At my thirty-first birthday, my best friend Laney stood up in the middle of dinner, tapped her champagne flute with a butter knife, and proceeded, over the next six minutes, to dismantle me in front of forty people. It was framed as a roast. She introduced it as a roast. She prefaced every cruel thing with "you know I love you," which is the sentence women like Laney use to smuggle a knife into a room. The speech started with some mild stuff about my apartment being messy. It worked its way through an embarrassing but survivable story from college. And then, for the last ninety seconds, she talked about
something I had told her in absolute confidence four months earlier — a medical situation, involving my body, that I had shared with her crying on her kitchen floor at 1 AM, and that I had, specifically, twice, made her swear on her dead grandmother to never tell anyone. She told it. She told it to forty of my closest friends and two of my coworkers, and she laughed while she told it, and I sat at that table with my face arranged into what I hoped was a smile, and I said the words "Laney, you're too much" in a voice so light I am still proud of it. And then I began, that night, the slowest and most thorough revenge I have ever taken.