Quinn

In the beginning, Quinn was everything you could ask for in a friend, or at least what Buddy and I had thought. Little did we know that it was just a surface veneer of goodness and you didn’t have to dig all that deep to see the festering fucked up underside to her evil soul. There were always signs, red flags you ignore in the first flushes of a new relationship whether its sexual or just a friendship. The endless stories of people who had wronged her, her regular habit of cutting people from her life, the tales of being continuously let down and victimised. There are people in this world who are repeatedly victimised, for example a molested child is far more likely to be molested again, but as a general rule, if someone is continuously ‘the victim’ they are either putting themselves in a position to be repeatedly victimised or they are spinning a victim narrative when they are in fact the problem. Quinn turned out to be the latter. She burned the people around her and spun a tale where she was the victim each and every time.

Buddy, Quinn and I all bonded over the torture of working for KRONOS and the ways we were slowly being broken by the company. We all had conflicted feelings towards KRONOS, we all drank too much, we all smoked too much, we all loved Bali far too much, and this led to a friendship that should have outlasted humanity. I wasn’t going to write about Quinn in this book, because for a long time I still thought the friendship was worth saving. But, with time and distance I have started to see how poisonous she really is. Buddy and Quinn had a fight. It was a big fight, but it was a fight that a strong friendship between two good people could recover from. The problem is Quinn isn’t a good person. I didn’t know this at the time. Quinn and I had had our differences, but she hadn’t crossed any lines I consider uncrossable in friendship. If I had known about her behaviour after her fight with Buddy, I would have kicked her from my life a long time ago. I try to make smart decisions in my life, unsuccessfully on a disturbingly regular basis as you will now know dear reader, but the point is I try. As an aspirational ideal to aim for, I’m all for making considered decisions not rash ones, I’m all for having the facts on your side before unleashing hell.

Quinn and Buddy had a fight. At the time I wanted to remain friends with them both and not get involved. The story starts as Buddy and Quinn’s story, but Quinn made it everyone’s story. Quinn did not support Buddy when Buddy needed it most, and instead of apologising she doubled down and set out to make Buddy look like a vicious, unstable hell cat. Hindsight and further information tells me Buddy had every right to feel how she felt and say what she said during her argument with Quinn. There was a lot going on in Buddy’s life at the time, and Quinn knew this. Quinn, being the lazy selfish bitch, she is, put Buddy in a position at work where Buddy looked incompetent because Quinn hadn’t passed on vital information. Buddy yelled at her. My reason for writing this chapter is I later found out that Quinn, that very same day, started a persistent campaign against Buddy, telling a white washed version of the story to as many people as possible, so she could deflect any responsibility for the situation from herself. She was inviting people she never gave a fuck about around for drinks and telling them lies to poison them against Buddy. Telling them Buddy had been bitching about them, telling them stories about the things Buddy said about them when it was Quinn who had said it not Buddy. I get in when you are hurt you want people on your side, but the mind games she played and the lies she told are fucking messed up. One fight, that she was equally at fault in, and she started a hate campaign involving as many people as possible, people she had previously bitched about constantly, to bring down one of her closest friends.

This all occurred around the time of Quinn’s birthday. I had organised a dinner party with Quinn and her Husband, Buddy and her Husband, myself and my two roommates. We were all friends and spent a lot of time at each other's houses. Over the summer we had spent most of our time at Quinn’s place because she had a pool and was happy to host, but the point is we were constantly in and out of each other’s houses the way friends are. After the fight, Quinn decided she didn’t want to come to the dinner I had arranged because it would mean seeing Buddy. Despite deciding this a week earlier, she didn’t tell me this until the day of the party. To really fuck me over as much as possible, she let me buy food and wine, and decorate the house, before cancelling the party. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, assuming the stress of the situation had got the better of her at the last minute. I hoped that in time things would calm down and sort themselves out. What I didn’t know is that a week prior, immediately after her fight with Buddy, Quinn had arranged a birthday party for herself at the Collaroy Beach Club for that night. She had invited a whole group of people that she had relentlessly bitched about prior to her fight with Buddy. On the day of her cancelled birthday dinner she invited me at the last minute to her party at the beach club.

