This is a secondary submission for Poetry Friday as sponsored by the lovely Mona. It doesn’t belong at the cat’s place, so I will store the memory here. The word for Poetry Friday is cut.

After the eight grade, the private school I attended closed. My parents enrolled me in public high school rather than than bus me with my classmates. Transferring from a class of seventeen to a class of two hundred and fifty was sobering. I didn’t fear the diversity, the larger classes or the mysteries of the cafeteria but I resented the Hell out of being torn from my safety zone. At fourteen, the sun practically rises and sets drawn by the force of adolescent ego.

I knew a few kids at the new school, but with varying class schedules and hormonal crashes, I flopped around like a fish out of water trying desperately to find a place to belong. Throughout my tenure, I tried to blend in with various groups ranging from outcasts, to nerds, to cool kids, and foreign exchange students. I was never a good blend with any, but managed to be non-threatening enough to be tolerated by most groups.

As a quiet freshman who doodled constantly in the margins of notebooks, I was quickly recruited to decorate for various dances. I painted backdrops for at least five dances I didn’t attend. It was through one of those after school drawing, painting soda sucking afternoons I met Gwen.

I was drawn to her in one of those adolescent girl crush, you’re older and you have more insight into the high school pecking order, please guide me and rescue me from my own naivety, sort of ways. She was two years older, but she was in my homeroom, so I suspect academics weren’t a priority for her. She was friendly, and what I perceived to be cool, in an off the radar way.

We were painting murals or some such activity and she realized I noticed the horizontal scars intersecting her right and left wrist. She made some flip comment about it, and I was too polite to inquire further. Until that moment, I never considered the purpose which motivated an act of self-destruction. I supposed at the time, that she must have had a reason yet I was too squeamish to consider what it might be. I never thought any different of her because of it. I was intelligent enough to realize my life experience was too limited to grasp the why, but I was relieved she hadn’t been successful. Now, I regret my reasons were largely selfish. The truth is I couldn’t imagine navigating the hallowed halls of education without Gwen’s guidance that first year.

Gwen earned enough credit to move to a junior homeroom the following year, and I didn’t see her as often. By mid-term, she was suspended for bringing alcohol on the bus. A few days into her suspension, she withdrew from school. I never saw her again. I heard a rumor my senior year that she was pregnant, but I never heard confirmation.

Occasionally I wonder where her path led. I was acquainted with her, but I can’t claim to know her or her problems any better than she knew me or mine. At times when I close my eyes, I see her hands, beautiful, delicate, but no less troubled.