Rachel
by Eli Dupree

Excuse me - I'm here to talk about Rachel. You know, the Rachel you expelled last week, after she stabbed someone? It must just be that easy for you to forget expelling someone...!
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to explode at you. I'm just angry, okay? Not even at you - I know none of this is your fault. I'm angry at the whole situation. I know you can't change anything now; I just don't want you to walk away from this thinking she was just a bad new student who stabbed someone for no reason - or thinking, for that matter, that the way she never took off her hat in public was just an affectation. I want you to understand. And you'll listen to me because you think I'm a good upstanding student. I know how it works.
I'm also angry because I've had to bottle up the way I feel because she didn't want me to talk about it because of her own stupid privacy! Well, given that she's packed her bags and left by now and you're never going to see her again, I don't think it'll hurt anything for me to tell you what it was that no one was going to tell you at the hearings.
That's right - everyone was hiding things from you. I'll get to that, okay?
I've known Rachel for a long time. She wasn't always that cowering, recalcitrant thing you must have seen in your offices. It's going to sound ridiculous, but she was a real fighter. She was the kind of person who'd punch any boy who annoyed her and then insult them if they didn't fight back. She was so strong, and she told everybody they should stand up for what they believed in. And she always let her hair hang loose around her face... she never wore a hat...
That was before the time that my boyfriend took me out in his car late at night and beat me. Rachel found out, and she told me in front of everybody that I should go to the police... and I did... and two days later, she disappeared.
When she came back, she was what you saw last week, frowning, hiding things with her eyes, wearing that tight little baseball cap with the brim sticking out the back, and she told me that fighting wouldn't save me, that I should do what they wanted and try to have no one notice me. She spent the rest of high school trying to have no one notice her...
She thought that coming here would let her start again.
And that brings me to the little encounter that never came up in the hearings because it doesn't reflect well on anyone who was involved. I saw it, but didn't tell anyone because Rachel didn't want me to. You see, that guy she stabbed had gotten her where he thought she was alone - he didn't notice me - and he knocked off her hat, and I barely had time to blink before he was on the floor, Rachel on top of him, the flash of metal at his throat. She was hissing in his ear, and I think I know now what she was saying - it was a threat. She was telling him what she'd do to him if he told anyone else what he'd seen.
The first thing that implies - since Rachel was the talk of the school the next day - is that the moment he was out of her sight, he told anyone and everyone exactly what he'd seen. Can you imagine, if you had a secret...? The two months they say it'll take to heal from the stab wounds are nothing. I have no sympathy for him.
The second thing it implies? Well, for all that she said fighting doesn't work...
Never mind. I'll let you work that one out. First there's one more thing that I have to tell you just because I have to tell someone, anyone, to get it off my conscience. It turns out this was earlier on the same day she stabbed the guy... I'd seen her run out of her dorm, fists clenched, clearly upset - I can only assume from hearing what they were saying about her. When I followed, she went into the science building, and into a bathroom, and stayed there for a while, and then I started to hear her moaning, so I knocked and she didn't respond, and I called out and she didn't respond, and then I tried the door - she never locked it - and walked in...
She was at the mirror, that same knife loose in her hand, facing away from me. At first I didn't see what was wrong... then I saw the reflection of her face, and realized that the blood on the knife was hers, but with her hat off even the way she'd sliced into her own skin, even the lines of red streaming down her face, couldn't cover up where, written in burn scars across her forehead, it said -
Can't I just say it was something you wouldn't want someone to burn into your own damn face, and leave it at that?! No one who ever cared about her would repeat it. If you want to know, just ask any of the other kids. Any single one of them.

I'm sorry. I don't even know why I told you that. I was just angry and my counselor wasn't nice to me and somehow I thought that going to you instead would change anything. Now I feel like I've been trying to guilt-trip you for doing your job.
I'm sorry for wasting your time.

~(April 2009)