Karen wasn't a pretty girl. Her long black hair absorbed the light instead of bouncing off a shine; her skin was so pale it was nearly translucent except for a line of gray freckles under each eye. All of her features were exotic and beautiful in isolation, but unfortunate proportion and symmetry left her appearance little "off."
I'd heard other kids talking about her, always commenting on how her oldest sister was a breathtaking beauty. When people heard who her sister was there was always an air of doubt in the reaction.
My sister was the pretty one too.
We met on the jungle gym where she was hanging upside down from the top rail with her with no hands. I stayed closer to the ground. The Jungle gym was a mystery to me, it was a three level collection of cubes arranged to look more like a house than any jungle and the small steering wheels attached to the middle level only added to the confusion.
I watched her hanging out of the corner of my eye while I wedged myself into position with one of the steering wheels in hand. "Aren't you afraid?" I hoped she would say yes.
"No. Want to play Major Astro?" She righted herself and took the steering wheel next to me. We launched at five, four, three, two, one, and at blast off all hell broke loose. We exploded into one life or death crisis after another. There were fires to put out and a hatch to seal; we were nearly sucked out into the stratusphere at least a hundred times. When the bell sounded that recess was over we rushed our landing. The parachute almost didn't open, but Karen was quick on her feet and she dangled once more from the top rail to repair the invisible damage.
When our space capsule hit the water we bounced up and sprinted to the back of our respective classes lines. We were breathless, and laughing. I waved good bye to her as my class snaked into our classroom and her's filed past.
We never played together again. Years later I saw her sitting alone in the middle school lunchroom. Her hair was greasy and pimples dotted her face in the places between the freckles. She stared into the nothingness just in front of her nose. It reminded me of my first few weeks there, before my grandmother's neighbor took pity on me and invited me to eat with her and her popular friends. When one of the girls made a comment about Karen; how weird she was and how ugly I told her about the time I played with her during recess, how lost we became in our fantasy, how we hardly spoke, only reacted to what seemed to be the same invisible world. I told them about her beautiful sister. We looked at her without pity, without admiration, without depth and only for a split second before moving on to the merits Bonnie Bell Lip Gloss.
It wasn't long after that when I read an article in my Nana's Reader's Digest. A mother wrote a heart broken letter about the death of her youngest daughter. She begged parents to listen to their children before it was too late, before they pressed a shot gun to the soft spot under their chin.
Karen's Mother wrote the letter.
