We will definitely be doing the same...no more phone over here...if anything happens that her mom needs to know about, we will call her ourselves...

Is psychopath an exaggeration? Let's see...She has thrown rocks with nasty notes attached out of her second-storey window (at her mom's) at her best friend because she was jealous that her friend was playing with someone else instead of her and then didn't seem to understand that it was wrong and smiled when it was pointed out to her that she could have seriously hurt someone; she laughed when her pet cats ate her pet birds (she said the birds were annoying to her and she was glad they got eaten and then while laughing, described in detail how the cat was chewing on the one while the other one was laying nearby dead with no feathers); she makes up stories all the time to her mom saying things like her dad got drunk and was stumbling around and peed himself (completely out of nowhere - not an ounce of truth to that one) and that I have threatened to not let her see her dad ever again (again never happened); for years she would send us scrawled pencil sketches in the mail (lives 10 min away from us) of babyish drawings of the three of us together with sappy notes spelled wrong intentionally when actually she is a quite talented artist and good student (she got busted on that one last year); she shows no remorse or emotion when confronted about her lying or strange behaviour; and she puts on a baby voice for her dad but talks to me in a sarcastic low-toned voice. She does seem to lack empathy for others (for example if something bad happens to someone, whether she knows them or it's in another part of the world her reaction is always "I hope that doesn't happen to me!" followed by some kind of dramatic gesture) and her whole world revolves around her and how much attention she can get and then retaliating if someone else gets more attention than her. I could go on...

I'm pretty sure her texts to her mom were fully intentional and not the product of her "interpreting" the situation incorrectly...she's 12, she understands the difference between an actual accident and just a minor scare. To give her the benefit of the doubt, we even asked her if she was confused about what happened and what the term "car accident" means. She said it means when you hit something. We asked her if she thought we hit something, and she said no. We asked her why she used that word then, knowing full well how her mom would react and she just stared at us poker-faced.

I teach middle school, and have for some time. I have seen my share of all kinds of kids (and I typically don't find them annoying at all! Actually I feel like it is a very interesting age, as they are maturing by leaps and bounds and starting to better understand the world and their place in it.) but only once have I seen someone like her and all the other teachers agreed that this child showed signs of an antisocial personality disorder, but his mom refused to have him checked.

I guess it could be too soon to label it full-blown psychopathy, but maybe antisocial tendencies at the very least...