Am I the jerk for not refunding my friend's $600? After she bailed on our group trip literally three days before we were actually going on vacation.

Because instead of being honest with us, she claimed that she couldn't go because her grandmother was in the hospital.

But in reality, she went on vacation with her boyfriend instead, duping all of us in the process.

So right now I'm honestly incredibly offended and I seriously

don't know what to do. Here's what happened. I'm a 19 year old female and my friends and I all

decided to go on a ski trip for 12 days over winter break. We found a place to stay and all in all,

it was around $600 per person for the rental and we decided it was just easiest to have one person,

namely me, put all the

money up front and just everyone pay me back before the actual trip, which everybody did.

In my friend group, we have a girl that we will call Sarah. Sarah comes from a comfortable

family and was even one of the people who suggested the trip and was one of the leading

forces to finding the Airbnb. And literally, in the weeks leading up to the

trip, we were all fine, sending outfit ideas, restaurants to book, etc. But the Tuesday before we

left, Sarah starts sending text messages to the group chat, saying stuff like, guys, my boyfriend's

family is going on vacation next week, and basically was sending a lot of details about where his family

is going for winter vacation,

and it was all stuff that we really didn't need to know. Then on Thursday, as we were leaving on

Saturday, she sends a text to the group chat, saying how she couldn't go because she had a family

emergency, claiming that her grandmother had gotten admitted to the hospital. Now, we were obviously

bummed out, but family comes first, and I told her that I would send her the money back that she sent towards the rental. So we go on the trip and everything's okay until one of my friends who has Sarah's location on Life 360, as they are roommates after all, sees that she's spending time in a beach town, and it's then that we put two and two together. Once we saw that, we spent the night

pissed off and we call her out the next day where she admits everything. She had been last

minute invited on her boyfriend's vacation and decided that she wanted to go to that instead,

...