosie’s house, which no one answered, and invited me to stay over in their room where they taught me how to play backgammon (I kid you not. I was so relieved they turned out to be fellow dorks rather than gang rapists!). Someone gave me a t-shirt with their school’s name on it to sleep in which I kept and grinned at for the next twenty years, and they drove me all the way back to Miami the next day after I finally reached a shrieking Rosie and Tammy and got the directions. 

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We just got separated. It was nobody’s fault! I would laugh at Lisa. I loved her, but she could be so stodgy.

On that trip, Tammy confided that her brother was in prison in Florida for burglary, and she missed him. He sounded like bad news to me, but he was her big brother, and she’d always looked up to him. I didn’t tell Lisa that part.

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Lisa invited me to visit her during Christmas break of our sophomore year. One of her high school friends was a hard-core punk rocker with a mohawk on top of half a shaved head. They were fun, and I was impressed that Lisa was apparently more open-minded than I’d thought. Her family turned out to be quite religious, which fascinated me because I hadn’t thought Lisa herself was any more observant than I was. She counted a priest and a nun among her aunts and uncles, and the bishop even came to dinner.

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She was so sheltered, Tammy had said. Now her judginess kind of makes sense. 

I had never told Tammy the things Lisa said about her, but she had seen Lisa appalled at others’ harmless shenanigans.

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1989-1995

Tammy moved to Miami after college, and I loaned her $1,000 of the good money I was making at my new job to help her get started. Of course, Lisa warned me not to.

You’ll never see that money again.

To be fair, she wasn’t the only one.

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Tammy started an interior design business in Miami, and she did repay me. She was doing well when she came back two years later to be a bridesmaid in my wedding along with Lisa. She’d met a guy, she said, eyes sparkling. Two years later, she brought him home, and I couldn’t keep my eyes from leaking as I watched her dying mother walk her down the aisle.

Lisa and I moved to different ends of the country for grad school in clinical psychology, but four years later, we were both living in our college town again. I had dropped out, realizing I could not detach from my clients’ psychic pain, but she had earned her Ph.D. For a few years, she and her husband lived down the street, and I love the photos of our kids playing together when they were small.

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After Tammy’s brother got out of prison, he moved in with Tammy and her husband until Brother could get back on his feet. Soon after, Tammy wrote me that she and Husband had been arrested for fencing stolen goods — Brother had resumed his burglary career and was stashing his loot in her company warehouse. She was too ashamed to tell me on the phone.

She’s still a thief.

This time, I had no rebuttal.

Tammy lost her business, spent time on house arrest, divorced Husband—whom she’d discovered had been conspiring with Brother—and swore she would never let either into her life again. When I vacationed in Miami in the mid-nineties, we had dinner and enjoyed catching up and admiring photos of each other’s kids; she was remarried and had two small daughters by then.

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2010

Fifteen years later, divorced again, Tammy moved back home with her girls and her new partner, and I was glad to have her near. Lisa and I were also divorced by then, and as in college, I wished they were friends so we could all hang out, but it was never going to happen.

You can’t trust her. I don’t understand why you want to stay friends with someone like that.

I understood how all the data points made Tammy look, but she’d never involved me in any of her enterprises, she told me about everything, and I believed she’d been honest with me. She didn’t have to tell me about her brother and her own arrest. This was in the stone age of no internet or social media, and I would never have known if she hadn’t. 

None of us are perfect. Aren’t we supposed to love our friends unconditionally?

Your life, Lisa had said, but keep her away from me.

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2013

I looked up from my album, but she still hadn’t answered. It was so unlike her not to text back, even if just to tell me she’d get back to me later. I called her… and got the repetitive bleat of a busy signal. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a busy signal, and in my head, it was a blaring siren.

I was sure she was alive—her family would have called me if she wasn’t. But I couldn’t stand it anymore and texted her daughter. I was probably being neurotic, and we could laugh at me the next time we got together, but I needed to know she was okay. Less than a minute later, my phone rang. 

“Are you sitting down?”

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My best friend of thirty years, my sister of the heart, the person I shared everything with, had been taken down by the FBI in her suburban cul-de-sac three weeks earlier, accused of trying to break her secret rapist/murderer boyfriend of eight years out of prison.

Eight years. The entire time she’d been living with the woman she’d left her husband for, my best friend had been involved with a convicted killer.

“Three weeks ago?! Why didn’t anyone call me?”

Daughter’s answer, a beat late, was a sucker punch:

“We didn’t know if maybe you were involved.”

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In her tweak of Dr. Maya Angelou’s famous quote, Oprah Winfrey says:

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” 

Had she shown me? 

My photo album was still open, and there she was, smirking at me in front of the bathroom mirror as she primped to go out. I scoured her face, and thirty years of memories, looking for clues I’d missed.

She had not. If any piece of this was true, I didn’t know anything anymore. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know what my reality was. I didn’t even know who I was since I’d clearly been oblivious to something huge going on with the person I thought I knew best.

I knew only one thing for certain: 

Lisa would miss the reunion. Her bail hearing wouldn’t be in time.

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