Early on a snowy November morning when
the sun had just peered over the edge of the horizon, a small
commuter flight over the Alps suddenly vanished in a blinding flash.
Almost immediately, everyone, lead by the News, was blaming
terrorists. Even a simple appeal to logic would have shown this to
be ridiculous. Why would terrorists target a plane with a max
seating capacity of sixty people and strike when it was miles from
any form of civilization? Also, explosions produced by terrorists
tend to be the normal flame color. They usually don't spew out bolts
of rainbow hued light, as some of the residence near the flight path
had reported seeing in the sky that day. Anyone could have made
those deductions but I, more than anyone, knew that terrorists had
nothing to do with it. Also, I knew about the incident before it hit
the news because my upstairs neighbor and life-long friend Shandra
was on that flight and had me listed in her registration as her
emergency contact. It was Shandra's presence that caused me to be
one of the first notified and to be certain that the official version
of events was wrong.
Thanksgiving was in just a few days
and I was engaging in some last minute before-bed packing,
frantically stuffing clothes into suitcases for my drive to the
family gathering two states over, when the phone rang. Seeing the
airline name on the caller ID, I picked it up, fuming with
irritation, expecting to be told that Shandra's return flight had
been delayed which would mean I would need to find someone to come in
and feed our shared cat who ran back and forth between our two
apartments by means of the back stair. I listened in stunned silence
as the voice on the other end of the connection told me about the
incident. After they had politely excused themselves to call the
next person, I sat dumbly, staring at the dead phone in my hand. I
felt nothing and it did not seem real. Although I was in my
thirties, this was the first big loss I had experienced and was
utterly unprepared for how overwhelmingly empty I would feel. I
could not believe Shandra was gone. For almost as far back as I
could remember, she had been a constant, if sometimes distant,
presence in my life.
We had been assigned desks next to
each other in second grade and had developed a connection largely by
necessity as we quickly learned we had complimentary academic skills.
It took a few more months before I discovered the real Shandra.
Some local acting group had come to the school to put on a play of
Robin Hood. It was rather exciting, at least to eight-year-olds,
with disguises and acrobatics and even a fight scene. I was
mesmerized and so were many of my classmates. A couple of days
later, while a small group of us were out on the playground, someone
suggested trying to make our own play. We would write scripts in our
free time and try to act them out when we met up on the playground.
It was a long convoluted story, sort of a cross between Robin Hood,
Cinderella, and Batman. But we loved it and apparently, so did some
of the other students because they would sit and watch us from time
to time. But we were still frustrated because ours wasn't as cool as
the play at the assembly. We didn't have costumes so we couldn't
really do disguises and even at that age we were smart enough to
realize the acrobatics were beyond us, but fight scenes we could do.
We didn't have swords like they had in the show but we were able to
script some good scenes with just fake shoving and hitting. But then
it happened.
“I'll never tell you the secret,”
cried Connie and gave an evil laugh, posing menacingly in front of
our impromptu audience, near the monkey bars, which we used as a
“castle” for some scenes. In response Shandra pretended to punch
Connie in the shoulder. From where I was standing to the side, I
could see there were several inches of space between where her fist
stopped and the other girl's body but, it must have looked real to
the “audience” sitting in front of us. As arranged, Connie
yelled and fell down. Both the yell and the fall were very dramatic
and not very convincing to a critical eye. But we were just kids and
the couple of people watching us clapped and cheered excitedly but
scattered quickly as one of the playground monitors came running up.
The rest of the people in our impromptu acting troupe scattered as
well, except for me. I don't know if I stayed out of loyalty to
Shandra or just because, since I was standing “on stage” near
them, it would have been far too obvious to try to leave. She
started yelling angrily at Shandra and it took me moment to realize
what was happening.
“No, no, you've got it all wrong,”
I cried as soon as I figured it out. “We weren't fighting. We're
just doing a play like we saw in the gym the other day. It's all
fake, like the actors do.” The monitor definitely heard me because
she looked over at me, but then looked away again without saying
anything and turned back to Shandra. I was so offended at being
ignored that I didn't notice anything about Shandra's reactions at
the time. I just wanted to get the woman to pay attention to me,
listen to me. I wanted to be the wise one who had solved the
problem. Maybe she didn't believe me, thought I was making things up
to protect my friend. “Ask Connie,” I pushed. “She'll tell
you it wasn't real. Connie, tell her that Shandra didn't even touch
you. Show her your shoulder so she can see there isn't a mark on
it.” But, sitting in the wet grass, Connie remained mute. Was she
just frozen with fear or did she have darker motives? Would it even
have helped if she had said something?
I'll never know. As an adult I get
that, even if she had believed this, it might not have cleared up the
concerns, but the sensible thing would have been to say something
like “Even if it's not real, that doesn't mean it's safe. Those
are trained actors.” That would have sufficed to put the
breaks on any concerning behavior while avoiding the need to assign
blame. To be fair, Connie was as much at fault as Shandra. She had
not only agreed to the stage fight but had been enthusiastic about it
so it would have been much simpler to avoid the whole issue.
