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While most college students filled the hours with editorial internships or summer retail jobs, your high school friend Diana Agnorelli devoted her entire summer to nonchalantly destroying your very last vestiges of self-respect.
Though you and Agnorelli had stayed in touch via halfhearted Facebook wall posts made on the brink of every school break ("hey are you home? it's been wayyyyy too long!"), the last time you'd spoken was two weeks into freshman year. In a ten-minute phone conversation, Agnorelli sang the praises of her orientation hiking trip to Mount Everest, the medieval castle she was living in as a freshman, and Yale's special neuroscience-philosophy-pop-culture-and-candy-eating interdisciplinary major (you know, the one you were so excited about until you got Early Action waitlisted and later rejected), while you concentrated on trying not to sound like you'd just cried to your mom on the phone for two hours about how much college sucks.
Best friends by process of elimination since middle school, the two of you had long nurtured a special kind of adolescent relationship. It's the kind where you have a lot of things in common, and you're at about the same level of popularity, and also you hate each other.
You knew there'd be trouble when you ran into her at your hometown CVS in May and she said, "Oh my god I can't believe it! Yeah I'm just home for the summer working in a lab on chimpanzee behavior in developing South American nations until I start my internship with Barack Obama but it's really hard to be away from my boyfriend while he's on his Fulbright scholarship and his modeling jobs and I really miss having all these crazy fun adventures with him and our tight-knit diverse group of friends that closely resemble an NBC sitcom from the '90s like when we all went on a Spring Break road trip around the country and tried all the best barbecue ribs gosh it's times like those that I know I'd look back on and smile fondly from the nursing home if I weren't too busy banging the hottest octogenarian there because even when I get Alzheimer's in 60 years I'm still going to be having a way more fun life than you! So what are you doing this summer?" and you said, "Uh, I might waitress again."
Indeed, upon your ill-fated reunion, Agnorelli immediately dropped her other obligations and dedicated the next four months to coldly draining every drop of self-esteem from your psyche. She invited you to lunch, and you accepted so that your mom would finally stop asking whether you were going to call up your old friends because they were always such nice kids and it's so important to stay in touch through college. And so began the terror.
"Oh, honey, the freshman 15 happens to everyone," Agnorelli said when you ordered a salad, frowning sympathetically but somehow not actually looking sad. "It's not a big deal."
She continued a steady nine-to-five program of delivering backhanded compliments about your appearance, belittling your college accomplishments, and even breaking out the disposable-camera graduation photos of you in your regular cap and gown and her in her specially accented valedictorian robe which you definitely aren't still jealous about even though your GPA was only .003 below hers.
As the summer entered its last days, Agnorelli began launching progressively ego-shattering reminders of the most unappealing attributes of your high school self. "Hey, remember when you thought you were going to be an actor and you tried out for the spring musical and got cast in the singing tadpole chorus? High school! Right?" It was hard to say whom you despised more in that moment: your high school self, or her.
Agnorelli said she hopes to continue her summertime efforts after college graduation, when you'll reluctantly end up rooming with her in a tiny studio and she can continue to pursue her passion for psychological torture. And as she'll probably remind you, it will somehow pay far better than your job.
