Breaking Kim

“Look who decided to disgust us with their presence,” someone mumbled as Kim hurried into the classroom; giggles made their way around the room.

Blushing, Kim faced the teacher, “I’m sorry, really I am, I was―”

“Save it Kimberly, I don’t want to hear it. One more instance and I’ll have you out of this class. Take your seat,” Mrs. Williams growled from her desk. Mrs. Williams was a stout woman who never had a kind word to say about anyone. Kim couldn’t help but to smile at the teacher’s resemblance to a good old grizzly bear. Making her way to her third row, last seat, Kim kept her head down, careful not to make eye contact when her classmates and their glares.

New to town as of a month ago, Kim Hess and her family had made the transition from a small town in Texas to big town Chicago. She didn’t know why people didn’t take to her the way people back home had. She didn’t look much different than the rest of the kids, being a slender, five foot six, brunette. She supposed it could be because she talked a little different than they did, but in all honesty she thought they talked funny too. A low town country girl didn’t quite make the mix of a crowd of city slickers.

Hiding behind her books and schoolwork, Kim stayed clear of everyone’s way, but nothing kept people from finding some way to humiliate her. Tripping her when she wasn’t paying attention to where she was going. Putting signs on her locker that said every colorful word they could muster up. Coughing or mooing when she would pass by a crowd. The list never ended.

When someone had spray painted her locker to say “Cow’s Not Aloud”, the principal stepped in. This only made things worse, considering it added “Tattle Tale” to her list of name’s to be called, even though she never “tattled” on anybody.

Her parents, busy with six other children, weren’t much of a help to their oldest child. They asked her after the first day of school how she liked it, she faked a fine, and they never brought it up again. Kim guessed she’d have to face the eleventh grade blues alone. But when two months had passed, and things weren’t any better, Kim started to panic. What if they kept it up? Or worse, what if they never stopped? Alone. She was all alone.

Lunch was peaceful at least. Every day she sat by an oak tree, nose deep into her latest book. She couldn’t say she minded being alone, but she minded the way she didn’t fit in. She smiled sadly. How did she expect to fit into a city town in cowboy boots and flannel shirts? Changing her appearance didn’t help her: she still talked the same. At night she would stand in front of the mirror, with a tape recorder, taping different ways to talk. But all sounded ridiculous. She hated who she was.

By winter, Kim was thinking life couldn’t be any more miserable. The other kids continued to harass her on any level they saw fit. Rumors flew at alarming speed about her; some so incredulous, she smiled while wondered what idiot had come up with it.

Slowly, Kim began to fade into inexistence. If she didn’t talk, stayed out of people’s way, and pretended she didn’t exist, everyone else did her the same honor.

Her parents couldn’t quite understand. They made lots of friends; some were even the parents of the kids who humiliated her at school. Plastering the fakest smile she could to her parents every time she was around them, no one could guess her pain. She hated it. The town, the people, the weather: all of it, she hated it. No, no one could feel her pain.

Until three months later, her parents, her siblings, and the kids who had made her life so miserable, stood around her cold white body. They stood around her coffin, to burying a seventeen year old.

Can you feel her pain now?