How to Make Friends and Get Some Revenge

Marissa had originally been excited to meet up with her friends. Yeah, they were going to a coffee shop, but there was probably tea on the menu. Besides, it wasn’t like they would only drink coffee, they would also go shopping together so she was sure to have some fun with her friends, right? She had hoped so, but it started to seem like maybe she wouldn’t. She had told her parents as they were dropping her off that she would need to be picked up at four o’clock, a decision she was now seriously regretting. None of her friends were there yet. 

After looking around the coffee shop for a couple minutes to calm her nerves, she decided that she might have arrived a bit early,  so she went outside to wait for them. Then after another fifteen minutes, she figured that Lena, Addie, and Bettie  might have walked by her and went inside to order, so she went into the coffee shop again. At the thirty minute mark her stomach began to churn. They weren’t coming.

   She was loitering in a coffee shop because her friends ditched her. She wasn’t sure what she should do as she couldn’t call her parents to pick her back up as they had gone to run some errands out of town after dropping her off, the house was too far to walk to, and her sister was out with some friends. Marissa was stuck there.

She started to get some weird looks from the baristas. She needed to order or leave the shop, so she left to do some window browsing of the nearby shops. The humidity immediately hit her once she stepped back out of the coffee shop. After walking around for twenty minutes, she was sweating and in desperate need of air-conditioning so she entered the building closest to her, a library.

    She opened the glass doors, and saw a librarian reading behind a desk. She let the door fall close behind her and the thud caused the woman to look up.

 “Hello! Let me know if you need help finding a book. I can also give recommendations if you don’t know what you’re looking for. There is also a new teen’s section you can look at over there.” The librarian said.

“Thank you, I’ll let you know.” Marissa said before walking toward the back of the library where the desks with the wifi passcode were located. She wasn’t all that interested in books, and she had wanted to see if maybe she received an apology text from her friends. That’s when she saw something that stuck out to her. 

It was a book titled How to Win Friends and Influence People and written by Dale Carnegie. She raised an eyebrow at that, thinking that winning or influencing people into being friends wouldn’t be worthwhile as it would be tricking someone into liking an artificial version of herself. Marissa continued walking to the wooden, round tables with a see-through plastic stand with the wifi passcode taped to it. After inputting it into her phone, she sat down and clicked on her text messages. Nothing. Next she checked her Snapchat, Instagram, and even her school email. Still nothing from her friends. No apologies, professions of guilt, or even platitudes were offered to her. They ditched her on purpose.

Annoyance and loneliness turned to anger and hurt as she realized that her friends had played a trick on her. She turned around, ready to start walking home when she spotted the book again. This time, she bent down to look at the back cover. She then walked over to the librarian and checked it out, then returned to the desk and started reading. She kept reading until her phone started ringing. It was four o’clock and her parents had arrived to pick her up. 

She grabbed her book and dog-eared one of the pages, before running out the door, hopping in the car, and heading home. She finished reading the book that night, and the next morning she began applying some of the newly learned principles from the book in her daily life. She played off the hurt she felt at being left behind by laughing with her friends. She began talking to classmates she hadn’t noticed before, like Betsy and Hannah. She found out that Betsy was passionate about robots and wanted to be an engineer one day, while she and Hannah often butted heads. She didn’t stop there, and by the end of August, she knew the names of all her classmates.

Over the next six months, she continued laughing with her “friends”, listened to Betsy rant about robotics, side-stepped serious arguments with Hannah while partaking in fun debates, and never dropped her smile. Eventually these actions were enough for her to get random waves in the hallway, texts in the middle of class, and invites to after-school hang-outs. Sometimes it was tough to act like Lena, Addie, and Bettie didn’t hurt her, or to keep smiling at people, when she wanted to snap at them, but in the end it was worth the difficulties.

It was worth all the hard work because one day near winter-break, she approached each of the three girls who left her hanging, and invited them out to the library to study for a physics test scheduled for the next week. Addie immediately agreed, with Lena and Bettie quickly acquiescing as well. After they agreed Marissa went out into the hallway and texted Betsy and Hannah to see if they wanted to come over to her place. Upon receiving affirmation from the two, Marissa shut off the ringer on her phone and headed home.

 As Betsy, Hannah, and Marissa giggled and threw popcorn at each other while watching Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, three girls were frantically texting their “friend,” demanding to know why she hadn’t shown up. While Marissa was hugging Betsy and Hannah goodbye, three other girls stumbled upon a particularly interesting book called How to Win Friends and Influence People.