"So, did you hear Jim* got married?"
I had heard nothing of the sort. Jim had been her boyfriend a couple of years ago. They had been together for a long time--over a year--and it had ended very badly. He had been Mormon, which she had grudgingly accepted though it had not meshed well with her Assembly of God background, and they had been very serious for a long time. The beginning of the end came when he went on a trip to South America to train with fellow Mormons on how to lead others into the Latter Day Saints faith. At first they exchanged letters and spoken recordings, but the communications grew further apart, he cheated, and he informed her he wouldn't date a non-Mormon. She was more angry than anything else, but was ultimately glad she didn't end up in a permanent relationship with him. He was an ass.
"Jim got married? To who?"
"The girl he cheated on me with. He sent me an invitation! I got it in the mail and was completely shocked. After giving it a bit of thought, I realized what he was doing. I'm not his friend. He didn't want me to go to the wedding. If I went, I would just be an awkward and hated presence. He only wanted to show off the fact that he was doing this, stroke his enormous ego. So I threw the invitation in the paper shredder and I got back at him in the best way ever."
I pause. One cliched way to get back would be to go to the wedding and shout out something when they ask If there's any reason these two should not be joined, blah blah blah, but if she chose another route I didn't know what it might be.
"So what did you do?
She laughs. "Well, they were registered at Target," the store where she works, "so I deleted their registry."
"You did what? How did you manage that?"
"I got a card you use to show when purchases have already been made, and I went in the back one day and marked everything as having already been bought. There were only two things that had actually already been purchased, so they're not going to get anything else they asked for. They actually came in together a while later to add things to their registry because they heard everything had been bought, and he gloated to me when he saw me and said something about having a lot of friends. I just walked away and laughed. I can't wait to see them get all kinds of ridiculous last-minute items and not have any dishes, silverware, or linens. It's the best revenge I could have gotten. I've never felt such gratification."
That's certainly one way to do it.
*Name changed to protect the bastardly.