part of my thesis.

I wrote my memoirs for my thesis on a sort-of dare. It ended up being a lot of fun, I'm still working on it. Here is a sampling:

Briefly, I had a friend in Vanushka. I have no idea what happened to Vanushka. Out of boredom, I’ve even Googled her to find her whereabouts these days. She could be at a nice school out west, studying computer sciences. Or she could be totally vanished from the face of the planet. I hope not.

Vanushka had moved here from India with her brother and parents. She was a short, stubby girl, unlike anyone I had ever come across before. Millcreek, the suburb in which I grew up, was quite whitebread, almost WASP-ish if you cancelled out the Protestants with that steady tide of Pennsylvania Catholics (holla). Minorities were few and far between. Her understanding of English? Somewhat broken.

And if the kids at our middle school were mean to me, they were near barbaric to the likes of poor Vanushka. She probably could have fared much better if she understood the concept of deodorant. God, I could kick myself for not bringing a stick of Secret and teaching her about it.

“She stinks!” I heard them joke. And it was true: she smelled bad. I couldn’t deny it when I talked to her. It was a rape of the nostrils. But she badly needed a friend and more than once did we end up being the last two left to be picked in gym class, thus forcing us to pair ourselves up with each other. Thus, for survival, we became friends.

Smelling so heinously was no reason to do what they did to her, however. Every day, she’d complain that something was missing. Someone had stolen from her. One lunch we both missed because some kids had put her lock on backwards.

“Brittany! Brittany! What am I gonna do?” she cried.

“Well, just keep trying at it. Or let me try, maybe,” I offered. It was the blind leading the blind. Neither of us could do a thing. Older students walked by, all upright and suave, snickering at our spectacle. The two strange girls fiddling with a plain locker. In the end, a janitor had to come by and help us out.

THEN:

“BRITTANY! BRITTANY!” Vanushka had found me one day after gym class, out of breath and with beads of sweat popping all over her forehead. Another crisis had materialized in her bleak universe.

“Yeah?”

“My umbrella! My umbrella! It’s gone! They took my umbrella!” she yelled. By “they” she meant her usual group of tormenters, a pack of grotesque boys led by this fat kid Andrew, who resembled a squashed, younger Rodney Dangerfield. Like if a giant had stepped on him. I saw them sitting on the other side of the gym, looking quite smug with themselves usually. “My mother will kill me, Brittany! KILL ME!”

“Oh, no Vanushka.” I nervously laughed. I wanted to calm her! “Your mother won’t kill you. Just explain what happened!”

“No! I will DIE!” Vanushka wailed.

She never found her umbrella. A month later, Vanushka disappeared, into the abyss. I can only hope her mother never killed her; I feel, in hindsight, this was a very real possibility.