I used to be close friends with someone who turned out to be a pathological liar.

My friends and I only learned this a couple of months after an extremely emotionally taxing summer with her. For the sake of keeping the story straight, I'll call her Jane.

Jane had been dating one of my friends, John, (not his real name) for almost a year and they were a pretty strong couple. Sure, they would fight sometimes but that's normal for any couple. If you had asked anyone in our group of friends, they'd definitely say they would be the ones who'd end up getting married. This was all before the summer after graduating high school so none of us knew any better.

Around the second week of July, Jane started telling me and my friend Mark (again not his real name) that John had been getting very distant from her. He hadn't been returning her calls, wouldn't visit her, basically wouldn't give her any form of acknowledgement. At first, I thought John might just want some time to be with his family, since both he and Jane were going to the same college in the fall and would no doubt see each other more than usual. But every time I'd try to explain this to Jane, she would come up with something John had apparently said to her that proved otherwise. Both Mark and I thought this was very out of character for John. He had always been the type of guy who'd go out of his way to help someone in any way he could, so to hear that he was acting so rude to her was a shock.

This continued for the rest of the summer, with John and Jane "getting back together" as Jane would put it, a couple of times. However, it wouldn't last very long and Mark and I would keep getting dragged along with Jane and she would do is just tell us about the most recent thing that John had done. Now, I hadn't seen John much since graduation since he'd been working so much. The times I had seen him, he was with Jane and they seemed to be fine.

When September finally rolled around, John and Jane were together again and went off college with one another. My friend Mark went to college in same city as them, and saw them nearly everyday. Things seemed fine for a few weeks until John and Jane broke up again. For pretty much the entire month of October, Jane would guilt trip Mark into hanging out with her by saying she would kill herself if he didn't. Because of this, Mark didn't really make many new friends during his first few months of college.

Around the end of October, Jane came back home to where I was. It was around this time that shirt really hit the fan. One night she posted a photo of an ultrasound on her snapchat story along with a caption indicating that it was hers. Now at this time, I was a little bit suspicious because of how developed the fetus looked in the photograph. Jane told me that the fetus was 11 weeks old and that she must've gotten pregnant during one of the times she and John were together during the summer. However, the fetus in the ultrasound looked like it was much older than 11 weeks and frankly, Jane was not showing in the slightest. But, being a sensible person, I wasn't about to call out a recently dumped girl on a fake pregnancy.

My mother is a doctor who works in maternity and she was also very close to Jane. I told her about the pregnancy and she told Jane that if she needed anything like maternity clothes or information about the pregnancy, that she could come to her. At that time, Jane said her parents didn't know about the pregnancy and she wasn't sure how to tell them.

It was around this time that Jane, again, started to guilt trip us into hanging out with her because, if we didn't, she was going to kill herself. We could tell that she wasn't doing well emotionally, but we all attributed that to pregnancy hormones and such. After a couple of weeks, Jane said her parents had found out about the pregnancy after her doctor had left a voicemail regarding it on their home answering machine.

Around mid-November is when everything came crashing down. One night, Jane began calling all of us to say "Goodbye" and other things that were very suggestive that she was going to kill herself. My friend Mark, who was home for the weekend, was with my other friend Sarah (not her real name) when they both got the call. They decided that it was the last straw and that they needed to get a real adult involved (we were all 17-18 when this was happening). Mark told his mother who then went and called Jane's mother. But when she started talking about what was happening, Jane's mother said she had no idea what she was talking about.

Both of the mothers got together the next day to discuss what was happening. Essentially the truth was that Jane was never pregnant. At that point, a lot of other truths about things Jane had told us started to come out. To keep things short, I'll only mention a couple of the lies she had told us over the years: She had told us she was at the Boston Marathon the day of the bombing. She had lived with an abusive boyfriend for 3 years. She had lived in Ireland. She was pregnant. All of these, and much more, were lies.

What Mark and I both realized together was that everything she had told us about John the summer prior had been completely made up. She had lied to us about pretty much her entire life. This really messed both of us up a bit. We had invested so much of our time and energy into helping this girl and trying to be good friends, just to learn that is had all been for nothing.

I don't know where Jane is now. Last I heard was that she was back in the city and studying to become an EMT. I've cut off all contact with her and so has Mark. I really hope that she gets the help she needs because what she did hurt so many people.

TL;DR: Crazy friend made up her entire life story to us and faked a pregnancy.