When I went to high school, the neighborhood I lived in was in the city, but abutted the county line. The bus I rode, when I rode it, which wasn’t consistently, was about a ten minute walk from the house, and then just a six or seven minute ride to school. There was a girl who lived along the rural rode that ran through the county not very far from the county line, and the bus that was supposed to take her to school was something like an hour-long ride that went up along the whole rural road, so she cut through the field, and someone’s yard, and walked to our bus stop, which was probably a twenty minute walk, and took our bus.
I used to talk to her sometimes, especially my freshman year, when I was new, and didn’t know anyone but my cousin, and we ended up in a class together. We never got to be close friends, but she had a horse, which I thought was the coolest thing ever, and I went over to her place a few times to see the horse. I’d just moved from New York, where only really rich people owned horses.
She lived with her grandmother in some sort of story where her parents lost custody of her, that I never was clear on, and didn’t want to pry-- I found out later her father was in prison, and she didn’t know where her mother was.
She had an uncle who used to come over, and her was very affectionate with her. Now, I was living with my aunt and uncle at the time, which sort of gave us something in common, I guess, and my uncle was affectionate with me, but in a fatherly way. There was something creepy about her uncle. He used to rub her back and her butt constantly whenever he talked to her.
Anyway, toward the end of our sophomore year, she shot and killed him, after he tried to rape her one more time than she could take. She ended up going to the women’s prison for it, and she started out with a pretty long sentence, but this was before the battered women’s defense was available. She got her sentence commuted at an appeal, because she hadn’t been able to use self-defense at her original trial, and then was paroled early for good behavior. I ran into her a couple of times, and things turned out surprisingly well for her. I won’t go onto the details, but she was in a good marriage, and she and her husband had taken over a crap business and turned it completely around, and performed a public service at the same time.
Really, she ought to write a book.
The uncle’s grave has a huge headstone, in the cemetery in the middle of town, where I know several people who are buried; I guess the grandmother really mourned him. She had one son in prison, while this son had honorable military service, and an advanced degree, and worked in aeronautics. She’d been proud of him, and her world just fell apart. I think she blamed the granddaughter; at any rate, she died just a few years later.
I wrote letters to the girl when she was in prison, but after she was released, we lost touch for years until we happened to run into each other. I didn’t recognize her, but she recognized me. She had little kids at the time, and they were beautiful.