[If you’ve noticed that I’m updating even less often than usual, it’s because the woman I’m working with has made it her duty in life to check how often I go online. She shall hereafter be referred to as Mme Gargoyle.]
When I was in third grade my family moved to a house in another school’s jurisdiction for perhaps a year. I hated that school and I couldn’t wait until we moved, even though I made a few friends there. In particular, I remember a girl (who I was never actually friends with) named Elizabeth ~Something~. A small Filipina girl with very smooth features and a very bossy, feisty nature. She always reminded me of an aggressive kitten.
As we weren’t really friends (and, in fact, was a bit scared of because of her bossiness), we didn’t even bother going through the motions of promising to write each other. Indeed, I almost never thought of her at all, until – until I heard she’d been hit by a car while crossing a dangerous street. She’d been on her way to a now-shut down convenience store. This was a couple years later; I assumed, with the self-absorption of a child, that she’d been killed. I didn’t think of it much after that.
On my first day of 7th grade I was walking down the hall when I heard someone calling my name. The voice had a hollow quality, and the pronunciation was slurred, but I recognized it all the same. When I turned around, who should I see but Elizabeth?
This was a very different Elizabeth from the one I’d known. While she still looked almost exactly the same, the accident had left her with a shuffling walk and severe brain damage. All of the feistiness was gone, and her smile (which was now constantly on her face) was innocent and carefree. Ironically, I was the only person she recognized from before the accident, and she followed me around school. There was just enough bossiness in her to remind me of the way she used to be, but it carried no malice.
Something similar happened to me recently.
I was at Commander Salamander’s with Joe & Marie (because Dirk was busy having a fit back at the car), looking at the horribly tacky dresses they had. I noticed that one of the guys working there kept looking oddly at me – he looked a little familiar to me, but only around the eyes. He eventually came up to me, told me I looked familiar, and asked if I’d gone to [Loathsome] High School. Surprised, I replied affirmatively, and he told me that’d he’d gone there. He followed by asking me who I’d hung out with. I named a few people, who he recognized, and he introduced himself as Josh.
I almost fell over when I realized who it was. There used to be a boy who sometimes hung out with my very loose group of friends – he was a slight boy with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a very pretty face. He might, at the time, have stood up to my shoulder. We called him Josh or Joshy[ie], and he sometimes rode my bus home because he had a couple friends living on my route. I think their names were Sharon, and Carrie (I’m not going to pretend to know how they spelled their names). He might also have been friends with Katie A-.
Josh had changed a lot in the intervening time. Gone was the peaches-and-cream complexion, replaced by acne that made his face look completely different. He stood at least a head taller than me, had a stud beneath his lower lip, and was lisping. He showed me the scars on the back of his neck where they’d installed metal rods after he broke it. Apparently, he’d been driving while both drunk and high during his freshman year of college, which ended his stint as a college student.
Astonishing who you run into in DC.
