Just a girl

Her face wasn't necessarily totally forgotten, I just had no reason to remember it until tonight.

Her face (blue eyes, freckles, framed by short brown hair) was resurrected from the deep folds of my memory by a post on Facebook from a man (then boy, now out) with whom I went to middle school. Sometimes I think it's silly to be "friends" with people you haven't seen in 20 years and may not see for another 20 or ever, but tonight I was reminded how important it is to keep those connections.
Being kids together is a powerful thing. Witnessing death together is even more powerful.

Her name was Christy and she hung herself when she was 13 years old.

She had been increasingly acting out as her parents increasingly withdrew her from (boys) sports teams. She was taken out of school and institutionalized. She died on suicide watch in a building far away from family and friends.

She has been described as "tomboyish" but I think most of the kids in our class thought (knew) she was gay. It was at a time when the word fag was freely shouted across the lockerless (guns and knives and gangs, you know) hallways or we would say things like, "That's so gay!" when we thought something was stupid. But nobody really realized the connection. Damaging semantics aren't a thought when you are 12.
Maybe I'm suppressing it but I don't think that bullying was the cause of her depression. At least not from most of the kids. I'm sure she had a tougher time when all the girls (myself included) spent breaks fixing thick black eyeliner and spraying extra hold Aquanet onto impressively vertical bangs. Or standing in the corner at a school dance hoping tight black stirruped jeans and off the shoulder salmon pink sweater (my favorite outfit) would attract a skinny boy in the grade above to dance with to "Everything I do, I do it for you." I really don't remember her being teased or ostracized, but these are things I may not have remembered anyway since they didn't happen to me. (I got teased and ostracized for different things, tweens being the tender cruel things they are.) Was it worse for the gay boys? Male homophobia was definitely more outwardly prevalent but I have to imagine the (sometimes) quiet isolation of being a young lesbian is no less damaging.

I wasn't good friends with Christy. I don't remember if we ever hung out after school or ate lunch together. We had classes together, we talked, we laughed. She was a nice girl. Yet we all had a good idea of why she committed suicide, why she was unhappy with her strict religious upbringing, why she didn't feel she had an alternative. But that wasn't to be talked about, especially at the funeral. I vaguely remember the viewing, seeing her mom and dad in the pews, a girl from class reading a eulogy from a crumpled piece of wide ruled notebook paper. Crying.
It was all so surreal. Especially the body.

Christy was in a dress and makeup. Very un-Christy.


I think of the kids I've been touring around the farm these days. The ones who are a little different, who don't quite fit into the strict social hierarchy of middle school. I think of how stressful it was to be that age: always wondering what you were expected to be when you grew up, who you would marry (twist off the stem of an apple as you say the alphabet- whatever letter you land on is the first letter of the name of your future husband), who you should make out with at the next pool party, if you were skinny enough, why your parents fought so much, why your good friend was giving bj's at highschoolers' parties, how could you cross the courtyard without being called a freckle-faced white bitch and getting into a cat fight, how to avoid getting shot (unfortunately a reality at my school) on your way through the gravel parking lot.
Wondering how to please your parents and be a good daughter but also trying to discover the teenager you are becoming.

I remembered her face before I Googled it. We didn't have Google in middle school on our Apple 2GSs. Christy never knew what the internet was. But tonight in the electrical strands that connect us together I am brought back to the courtyard of Horace Mann, to apple pies and milkshakes for lunch and trash cans being thrown during the Rodney King riots. To overcrowded classrooms and all those kids just doing the best they could. To a girl named Christy.

13 is rough.
I'd like to think her 14th year would have been better.
And 15th.
And 16th.

What would she have been at 33 if those in her world (the world) had accepted who she was, who she was becoming, and not who they wanted her to be?

I guess that can be asked of many of us who are still alive...