Someone's Story repeated by Somebody Else and now told by Me

There was a girl, Holly, who went to the same high school with a girl named Karen. They were best friends and did the usual best friend things: gossip, laugh, hang out at the local gathering spot (I picture some sort of convenience store parking lot but I'm probably just getting that from the convenience store in front of my high school) and whatever else people of their age did in this town of theirs. They did everything together, even getting a crush on the same boy. His name was Tom and was a handsome lad (probably - I don't know for sure, but who ever gets a crush on a person they thought was ugly?).

At first they didn't even acknowledge their mutual crush, save for a few comments about "a cute guy" they both knew. Holly was never sure when they first openly spoke about Tom and what they both felt about him, saying, "It's almost like one day we just openly admitted the truth and neither of us noticed it. Like we had this long conversation about Tom without ever having had the conversation."

A reasonable person would expect a rivalry to develop. It did, but it wasn't some cheap TV show rivalry: undercutting each other, barbed comments, and possibly a slapfight during sweeps week. Holly would do what she could to get Tom to notice Karen and Karen would do what she could to get Tom to notice Holly. They did their best without having it look too obvious to Tom. It was a strange rivalry, but it seems right. Holly is not a venal, underhanded person and her best friend would not have been, either.

"You know he likes you," Holly would say to her friend.

"He does not. Tom likes you," her friend would reply.

"No, it's you."

Sometimes, at night, they would walk to Tom's house and stand across the street. The window to his room didn't afford much of a view. All they could see was a desk with some clutter, a chair, some posters they couldn't make out and part of the door to his room. Neither of them said a word to each other while they waited. They wouldn't stay for long - only until they saw Tom. When they saw him in his room he would sit in front of the desk in his bedroom and start working, or would practise on his guitar; sometimes he'd be talking to somebody they couldn't see, and other times it would just be a brief glimpse of him on his way to another part of the house. After a few minutes of watching they would leave.

Nothing much happened until the summer. Karen got a job at the Dairy Queen, met a guy and started going out with him. Holly became a camp counselor at a summer camp two hour's drive away and was out of town when it happened.

Tom and some friends had decided to go hiking. They'd driven to this park and started walking one of the trails. Apparently a part of it went by a steep and somewhat slick area because Tom slipped, or was horsing around and fell (the later rumours were in disagreement, and the newspaper account had few details). He dropped, slided, and came to a stop about two hundred feet below his friends. By the time they reached him he was dead.

According to the rumour mill Tom's mother had a nervous breakdown and the father moved the whole family - there were two sisters, one older and one younger than Tom - several hundred miles away. They'd pretty much just thrown all their things into a van and left the realtor to sell the furniture and the house.

Before everything was sold away, Holly made one last trip to the house. The front door was unlocked and Holly carefully went inside. She stayed by the door for a bit, ready to leave if there was ever a sound of somebody else in the house. She heard nothing, and slowly became bolder as she walked around the house. A lot of things had quite obviously been taken but some had stayed. Furniture, as I'd mentioned, but also little, natural things like some magazines in the kitchen, a jacket hanging in the closet, or a calendar still set to the previous month, when Tom had died.

Holly eventually worked up the nerve to go upstairs. Up she went, trying to orient her knowledge of the location of Tom's room with the layout on the second floor. Hesitating, she entered the room. It was strange for her to see from the inside to see what she'd only seen a small part of from the outside, and stranger still to see it so empty of the few things she knew were supposed to be there. The posters were missing, as were the things on his desk. Holly opened the drawer and in the very back were some love letters, all of them unsent, addressed to Karen.

"I knew it," Holly said to herself. "I always knew she was the one."

Here, Holly added when telling the story, "You wake up, and you just decide: I like this boy. You don't know why. It's like it's decided for you, and you spend so much of your life afterwards trying to live up to it."

Holly works in an insurance company, married, with a kid on the way. She's quiet, but likes to laugh.

Santacruzan

01 June 2006

Hello everyone, and the happiest of birthdays to leRoi!

For us out here, summer is almost over because on June 5 schooldays begin. It may interest all of you former Queensrow residents to know that we are building a new (and quite big) Parish Church just outside the house in Area B. A few years back, the residents started holding the traditional Santacruzan or Flores De Mayo.

As is wont for occasions like this, the Gay Population started to turn things into one humongous - and sometimes barf inducing - fashion show instead of the religious rite it was supposed to be. As most of you Da Vinci Code fans know, the Santacruzan actually is supposed to commemorate Queen Helen's search for three pieces from the Holy Cross. Queen Helen if I remember my Christian lore properly is the mother of King Constantine, the pagan monarch who saw how globally powerful Christianity could become and who convened the Council of Nicaea to draft what would become the guideposts for the practice of the Christian faith as we know it.

In any event, the good Parish Priest of Queensrow together with his clergy and the lay faithful decided that beginning 2005, the Santacruzan will no longer be a gay fashion show. Instead, they will hold a catechetical pageant involving biblical characters. And this is the part where Biboy comes in because he was the hands down choice to play Goliath.

Last year, Biboy was notified only two days before the parade but he still managed to cobble together a decent costume. This year, Biboy had a little more time - a couple of weeks - so he came up with the gold body armor in the picture. The rest of the characters are in the group shot. There actually 26 of them. Last year, there were 19 so the community is beginning to get into the spirit of things.

The body armor is actually made of foam-assisted rubber matting which Biboy cut and fashioned into what you see. If you guys look closely, the shield that Biboy is holding is actually the cover of a World War II vintage mess hall container that Lulan brought over to Manila from Red Beach in Palo, Leyte. The container came with the old dinner table you guys had in Area S. (That table is with me now.)

And that is what we did on our summer vacation.

Cheers, one and all!