Because or Why Not

She was crazy.  Not the kind of crazy that your best friend is when you roadtrip on the weekend.    Real crazy, but she was good at it.  Crazy was her forte.
It was hard to tell, sometimes.  We sat on her deck drinking blender margaritas and overlooking the parking lot.  Back then you could blame it on alcohol.  Her stories grew with her confidence as you commented politely on what she'd just said.  Why not have this outside friendship?  Crazy stories, her cigarettes and booze.  Always booze.  She was never really sober. 
Then you could blame the drugs.  Of course, you could never be sure what she'd actually done.  Something fucked her up.  She wanted to get stoned with me and build snowmen.  Prescription bottles littering her apartment.
Her parents, dead.  Although eventually you came to question even that.  A year later, when she'd finally left, her Dad came into the restaurant.  The same one who'd committed suicide.  She told me she was going to kill herself on Christmas and she hated my boyfriend.  I started avoiding her calls, and loathing the shifts we shared.  I knew she was taking my tips.
She was 24.  She was doing a convict in the kitchen, guys from out of town she met on the internet, and old men who came into the restaurant and called you Sweetie if they thought they could.
Sometimes I'd get phone calls late at night.  Slurred disillusions.  Once she'd been shot, and sewed herself up with dental floss.  I tried to call the cops on that one, but she made me promise not to.  She had four names that I knew of, and excuses for all of them.  A pathological liar.  And definitely good at it except for when she got carried away.
Eventually she knew I'd caught on.  She needed help, but there wasn't much I could do about it. She started to hang out with the other twenty-one year old waitress.  Stacy was naive and desperate for friends.   
She talked herself out of the hospital when she finally got called.  Talent.  A sad broken alcoholic.  We learned, among other things, that she was also twenty-one with numerous fake IDs.  My age.  That shocked even me, and I recall saying that she was just a kid.  I was just a kid.  We were both too young.  I never figured out if she knew her age, or had fooled even herself.  She never admitted.
The late night calls came again.  This time she threatened me and I hung up. 
When I see a puffy faced chubby girl I think of her.  She had good hair, at least.  Thick and deep burnette. When I walk past a group at night and hear a female slurring profanities, she comes to mind.  To this day I'm not comfortable with the fact that she knows where I live.  Maybe mild post-traumatic stress.   I think I have a right, after 2:00 AM phone threats.