You gotta have friends

Hopped online this morning to find this missive from a long-ago high school buddy, K:

Mrs. H!?!

I hope that you haven't forgotten good old K ...

I just got my alumni directory and HAD to send you an e-mail.

Sorry we lost touch when you were in college. I got a little freaky around that time and wound up following the Grateful Dead around for a while and just basically being a party girl (U2 reference!!) Well, now I'm married, almost 7 years, to be exact. My husband is a down-to-earth freak, just what a spacey freak like me needed. He is also the complete opposite of me, personality wise, so that works, too. I guess you're married now, too. Or, you just changed your name to confuse and elude the public.

Anyway, this is just a short note to say hi after all these years and that I've always thought of you and Frau Doktor and all the fun we had in high school, which sucked. You and she were the only people I really thought of as friends then, mostly because I hated everyone. I think you can understand. Well, if you have some time, please write back or call me anytime (xxx-xxx-xxxx home or xxx-xxx-xxxx cell). I'd love to hear from you.

Hope all is well.

First, a little background. K was the new girl in school at the tail-end of grade school (wherein she affected a near-constant tough-girl stance and threatened to slit her wrists with emery boards), but I don't recall being particularly friendly with her until high school.

Later we got to be good friends, but she had a crappy home life (divorced parents, living with her dad and stepmom and much-favored half-sister, who was a juvenile delinquent and went to reforem school), and every so often she would sort of freak out a bit. Usually this would take the form of lashing out at me and our other friends, giving us all the silent treatment for a few days, and then sitting down with us at lunchtime later in the week as if nothing had happened. Sometimes we knew why she was angry, sometimes we didn't. Often, I would react to her lashing out with an equally abrasive remark, which I can see now was the wrong approach. It's hard for me now to remember what it was like to be a petulant teenage girl, which makes me a bit sad, because I was SO moody and alienated that I figured I would always understand the complexity of the feelings I had then. But K had me beat - no one was moodier or more alienated, and when she wasn't brooding, she was acting out. I was a fairly naive schoolgirl, and although K wasn't a crazed drug-addled tramp, she engaged in enough risky and off-the-wall behavior that she made me nervous (her smoking pot bonding experience with her real mom, whom she wasn't supposed to see, comes to mind, as well as one adventure in which we hung out at some dude's house drinking beers after taking a valium apiece).

In college, our bond became looser, but we were still semi-friendly, until she invited herself to my school for the weekend and attended the Artfag Ball, which was an annual quasi-formal party, well-attended by all the wacky, debauched students at my small art school. Mainly, it was an excuse to dress up, or dress in drag, or dress as a corpse in disco clothes - if it was fabulous, it was accepted. K attended the party with me, got piss drunk off of 2 beers, and proceeded to bump 'n' grind the majority of the people on the dance floor. "Wow, your friend is drunk!" was the refrain I heard over and over again that night, soon followed by, "Your friend needs to go to bed!" I lost track of her and didn't see her until the next morning, when she did the walk of shame back to my dorm from the apartment complex across the street (while I worried myself sick she'd been raped or killed - I had no idea where she was). She had spent the night with the roommate of one of my friends, and it was the story of the hour on my small campus. I was mortified.

A few weeks later, she developed a relationship with a friend of a friend on campus who was known for doing lots of drugs and filing his long nails into points. The alliance didn't last, but she did recommend to me that if I ever needed to get laid, I should go looking for him (um, no thanks!). This was followed by many sob stories that had a ring of untruth and prominently featured her victimization and desire for vengeance. It was getting harder and harder to stay friends, and I wasn't up to the task. After that, I let her sort of fade away, talking to her on the phone occasionally, but not going out of my way to remain in touch. I felt a little guilty, but I got over it. The other friends we'd had had already cut her loose in high school and didn't fault me for wanting shot of her. I felt like I had wasted too much time commiserating with her on her hard-luck situations, offering advice that would never be taken, being sucked dry by someone I now considered an emotional vampire.

I guess what I'm asking is, should I allow this person entrance back into my life? I've prided myself on lately weeding out the bad friends and culling in the good ones. I'd hate to dismiss her on the basis of her jackassery 15 years ago - maybe she has changed and grown as a person, and I certainly wasn't the greatest person in the world when I was 19 - but I'd hate to let her back in and then be stuck shoring her up in her personal high dramatics again. Does this make me a bad person? Shallow? Selfish? I welcome your input, just don't bash me too hard.