I was nineteen and had just returned home from my junior year at boarding school. I was old for a junior, but home-schooling doesn't always prepare you for the world like it should. I was primarily just relieved to have successfully completed the first of the two years my parents had planned for me to attend. All things said, it had been the most tumultuous period of my life, outpacing the rest of my short existence by a significant margin. In that one year I'd fallen in love, had my heart broken, and repeated that process twice more. Those are stories for another time. This story is from the interlude, the time between those years, a few weeks completely separated from that chaos.
Many of the details escape me, but I was working at the local church school that summer, mostly maintenance and cleaning of some sort, preparing it for the upcoming year. There were a few of us working there, eighteen and nineteen year olds, home for the summer, some like me from boarding school, others from college. Most of us were just trying to save up some spending money for the school year ahead. I remember almost none of those people, only Katya remains clear in my mind.
I was a year ahead of her, but we had been in the same classroom in that two classroom school my freshman and sophomore years. As usual, during those two years, there were no more than thirty students in the entire school, but we were still leagues apart socially. I was the home-schooled kid, awkward, clumsy, a bit chubby. She was an only child, but her older cousins were like sisters to her, all whom had gone to this school. As their extended family was the largest and widest spread, they had become the "popular" clique by default. In a school that small, that is of course all relative, but to my mind it was an enormous divide.
So there we were, two people, who in my mind would've likely never have talked otherwise, working side by side, joking and chatting. It felt amazing. She was cute, adorable even, but with a mouth that wouldn't quit and a personality to match. The term "firecracker" was practically coined just for her. She was mouthy, bossy, and completely unladylike. I loved every minute of it. She was an unapologetic flirt, with all the guys, and in retrospect, probably some of the girls.
I missed the signals she was sending me for almost too long because of this. I didn't think I was anything special. After all, she said all the same things to the other guys. Looking back it should have been painfully obvious. I was the only one she made excuses to work with, I was the one that she touched, smacking my arm when I got talked back, bumping into more times than could be explained by simple clumsiness. When the day was done and I was waiting for my ride, she was the one that lounged with me on the playground equipment, just talking like we'd been best friends forever. I was oblivious, and I would have gone the whole summer like that if fate hadn't had different plans.
My dad worked long hours, and as we were poor, we just had the one vehicle. He'd drop me off early in the morning on his way to the mill, and pick me up in the evening on his way home. It was one of those early mornings that I found her waiting there. It wasn't unusual for her to be there early, though I never questioned as to why that was. It was a bright sunny day, and it felt like the entire world was right in its place, right where it belonged.
I saw her out on the swings, and headed over. The staff wouldn't be here for another hour to unlock the buildings, so this was usually one of our times to hang out, just the two of us. The moment I saw her face, that bright sunny feeling was shattered and my world instantly turned dark and stormy. It wasn't just the fact that she had a purple bruise under her eye, or the fact that her lip looked cut and swollen. It was the look she gave me. To this day I still get a shiver when I think of it. So many feelings welled up in me at that moment. Sympathy, rage, disbelief, all warring with each other to take top billing.
Her eyes looked far away, and the bossy, mouthy bitch who'd become my best friend was gone. In her place was a broken girl, too broken for tears, just staring ahead. I don't know how long I stood there, it seemed like an eternity. Once I realized that the silence had hung on for far too long, I broke myself out of it and went to her. I knelt next to her, completely unsure what to do or what to say. Nothing seemed adequate. So being the thoughtful, caring, and empathetic soul I was, I blurted out, "What the fuck happened?" That did get a reaction, and I'm not sure if she was on the edge of crying or laughing, the sound was so quick and faint, and the look gone from her so fast. She hung her head as if ashamed and then the dam broke, she started to cry, sobbing. It was heartbreaking and tore at me, right to my very core.
I was an awkward kid, I didn't have any experience with anything like this, but I had to do something, anything. My family had never been a hugging family. Physical affection was something I'd rarely seen modeled growing up. So when I tried to hug her, it didn't feel natural, it didn't feel right. I felt like one of those novelty claw machines, clumsily trying to hang onto a stuffed animal and going about it all wrong. Somehow, that didn't matter to her. It was what she needed, and she hugged me right back. I remember having a momentary detached thought that this hugging thing was definitely underrated. It felt so good to feel so close to someone, to have the mutual feeling of caring about someone so much that you had to be touching to express it properly.
So I held her, she held me, and she cried. I didn't know what else to do, so I let her, and eventually, she began to calm down, and finally stopped. Still holding her I asked, "What can I do?", and she looked up at me and by God she smiled. I will never forget that. After all of that, with all the pain she was obviously in, she smiled at me. It was like being trapped in a pitch black room in a strange house, and someone had just lit a match. The room may have still been dark, but that light was all you could see, all you cared about in that moment.
We stayed like that for a bit, and when she'd calmed down some I finally got the story, in bits and pieces. One of those other guys had taken the flirting really personal, and decided she should only have eyes for him. Being lonely, she took him up on his offer, and they'd gone out the night before. As you can plainly guess, it hadn't ended well. She'd had enough, he hadn't, she tried to get away, and he expressed his displeasure with his fists.
To this day I don't know what exactly transpired there, but whatever it was it hurt her and shamed her. She wasn't sure what to do, because at the time her mom was more than a little nuts, and really didn't have a great grip on reality, so she'd have been of no help. Her dad was always in a world all his own and would never have noticed, always caught up in his own little happy bubble, oblivious to everything but his cars and his tinkering. She was confused, hurt, and through no fault of her own, ashamed. So she'd said nothing, to nobody, and just gone about like everything was fine.
