Remembering Shirley

Once upon a time, long long ago, I attended an elementary school. In my last year (grade 8) our teacher was this real asshat named Larry, so, to say the least, this class was a little dysfunctional. In that class were two sisters named Susan and Shirley. They were twins, but you would never have known they were related. Susan was a big girl, powerful and rotund who wanted to fight me on a number of occasions, while Shirley was slender and mild and quiet. Susan had dark brown short hair and skin problems while Shirley had long blonde hair and milky smooth skin. After Christmas that year, Shirley was absent. She was absent more than even I was throughout the year to that point, but this stretched on for some time. We asked Susan where Shirley was and all she would say is that she was sick. When she had been away for nearly a month Susan said she was living somewhere else. About a month and a half passed and Shirley returned to school. We were all very nice to her because we thought she was really sick, but after a few days we could see that she was healthy physically. We all noticed she had changed somehow, but we didn't know how. A few weeks later Shirley overdosed. It shook the school, the staff, our class. We all felt so terrible for Susan. As closure our class was bused to a funeral home to say goodbye to Shirley. I remember how spent her mother looked and I remember how red Susan's eyes were from crying. Thinking back to Shirley's return to school I remembered how out of it she was. She had a difficult time communicating, she moved in slow motion, her eyes were glazed over, she was depressed. How our teacher didn't see that she was stoned out of her mind is beyond me, but I did allude to his personality earlier. Rumours were flying. We heard she was hanging out with bikers, that she was prostituting, that it was suicide, that it was an accident, that she had a much older boyfriend. It was hard to know what to think. Susan became very quiet after that. Everyone was very nice to her, but I think she just wanted life to be normal. Later in the year this guy who was called Hairlip called her a cow after school. I called him out for it and we fought. Our teacher Larry saw us fighting and came out to talk to us. He let us fight with the stipulation that it be a fair fight, but I think he just wanted Hairlip to kick my ass. The next day Larry yelled at me and said I was a dirty fighter, but I think it was because I won the fight and he was disappointed and needed to vent. Later on Susan came up to me and thanked me. It meant the world to me at the time.