We began listing everything we could remember. Compiling evidence. We realized we couldn’t handle being the only ones knowing this. It was like being insane. We were living in a reality detached from everyone else’s: everyone else still trusted Katie, and like us, had good reasons to. Hell, Katie was more trustworthy than we were. We were shifty Europeans with no loyalty to the United States. Vocally. Yanks hate that. If we were them, yeah, we’d have believed her over us. So we had to be certain.
And as soon as we tried, it quickly became apparent that almost nothing could be proven. Of course, anything based on conversations alone could reduce down to “he said, she said,” or claims that things were misheard or misunderstood. Even though there were two of us for many of these conversations, people might assume we were just closing ranks—or worse, ganging up on her.
So how could we be sure?
We began with the patterns. Most of the lies directly imitated Kasia: her identity, her memories, her precise edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, even her recipes on Katie’s Instagram. In conversation Katie would echo whatever Kasia had previously said, but she seemingly never added additional details that would have made her stories more believable. This I found surprising. It made it seem unpremeditated, compulsive, and likely improvised at high speeds. Perhaps the need was only triggered after Kasia said something Katie wanted to be true of herself, or felt should be, and the time it took for this feeling to swell and then burst accounted for the delay. These were felt lies, not thought-out ones: reflecting some psychological need, a transformation of reality, of herself, that she wished for. To be like Kasia.
With the many examples of her parroting Kasia’s memories we noticed there was always a slight delay. This helps to explain why she was so believable. If she had instantly replied “me too” every time Kasia shared something, the imitation would have been totally transparent, but after a small interval it somehow wasn’t—whether because it imitated the rhythm of more natural conversations, or simply because the delay stopped the imitation from sounding like a reflex action. Regardless, it was incredibly effective.
I wondered then: should we have noticed sooner? Had we failed to help her, to accept her as she was, that she had to pretend? Is the moral of all this, that we were terrible listeners, terrible friends?
No! Look at how much we have recalled about her! All of it listened to, remembered; all of it thought over!
No, this was her betrayal. But what it says about friendship, that we’d let her in so openly—this was humiliating. All it takes to form what people will tell themselves is a genuine friendship is to mirror them directly over time. That’s it. It’s so easy. Anyone can do it; anyone could get into your life like that. Mirroring Kasia was all she had to do for us to invite her to our home, confide in her, trust her with the access code for our front door and with the care of our dogs and cat. Were we such idiots to view her kindly? For Kasia to believe she’d made one friend here, with whom she shared so much experience?
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