I came into the convenience store with a sore throat and a runny nose. I felt weak and just wanted to get it over with. The convenience store was more crowded than usual, though nothing too overwhelming. Among all those customers, one person caught my attention, someone I had not seen in at least 5 years: Daniel P.
When I was about 10 years old, Daniel and me were best friends. We played the Magic: The Gathering trading card game every day, and it was not unusual for each of us to visit one another’s homes every week or so. We were both part of a group of friends which wouldn’t have been out of place to call “the Outcasts Club”. Each of its not-so-proud-to-be members was weird in some way. Whether too fat, or too eccentric, too ugly, or too high-pitched. Daniel belonged in the last category of weirdness: he had a girlish voice. Ever since he was 7 years old other kids were already making fun of his voice, and the other kids’ voices weren’t “manly” by any standards (we were all 7 year old kids). From that point onward, getting bullied became part of Daniel’s daily life.
Of course, all children part of the Outcasts Club got bullied from time to time (note: it was a male-only catholic school, so all members of the Club were male). It was something you kind of expected at every turn. This was maybe one of the reasons relating to people was something difficult for me later on in life. I was afraid of people. But no one had more reasons to be afraid of other people than Daniel.
Not only had he had a girly voice, he also had a wonky eye: nothing serious, just a small deformity like Radiohead’s Thom Yorke had (actually, Daniel had exactly Yorke’s type of wonky eye). This was just more material for bullies to make nicknames and pranks from. From all nicknames they called him, “Hunchback of Notre Dame” stands out as the harshest I can remember.
Just about anything Daniel did was mocked by other kids. I don’t think I ever knew another kid who had a harder time making it through school. Yet, not everything was hopeless for Daniel. He had friends.
The Outcasts Club admitted anyone who wanted in. We really took in just about anyone who wanted to hang out with us, no matter how weird he was. Honestly, there was some really weird people in the club, like that kid from out of town who never quite learned how to talk without breathing in-between words (or in-between letters, for that matter) and always talked about sex (or sex monsters), or that fat kid who had minor mobility problems who once brought a phone to school to charge other kids for its use (although no one ever paid for it). Why was I in the Club? That’s something for another time. The point is Daniel had a group of weird friends he belonged to, no matter how weird he was.
Even though the rest of the guys from the Club were in different classrooms, I was in the same classroom Daniel was. We would team up to do homework and school projects.
Now, when I turned 14 I got “recruited” by another group of friends (a group that would later name itself “the Tripod”) which I considered to be “cooler” than the Outcasts Club. I abandoned every single one of my old friends as soon as I got the chance. No longer would I sit next to members of the Club or be in the same homework group Daniel was in. I still remember the look he gave me whenever the teacher would tell us to form groups of three or two people and I would ignore his invitations so I could team up with the Tripod… he looked at me like someone who had been forgotten in a sinking ship, as if the rescue boat had chosen to leave him so it could rescue “cooler” people.
As the years went on he became more isolated from the rest of the kids. He would be made fun of, people would bully him, hit him, call him names, make him cry or leave the classroom to wander alone in the school hallways. I only watched. I stood by motionless, relieved as if a bomb that could’ve hit me had hit someone else instead by chance. I felt as if somehow the only thing that kept people from making fun of me was the existence of this weirder kid.
He would no longer look at me whenever it was time to make homework groups, in fact, he would not look at anyone at all. He would always choose to work alone. He stopped hanging out with the Club. He didn’t show up at the graduation ceremony. He became a ghost.
More than five years after the last time I saw him (about the day before the graduation ceremony), I ran into him at the convenience store. He was very thin (“malnourishment” thin) and taller than I remembered him to be. He was wearing a heavily worn t-shirt and was unshaved, he had isolated stumps of hair in his jaw and chin. His glare was empty, like a wandering husk. With a can of Taco (chocolate powder used to make milkshakes) in each hand, he stood silently in the paying queue.
I approached him from the back and raised my hand to say hello to him. “Hey there, Daniel, long time no see” I thought. Something stopped me from actually saying those words. When he, in his apparent boredom, turned around, he looked in my direction. His glance didn’t stop for a second, he did not recognize me, as neither had Giovanni (wait for Survivors – Part II). I wasn’t surprised, for I had changed quite a bit after the graduation ceremony.
When it was his turn to pay, the cashier asked for his name. “Daniel” he said in a boyish voice. That did surprise me. I somehow expected him to have naturally developed a more lower-pitched voice tone by now. He paid and left.
Had I done the right thing, I wondered. Should I have said hello to him and asked him about his doings? What for? To give him the illusion of friendship and then abandon him again friendless? To ask him how he was and then make up an excuse the moment he invited me to play Magic: The Gathering again? No, he had learned to survive without me or anyone else, he sure as hell didn’t need me to desert him again.
I felt pity for him. Was it “Taco milkshake night” the only “special” event he had looked forward to the whole month? Why did he look so abandoned? Was he still as unhappy as I remembered him to be when he wandered alone the school hallways? Was he wandering alone the hallways of life after the endless mocking his life had been subjected to?
I’ll never know, for I chose to be the ghost this time.