Forever Young

I was marked "absent" for my first day of the sixth grade. I was eleven years old and looking forward to my last year of elementary school, positive that THIS year would be different! My fifth grade year had been fraught with trouble; my teacher wasn't so nice, and one boy had suddenly decided I was one worth tormenting. My grades, normally all above average, plummeted.

My older brother was listening to "Fly Robin, Fly" while I went into my room the day before school was to start, and I tried to take off my Sunday dress. I struggled with it, eager to get back into my designer jeans with Gloria Vanderbilt's name on the back pocket. Unfortunately my struggles and lack of vision when the dress was stuck on my head combined into a cacophony of events. I weaved into a table that held a perfume bottle which was swept off and onto the floor. The crash sent me whirling around, dress still covering my head, and I lost my balance. My foot landed squarely on broken glass. I howled like some sort of possessed banshee, and my mother came running.

When I returned to school it was on crutches. A new boy was there, and his name was Kevin. He was quiet and uncommonly skinny. He had straw-blond hair and a giant mole on the left side of his face. He wasn't an unattractive boy, but neither was he handsome. He watched from afar as I struggled to stay "cool" when I felt anything but.

Brent was popular in my small town, no way around it. He wasn't just popular with my classmates, he was popular with EVERYONE. His name and/or picture were almost always in the local paper, his father owned a car dealership, and his mother ran every charity organization in town. Brent had silvery blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and a wide smile that only I seemed to know hid an evil personality. He took real joy in my emotional pain. I saw it on his face when he got other kids riled up, and I was bombarded by him daily until I thought I'd go crazy. I kept wondering: why has Brent done this to me? He has everything. People love him, he's good looking, he's rich. Why has he singled me out? My mother knew a little about my troubles, but like all adults of the time, she only told me to "suck it up." She didn't understand what this torment was doing to my soul.

Only one boy didn't give into the pressure, and it was Kevin. He didn't talk to me much, but he would look at me from afar, never approach me. One day another girl, said Kevin liked me. I did what girls were supposed to do if an unpopular boy liked them: I wrinkled my nose and said, "ewww, I don't like HIM. He's gross!" What I didn't know until after the words were out was that Kevin was standing directly behind me, and I saw the wounded look on his face. I understood it, and I couldn't believe I'd been the one to put it there. It made me feel worse than ever, so I did what most eleven-year-olds do. I ignored the whole event. I would look at Kevin every once in a while after that, and I saw him still looking at me from afar, so even though I'd crushed him the way others crushed me, it seemed he still cared. I wondered how dumb he could be.

In March my mother was knocked over with the knowledge that something was very wrong with me when she received a letter telling her I was failing. It was then that she sat me down and finally understood what was happening to me. She knew Brent's parents were having serious problems and should have divorced long ago, she said. She speculated that Brent zeroed in on me specifically because of our long connection. To him, she explained, I might be a symbol of an earlier time when his family life was happy and his parents weren't intent on hurting each other. She felt I was the fallout of his parents' cruel behavior. Well great. It was nice to finally have a glimmer of understanding about why Brent was doing this to me, but it sure wouldn't make him stop.

When I was in the seventh grade, my brother be-bopped to KC and the Sunshine Band while I struggled to lift myself up from the stigma Brent had left for me. I tried to join basketball, but the girls were just too mean. I didn't want to deal with such cruelty anymore and I didn't have to, so I switched basketball for speech. I found my niche. In speech class I discovered that I shone brightly. I was a clear speaker and reveled in writing and presenting all sorts of speeches, and when we had tryouts for the spring play, there were other girls begging me not to try out for the roles THEY wanted! It was a great feeling, being good at something-excelling, even. Through all my trials and tribulations, Kevin was a quiet presence. I was always aware of him in the background, and every once in a while someone would tell me "Kevin likes you," but that would be the extent of it. He wasn't a stalker. He would just be there once in a while, looking and smiling. Sometimes I remembered to smile back.

