Betrayed by a Friend’s Lies

Photo by Brian Simmons / VOX Staff

By David McDaniel / VOX Staff
 
I met Mike following one of the most difficult times of my life. In the span of a year, I had lost my both my grandmothers, a grandfather, an aunt, several cousins and close friends. Their deaths devastated me.
 
I grew depressed, dropped out of high school and lost a lot of weight. Also, I distanced myself from everyone I cared about, including my mom. I felt cursed. I believed that if I continued to be close to them I would lose them. So after several months of falling apart, I decided that the only way to save myself and the ones I loved was to leave.
 
I went to Albany, Ga., to join Turner JobCorp, a program that helps teens prepare themselves for life after high school. I spent a year at JobCorp, where I earned my GED and learned skills that might someday help me land a job. Even more importantly, I also learned that running away from my problems would not solve them.
 
When I came back to Atlanta in the summer of 2006, I started opening myself up to people again — but only a little. I still was withdrawn and had a hard time getting close to anyone because I was afraid of losing them as well.
 
But that changed when I met Mike, a guy who became a good friend and something like a younger brother to me. He helped me close the distance I had put between myself and others.
 
 However, unfortunately, through Mike I also learned that death is not the only way to lose someone. When I opened up to him about my life problems, I opened myself up to be taken in by a string of outrageous lies. And even after I forgave him, he continued to betray my trust to the point where I had to cut him completely out of my life.
 
A True Friendship?
One weekend this past summer, I was over at my Aunt Reene’s house, and I decided to go for a walk down the street.
 
“DAVID!” I heard someone shout from behind me.
I turned around to find my best friend Henry hustling to catch up with me. He had someone with him, a tall, shifty looking character I’d never met before.
 
 “This is my homeboy, Mike.” Henry said.
 “Where do you live?” I asked him.
 “Just around the corner.” Mike said. “Hey, you got a cigarette?”
“How old are you?” I asked him, as I took a pack of cigarettes out of my bag.
“I’m 17,” he said.
 
How can I tell him no when I started smoking at a younger age? I thought to myself. So, despite my hesitation, I gave him a cigarette.
 
He seemed pretty cool, so I gave him dap (an age-old handshake among African Americans that indicates dignity and pride). We all headed over to a pizza place called Mojos and chilled out for the night.
 
After that night, every time I saw Mike in my aunt’s neighborhood, we would sit on the front porch and talk. For some reason — maybe because he didn’t know much about me — I told him how hard these past few years had been. Still, I didn’t tell him everything. But then one time Mike confided in me that he’d lost some people in his life, too.
 
He told me he had some friends who were killed in gang fights.
“Man, I know what you’re going through,” I said.
“How did you get over it?”
“I never really got over it. It just gets easier day by day.”
 
That exchange forged a strong connection between us. I felt like we were both looking for the same thing in life — a brother.
Mike later opened up to me about even more painful stuff — that his mom died of a cocaine overdose and that his father was shot and killed when he was young. He told me that he had a little brother who was killed, and that an older brother was on death row. He said he had a daughter. He said he lived with foster parents.
 
And I thought my life was messed up. I admired him even more because he had gone through all these things and seemed to have dealt with them well.
 
 When he listened to me, he didn’t try to act like my counselor, but rather just a good friend. I told him about all the deaths in my family and among my friends. I told him how I lost Johnathan, the closest friend I ever had, and how I never thought I would have another friend like him again.
 
“Hey, I’m on your side no matter what,” Mike said.
“That’s what Johnathan said to me, and he died a couple of months later,” I told him.
“Well, I’m not Johnathan. Me and him are two different people, so stop trying to compare us to each other.”
 
Betrayed by Lies
Mike and I grew close enough as friends that he introduced me to his family. I was nervous at first but they pretty much accepted me with open arms. His foster mother was particularly sweet to me. “We’re going to treat you as if you were one of our own,” she told me.
 
 I grew most attached to his foster dad, probably because I never had a father growing up. Mike’s family was so warm that I felt like I could really be myself around them. I never thought I’d wind up calling his foster parents mom and dad, but I did.
 
Two months sailed by, and I went over to Mike’s house one weekend to talk to his mom about how good an influence Mike had been on me. “I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “He’s come a long way.”
 
“Well, I’m proud that he got his GED and a new job,” I said.
“Mike does not have his GED,” she told me. “His father and I are still working on that.”
The conversation took a turn I did not expect.
 
I felt stupid because I never thought that he would lie about something so simple. Then I thought to myself: If he lied about something so small, then what else could he have lied about? Something clicked in my mind as I looked at the family portrait in their living room, soon replaced by the sickening suspicion that he had lied to me about everything.
“Are you Mike’s real mother? His biological mother?” I asked her bluntly.
 
“The last time I checked, yeah,” she said, almost with a laugh. But then she realized what I meant, that Mike wasn’t in foster care at all.
 
She went on to tell me that pretty much everything Mike had told me was a lie. He only had one brother and sister. He hadn’t fathered a daughter. No one in his family had died some tragic death.
 
I couldn’t believe my ears, so I got up from the couch and went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. I felt betrayed and used, like a brother had stabbed me in the back. His lies are what made me open up to him and trust him. This betrayal hurt me badly. I wanted to cut Mike from my life right then and there, so I walked out of the house, thinking it was for good.
 
An Attempt at Forgiveness
Later on, Mike’s family reached out to me and asked me to give him a second chance. His dad called me on the phone and asked me to come over to their place for a family meeting to sort out everything. “I don’t know why Mike would tell lies like that, but I think it would be best if we all sit down and find out the truth,” he said.
 
I was against it at first, but eventually I went over there. Everyone sat in the living room, but nobody said anything for a while. All I did was look at Mike feeling hurt. Finally, I spoke: “Why did you lie to me? You told me never lie to your family and never keep anything from them. Aren’t we family?”
 
He sat there for awhile before he said, “I don’t know why I lied.”
His father spoke up: “When someone trusts you, Mike, and then you lie to them like you have, how do you expect they’d feel? David is hurt and feels like you betrayed him.”
Mike sat in embarrassed and guilty silence.
 
“What do you think both of you have to do in order to make this friendship work?”
Mike finally spoke up, looking me in the eye: “I need to stop telling lies. I need to treat David with respect, trust and loyalty.”
 
The anger I had felt didn’t completely disappear, but I knew that I had forgiven Mike at that moment, that I was going to give him another chance. After the family meeting, I spoke to him alone on the back porch.
 
“I’m gonna be you’re brother no matter what,” I said. “Just be real with me, and whatever you do, do not lie to me again.”
 
“You got it,” he said. And we put this behind us and started over with a clean slate. Our friendship was going to be stronger than ever — or so I thought.
 
A week later, Mike started lying to me again over stupid, small things like who he was hanging out with and saying things behind my back. And that’s when I decided I couldn’t change him. No matter how good his heart was, he was a compulsive liar and I couldn’t be friends with him ever again.
 
Despite the lies and betrayal, Mike did help me deal with my past. I think he lied to me to help me deal with my pain and to get me to open up about my problems. For this, I’ll always be thankful he came into my life.
 
Also, by dealing with Mike I learned a lot of things about life. First, don’t judge a book by its cover. When the pressure’s on, you’ll find out who your true friends are. And second, strong relationships must be rooted in trust and honesty. If you can’t be yourself with someone else, then everything is based on lies. And lies eventually will come back to haunt you.
 
David, 19, returned to VOX this summer where he has been a staff writer for four years.