A college-age girl had gone home with a friend and discovered an incredibly clannish environment, like a little family mafia. You were with them or with the terrorists.
Never mind that they were terrorists themselves. It made me think of a family I knew as a kid and their enforcer daughter, Vickie. Man, she was cruel. My girlfriend was stunned at the stories and the brilliance of the cruelty and I was stunned that she was stunned.
I hadn't thought about it but I guess I assumed that it was normal bad shit, but my girlfriend thought that I had encountered an outlier, a prodigy. I still don't know about that.
But being on the inside with them was pretty good, if a little scary because it always felt precarious. You were rewarded for loyalty. But you didn't want to beat them at anything.
It might be trivial to you but it wasn't for them. My sister had been destroyed by grade school cruelty--probably her fate, at the hands of someone--and it turned out to have been Vickie.
I don't blame anybody. Vickie may have been a victim herself of who knows what. But, lately, I am reminded of Vickie and her family again watching the American version of Shameless.
Vickie was a Fiona doppelgänger. She provided the survival skills but at the evil end of the spectrum. And, before her, the family was utterly unlike this. The older kids were nice.
Their son my age and Vickie were a hit team. My mother had a debilitating stroke and they got off on it and the sufferings of a mutual friend whose brother had killed himself.
It seemed normal, if vicious. Look at the Gallaghers, in Shameless. People are routinely victimized in life. I remember being cruel myself, but I was in awe of real survival skills.
I didn't have any or not what I needed. I bet that Vickie has been victorious in her life, wherever she is. I don't feel anything about it. It seems so distant.
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