Instead, the monitor told Shandra to apologize to Connie and I
thought it was over. Nothing bad was going to happen to us. This
was the standard way of dealing with playground quarrels that were
too complicated to be easily straightened out but not serious enough
to be worth the effort of sorting through the complications...or if
the monitor was having a bad day and just didn't want to be bothered.
Instead, Shandra kept trying to
justify herself by echoing my defense about it being staged and that
she hadn't intended to hurt Connie, in fact hadn't even touched her.
“If you don't want us to do plays because it's too hard to tell
what's real and what isn't, then we won't,” she said in a wild,
desperate voice. “But I wasn't trying to be mean. I would only
feel sorry about doing something if what I did was wrong.” The
monitor continued to press her more forcefully and something snapped
inside Shandra. “Your job is to make sure no one gets hurt. So
you can tell me that I can't do things that might hurt people. But
you can't tell me how I feel. If you can control what's inside of
me, then I'm not a human being any more. I'm just your puppet.”
The monitor stared at her in shock for a moment then began to repeat
her demand but Shandra screamed, “Put your hand in the puppet and
work its mouth.” She kept screaming this over and over, curled
into a ball on the ground, clutching her head which she was still
doing when Connie and I fled in horror.
Shandra never spoke of that day again
and I never asked her about it. Needless to say, we never tried to
do theater again. Actually, for the next several months, she spent
her time on the playground sitting under the giant corkscrew slide,
curled into a ball. I wasn't a great friend and frequently got bored
and went off to do my own thing but she always welcomed me back when
I was there. Connie however, she would not speak to and remained
permanently hostile to for the rest of the time we were in school
together. But I had learned my lesson, as most of the people at
school had. When Sandra was confronted with certain issues, everyone
would scatter. But she was gentler with me than with most, probably
because she appreciated that I stuck around when no one else would.
And so we stuck together. I liked
Shandra despite her craziness. I guess part of me admired her
willingness to flout expectations and, certainly, it was wonderful to
know I had a friend who would stand up for me no matter what. When
one of the rich popular girls made fun of me for wearing badly
fitting clothes, because my mom had fallen in love with them in the
store and they didn't have my size, none of my other friends would
stand up for me because they didn't want to get on her bad side. But
Shandra had stood over me and given her such a tongue lashing that,
eventually, she had backed down. Of course, this alienated the few
people left who would still talk to Shandra, but she didn't care. It
also made me a pariah temporarily, which I cared more about, but I
laid low for a couple of months then showed up with a new, more
stylish outfit I had managed to wheedle for my birthday and all was
forgiven.
More problematic was attempting to
juggle Shandra and my other friends long term. For example, none of
the other girls invited her to their birthday parties and I had to
find ways to go without Shandra knowing for fear she would be hurt,
feeling horribly guilty about it all the while. This kind of thing
got more common as we got older and the other girls wanted to have
sleepovers where we did each other's make-up and talked about girl
things. Because I was super eager for this kind of activity and was
unable to get enough of it otherwise, I tried to start up similar
conversations with Shandra. I do and did, even at the time, have
enough respect for her to know I was doing this purely for my own
satisfaction and not for any misplaced pity at her self-imposed
isolation. Whatever the motive, it generally did not go well. I
remember one time when we were lounging on the old couch in Shandra's
basement the summer we turned thirteen. We spent a lot of our time
there now complaining about the new complications in our lives
revolving around the added stress of Middle School and the aches and
pains of our growing bodies. I was talking about how my breasts had
grown enough that I needed to wear a training bra and how
uncomfortable this was and imagining what it would feel like to have
a period.
“What do you think it will be like?”
I asked Shandra. She just shrugged, staring up at the ceiling with a
vague distant look in her eyes. “Don't you think it's exciting?”
I asked, slightly miffed.
“No.”
“No? All the changes our bodies are
going through, what we're becoming?” The muscles around her face
tightened as if she were trying not to listen.
“I do think about my body changing,”
she said at last. “I imagine becoming a being of crystal, hard and
flashing.”
I don't know if that was the first
time she talked about wanting to be able to turn into crystal but it
was the first time it registered strongly enough for me to pay
attention. Of course, I imagined a slender, graceful, shining
creature like Emma Silverfox, hair rippling like liquid glass, body a
prism reflecting rainbows. I thought it was very poetic. “To be
beautiful crystal creature...” I began eagerly, thinking this was
something new we could share, but I was brought up short by the
contempt on Shandra's face.
She was looking at me like I was a
complete idiot. “Beauty does not matter,” she cried in
exasperation. “Only power matters.” Guess I had been right on
target with the superhero idea but not in the way Shandra intended.
I didn't know what to say to that and, eventually, we turned to
talking about something else. It certainly wasn't the last time she
mentioned the desire but it became a kind of background thing, the
way most girls that age would absently worry about shaving or acne.
Read the full Story here
©Amanda Hamlin 2005