The day after Buddy and Quinn’s fight Buddy and I had spent a day shopping. We had put a pic on Instagram of us having lunch. Because everything is about Quinn, she had decided this was evidence that I was on #TeamBuddy and I was getting in the middle of all of their drama. That is the world we live in people, where doing what you always do, posting pics of your lunch is interpreted as a war cry that you are going to take down a person who hasn’t once crossed your mind that day. This photo caused ‘the situation’ spiral further than ever. Somehow, I was now an enemy too, and Quinn started spreading shit about me. In Quinn’s eyes I had betrayed her. She started contacting our shared friends and co-workers and telling them lies about me too. I didn’t know this at the time, but later I found out that Quinn told a mutual friend that I referred to her as that fat desperate slut behind her back, and that I only invited her places when I needed a Designated Ugly Fat Friend with no life to make me feel better about where my life was at.

When I received the message from Quinn that she was cancelling her Birthday dinner, I tried to call her but she didn’t answer. She later sent me an angry message accusing me of deliberately hurting her feelings by spending the morning of her birthday with Buddy. I tried again to call her, to sort things out but she wouldn’t take my calls. After back and forth text messages over a couple of hours, with me apologising even though I had done nothing wrong, she invited me to her party at the Beach Club. The party was starting 10mins after she invited me. Obviously, the decision to invite me either hadn’t been her idea or she was doing her best to inflict maximum psychological pain and damage. I had already purchased a cute gift for her and written a thoughtful message in a card, so beyond getting dressed and getting myself there, I was ready to go. I sometimes wonder what happened to the gift and the card, did she dump it? Obviously, my friendship and the gift meant nothing to her. I was just another pawn in her war against Buddy.

Friendships are hard to build, but apparently easy to tear apart simply to win the war against someone else. I showed up half an hour late to the party because I had been given 10 minutes notice that it was even on. I had to drive because Uber was having a huge surcharge. She interrogated me as to why I wasn’t drinking, and then became angry at me for not ‘participating’ in celebrating her birthday. I had done my best, with a last-minute invite, to show her I cared, but she set it up so that nothing I did was good enough, and I could not help but fail to prove my friendship. It was horribly awkward and deeply uncomfortable. I did my best to make Quinn have a good time, and to show her I was her friend, I stayed for a good few hours, participated in conversations and tried to make sure Quinn felt loved. If Buddy had known how Quinn was involving others and miss-treating me to punish me for remaining friends with Buddy, things would have spiralled further. Quinn was hurting me, but I couldn’t talk to my best friend about it without making things worse. I was still trying to be the peace maker, trying to take no-one’s side in an argument that didn’t involve me. I was taking all of the abuse Quinn threw at me, not knowing she was trying to break me and turn everyone against me too. Things went from bad to worse between Buddy and Quinn. Buddy started to spiral, and nearly had a breakdown. Buddy is one of the strongest women I know, watching her be broken by the sheer vindictiveness of someone who was supposed to be her friend was fucking heartbreaking. In her anger, about an argument she was equally responsible for, Quinn tried to push her former friend to suicide with a campaign of malicious gossip and attempts to isolate her. I still can’t find any reason for why she would attempt to so completely and totally destroy Buddy’s life. She wanted to crush Buddy’s soul out of spite, hate and revenge. One fight was enough for Quinn to show her nasty vindictive side. A side we never dreamed existed. I later learned that Quinn was also trying to get both Buddy and I fired. She was going to David Brent and Napoleon crying about being bullied by us, she was feeding them lies about me, knowing I already had a rocky relationship with them. I didn’t know she was doing this, but knew my time at KRONOS was coming to an end.