By the time I was in the ninth grade-and disco was a mere memory-my acting and writing talents saved me. I was known for being "the good one in the school plays" and I was on the newspaper staff. I was also in band-I played the drums and actually got to play the quad toms during marching season. I had a boyfriend that year and my life was full. Brent's ability to control what others thought of me waned, although he still tried. He would look at me with contempt and say cruel things, but no one seemed to pay him much attention, anymore. I felt altruistic enough to smile at him.

Kevin, in high school, began to run with "the cowboys." I'm from Oklahoma, so the group of cowboys was mildly popular and always fun. One of my best friends became FFA Sweetheart-Future Farmers of America-so we began to "run with the cowboys" a little, ourselves. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I ever got close to Kevin Kreiling.

I had boyfriends off and on, a couple of them from the "cowboy" group. By that spring, though, I was footloose and free, feeling the "winds of change" coursing through my body at the thought of adulthood and independence. Brent's years of torment were a distant memory best forgotten. But Kevin became a friend. Through our friendship, I discovered what a nice guy he was. He was quiet, unassuming, and just nice through and through. At eighteen he was still skinny and his hair was still straw-blond. His wire-rimmed glasses hid blue/green eyes that sparkled with a kindness few ever truly understood. One night Kevin and I somehow ended up in his pickup truck, alone together. We talked and laughed as we "dragged main," and he mentioned his years-long crush on me. He talked about it lightly, almost too softly for me to hear. Sitting next to Kevin in his truck, knowing the goodness of his heart, I began to feel something for him, this sweet, quiet young man who always looked at me from afar. I knew he still cared, something I'd always taken for granted. I tried to hint the way girls will, but he merely looked at me somberly. I was a bit confused, a little crushed. But I moved on in my life and thought about him only sporadically here and there. In hindsight, I wonder if he thought I was just "playing" with him that night. I was a bit of a flirt in those days, so perhaps he thought I was only filling time, doing what I do when I flirt. That really wasn't it, though. I sensed in him something special.


* * *

Years later I attended my twentieth class reunion. I was eager and curious to see some from my graduating class of 1984, to dance once more to "My Sharona" and laugh at yearbook pictures with our curling-iron hair and mullets.

I thought about Kevin Kreiling over the years. I even tried "googling" him a few times with no results, which confused me-who can't be googled? So he was one I wanted to see, was curious about. When I arrived it was surreal. Boys-turned-men and girls-turned-women since we had last seen each other, and Brent was very, very nice to me. He's a bank vice president in Colorado. It seems the years have mellowed him, but I can never forget what he did to an innocent little girl who did nothing to deserve his torment. Sure, it was a long, long time ago. But not in my little-girl heart; in the depths of who I am, it was yesterday. So I gritted my teeth and did my best to be civil, but was it ever hard, made harder by the fact that we all seemed to gravitate more towards our childhood friends instead of the high school ones. And he was a part of my childhood. I couldn't help sniping at him every once in a while and he'd narrow his eyes and stare at me, then attempt more niceties. I knew and he knew.

I asked about Kevin Kreiling. "Oh, didn't you know?" One of my old classmates widened her eyes. "He died a few years after we graduated. He became some sort of rescue worker and died in the water, trying to save a little girl." Shock waves ran through my body. Of course. Why I couldn't google him. He wasn't around for the technology age. He is forever young.

How fitting that he died trying to save someone. It was very in-keeping with what I knew of him. That night his picture was on a flower-covered table of our banquet room, next to the picture of a girl we lost to a car wreck. I went over and stared into his senior portrait and I grieved. He was someone I could have known, should have known. I wondered what could have been if he'd taken me up on those hints so many years ago. I wasn't ready then, for any long-term relationship. Maybe he knew that. Maybe he thought he could find me when I was. Maybe he didn't care, I don't know. I'll never know.

To me he's that little boy I first saw across the street when I was on crutches. He stared at me through those wire-rimmed glasses but said nothing. I guess I thought he'd always be there after that, gazing at me from across the street. Wherever he is, I want to think he knows my heart and realizes he's embedded in it. His face in my mind reminds me that we don't have forever to tell others how we feel. We have today.