You know her, don’t you? That blank face staring up at you from the front of the morning paper seems awfully familiar. Perhaps someone you know that had grown older. You push the paper aside and try to act like nothing had happened, but her face stays in your mind. Her face, those sad eyes and that same familiar expression.  The chair creaks beneath your feet as you get up from the table and go to school, trying to forget her face. Don’t you remember her?

Because she remembers you.

Clear as a bell, she remembers everyone she’d talked to. It was not easy for her to forget about her past. Throughout her life, she had been a drifting ghost and a wallflower, hadn’t she? Certainly you remember PE class in elementary, when she’d been the nice little girl who crept in the corner after she had been tripped by your friends. If you did something she would never tell.  She endured your jokes and your teases and never seemed to cry.  She endured everything and anything possible.

She tried to keep composed all the time. She lived a normal life – wearing normal school uniforms and always doing her hair up in different styles every day. Her mother appreciated her good work in school. In that year she was a transplant from a different school and was just getting the hang of things and fitting in.

She never did fit in, did she?

Certainly you remember your giggles when she used to attempt to talk to you. She was ignored and a space-taker. She thought she was your friend and you were hers. She’d give you anything when you needed it. She thought she was a part of the group when she laughed along with your friends. But none of your friends acknowledged her, did they? She was a little giggling ghost at your table. When there were parties, she was never handed an invitation. Remember your birthday party when you didn’t invite her?

She remembers every part of it. She sat at home and cried in her room while her mom yelled at her, telling her not to pout. Her tears stopped around dinner time when she would have to eat, but afterwards she’d cry herself to sleep.

Every year you saw her up to sixth grade, she seemed to grow bigger in size and shyer than normal. In middle school the tormenting stopped for a while, but you’d still talk about her behind her back. She was quiet and reserved, spending her normal day in the library. She had a few friends that would come and go.

Certainly you remember those tears in her eyes almost every morning?

No one talked to her and she grew lonely. When she did try to talk to people she felt like scum on the bottom of pans in a sink. You heard about her crushes on guys and about how they thought she was the most hideous thing ever. You knew about how kind she could be but said nothing to help her. You watched as she wandered around the hallways, quiet and silent. She had strength to hide her feelings while at school. But you didn’t know that’d she cry herself to sleep often or how much she hated herself. You never knew the extent of her emotions, and you never will.

You left for a different school and never saw her again. Now, around graduation time, you stare down onto her picture in the newspaper. It is time for work but you find yourself walking back over to the table to read the headline in disbelief.

But you knew it was coming, right?

You read over the title over and over again, mouthing the words before actually saying them out loud. “18-year old girl commits suicide” slips from your tongue. You immediately throw the paper out and try to forget all about it. You get in your car and drive off. But her face and the headline stay implanted. You remember each detail – her piercing eyes looking up from the paper, her mouth parted a little as if she wanted to say something.

You wonder if anyone else saw the headline and recognized her from school. You don’t remember anything about those years, you chose to forget. You forgot about all the friends you had, or what grades you had, or what you even looked like.

She wanted to forget those years of torment and of hopelessness. She wanted to let go of the people in her past. It was not so easy for her. It was easy for you to forget.

But all through her life, she remembered.