One Candy Cane Regret

My hometown in New England was small. Most of the townspeople worked at the State Hospital, an institution for the mentally handicapped. We lived near the escape siren, and when a patient left the grounds, the siren blew like the warning signal for a tornado. Old ladies would lock their doors, afraid of the 'retarded.' Our house sat across the street from the library, a quarter mile from the town common. My parents purchased a beat-up Victorian mansion; it was over 200 years old and runaway slaves hid in a secret room under the stairs during the time of the Underground Railroad. The neighbors swore the ghost of the previous owner haunted the grounds. She hung herself in the dilapidated barn in the backyard, the victim of alcoholism and small town gossip. The light from a single candle she place in the loft flickered in the middle of the night, said the neighbors, and her moans hid behind the wind during winter storms.

My school had only 400 students, grades seven through twelve. I hung out with the nerdy band bunch, and though we were ostracized and ridiculed by the beautiful and popular, we weren't treated like a small handful of students, the poorest of the poor from a dirt poor town. One of these kids was a girl named Trish. She was one year younger than me, a seventh grader, with a halo of frizzy blonde hair and watery eyes. I never heard her say a word. She sat alone in the lunchroom, never eating, never bringing or buying a lunch, never cracking a book or a smile, a pale goddess of the poor. She sat and stared into space, and I found myself watching her over the course of the year, wondering why she never ate. Now I'm sure she was too poor to even bring a peanut butter sandwich, but in my eigth grade mind that poor was for people in books, not in my school, not across from me at lunch.

I saw Diane Wilson and her pack of rabid cheerleaders torment Trish. Diane wore feathered roach clips in her hair and her older boyfriend drove a Camaro. She poked Trish in the back with math protractors and tripped her on her way out of the lunchroom. I wanted to protect Trish, to jump in between them, to grab Trish and run to the office, but I never did. I never did anything. Trish never cried, never ran to the office. She picked up her books each time, and walked away, eyes watery, back ramrod straight.

That Christmas I made homemade cards for my friends. I wrote funny poems and taped a candy cane inside each one. I applied glue to envelopes and sprinkled it with colored glitter. I made one of these for Trish, too, with a cotton ball snowman on the cover and these words inside:

Dear Trish, I am sorry that everyone is so mean to you. I would like to be your friend. I like your hair.

Sincerely,
Birdie.

I kept that card for a week, up until the day before Christmas Eve, our last day of school before vacation. I kept it in my blue canvas bookbag, at the very bottom, under my math book, where no one could see it, and waited for a moment when I would find Trish alone. But that moment never came, and I was too afraid to slip it inside her books, or inside her locker where others left her mean notes.

Trish didn't return to school after vacation. I never found out why. Maybe her family moved. Maybe she died of loneliness or malnutrition or beatings from her father. I wish I knew. I wish I gave her that card.