We called her Spacegirl.

Her real name was Megan Daniels, but nobody actually called her that. She’d been Spacegirl since Grade 2. She was the kind of kid who stuck out in the crowd with her long red hair, ghostly pale skin and coke bottle glasses. For as long as I’d known her, Spacegirl had been quiet. She didn’t like to be around us. She didn’t play with us when we were kids, she didn’t even talk much.

Most of the time, she’d find somewhere to sit, far away from everyone else. Then she’d open up her little notebook and scribble inside of it. Sometimes she wrote poems, sometimes she drew. But she was always off on her own little world. Nowadays, I understand why we targeted her. She was different, and she was alone. That doesn’t justify any of it, but kids can be cruel. I remember that it was Sasha Brown who told me that Spacegirl was retarded because her Mother was on drugs. She probably just made that up. But we all believed it. She had always been the worst towards Spacegirl, and she kept that up until the end.

It all started in Grade 5 when Sasha took her notebook.

It had been raining that day, so we’d had an indoor recess. Spacegirl sat in the corner at her desk, eyes focused on her notebook as she methodically worked on a drawing. Sasha and I had been sitting nearby at our desks, and we simply just watched her do her thing.

“I can’t believe they let that retard sit in with us.” Sasha murmured, “Look at her… Why do they even let them in schools? They aren’t gonna learn anything.”
“Better than leaving her at home with her crackhead Mom.” Said Tanya Evrett. She and I weren’t exactly friends, but she sat close to Sasha and I. “My Dad says he sees a different car in front of her house every day. He says that she lets boys come and they pay her so they can have S-E-X.” None of us could actually say the dreaded S word at the time. Sex was still a terrible unknown thing, and we all had been raised to believe that nobody decent would ever do it.

Spacegirl paused, and her eyes darted away from her book, to look at us. I can only imagine she’d heard us. Sasha just stared right back at her.