How I Remembered Persephone
C. Haven

1
Growing up, I was a shy, quiet excuse for a pretty girl. Of course, I didn’t know I was pretty. A curious hybrid of Asia and Ireland, I inherited the best of both worlds and took everything for granted.
I lived with my parents, Rob and Angela McFadden. I had three brothers, one of which I didn’t know existed until I was older and understood.
Being the youngest of two (three) boys, I was raised with wrestling and running barefoot through mud, chasing garter snakes and knocking down beehives with sticks that looked long enough until you realized ( as you ran from a horde of angry bees) that it hadn’t been.
Rob Jr., or Robby, as we called him, was the oldest (second oldest) in our family. He had very handsome features, as did we all, and all of the girls followed him in school. He played on every sports team and people looked up to him a great deal. Robby McFadden, that’s the name to remember.
Then there was Marley. He was only a year older than me, and he was the smart one. We called him Mars for short, or Mars Bar if we wanted to make him mad, which was often hard to do. Robby and I made a game of it: Making Mars Mad, or the M game.
Mom usually made us stop as soon as we had just begun. That’s the kind of boy Mars was, he would ignore you until he had had enough, then he told Mom. Not like Robby, who would pitch it back at you until either you hit a nerve and he punched you, or he got bored of arguing and punched you. Either way, Robby and Mars reacted differently to deliberate annoyance, which was what Dad called, “pissing each other off on purpose”. But if you said that, you got smacked.
I was the baby of the family, and also the girl, so I had my options. If Mars told Mom, I could strategically burst into tears. But I could also almost always get away with hitting Robby back. It all depended and the intensity of my boredom and if I felt like bruising.
We grew up in Montesano, Washington, which, if you didn’t know, is a whole lot of nothing. But I liked it there. I liked racing my brothers alongside the creek and the trips into town and the orange popsicles we licked in the summertime, the sticky juice melting and running down our sweaty arms.
Our neighbors had a farm, and I could go over anytime I wanted and ask Mrs. Floret if I could ride her horse Splashes. She never said no until Mr. Floret caught Robby and a couple of his friends throwing rocks at his cows. Then whenever I came to the door, she closed the curtains and pretended she wasn’t home. I knew she was in, though. The curtains were lace.
I didn’t make friends at school. The boys thought I was weird when I asked to join in the foot races or play basketball with them. The girls didn’t like me because I was different.
It wasn’t until seventh grade that the boys started treating me differently, although the girls only went from bad to worse. They spread nasty rumors about me and said I lived on a farm and slept in mud. That wasn’t true; the farm was a couple fields over and we didn’t own it. And not once have I ever slept in mud.
In eighth grade, the boys whistled at me in the halls and the girls found excuses to pull at my dark brown hair. My books were knocked from my arms, invisible ankles tripped me on my way to the backs of the classrooms. Then there were names. My least favorite was Handbasket. Helena Handbasket. I couldn’t walk down the hallway without hearing, “Bloody Hell in a Handbasket, there she goes!”
I hated school. I lived for the moment when the bell would ring and I would be free to climb to the back of the bus and wait in reverie until my brothers and I hustled off, Robby waving to his football friends and Mars chortling with his nerd mates. It made me want to die.
Over dinner, when my parents asked about school, I was popular and had lots of friends. I wasn’t failing math and gym and people didn’t call me Helena Handbasket.
It was an easy lie; Robby taught me the art of lying when I was young.
“You gotta believe it, Helena,” he would say, “lie with confidence. Act it out! Be who you want to be, but be them with belief!”
And I did. And since Robby was a junior and Mars was a freshman in high school, I could lie all I wanted. They didn’t see what happened at the middle school.
It wasn’t until ninth grade that I made my first friend. The boys were still whistling after me and waving money at me in the halls, and the girls were of course worse than ever before, but not because they called me names behind my back or spread rumors, but because they ignored me entirely. Even the humiliation was better than being non-existent. I went from target to invisible over the summer. And it broke my fourteen year old heart.
School had only been going a month when she arrived in my homeroom.
Her hair was pink. Bright, neon pink. I could see the bleach blonde beneath it. It was long and cut in choppy layers, and the top stuck out in every direction. An occasional braid was snaked around her hair and I could see tiny pigtails poking out from the top like antennae.
She was wearing a bright green dress with polka dot gold leggings and white go-go boots with unicorns and cheese doodled on them in Sharpie. Her shoelaces were leopard print.
Under her dress was a plaid tank top and a quarter sleeve shirt that looked like it had been cut apart and fastened back together with blue safety pins.
She had three earrings in one ear and five in the other. Her eyes were big and brown and surrounded in an ocean of purple eye shadow and neon blue eye liner. Her eyelashes looked fake.
She held a zebra striped backpack with pins of Bob Marley and penguins on the front and rubber bracelets ran up to her elbows. Every finger had a ring and she wore three different necklaces and a tiny silver stud in the right side of her nose.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. All my life I had done whatever I could to fit in, and this girl was standing at the front of the classroom looking like a rainbow had thrown up on her. But that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was that she was looking at us like we were the weird ones.
“Class, this is Persephone Hill. She’s going to be joining us this homeroom period.”
I think the class was too shocked to speak. Nobody quite knew what to think. This was Montesano High. We all tried to be someone we weren’t, and God forbid anyone being themselves. Who was this Persephone girl trying to be?
“I’m afraid the only seat available is back there,” the teacher motioned back by me. “Is that alright?”
“Perfect.” Persephone broke into a smile that reminded me of sunshine after a storm.
She nearly floated back to where I sat and plopped down in the desk beside me.
“I’m Persephone, but you can call me Seph for short.” She offered me a decorated hand. Her nails were painted highlighter green and bitten to the quick. “You’re really pretty.”
The class was silent. They knew I was pretty, but had always ridiculed me for it. My green, almond shaped eyes and long, voluptuous brown hair had been bad until now.
I accepted the hand. It felt so good to be welcomed by another person my age!
All that day Persephone followed me, bounding at my side like an anxious dog, tongue hanging out, tail wagging a hundred miles an hour, doting on my every word.
At first I was honored, then suspicious. She couldn’t be for real. Somehow, this was a setup. Nobody treated me like this. Nobody even talked to me. How did this walking rainbow come to be, following me to my classes before skipping off to her own? Didn’t she know the world was a bad place to be? Had no one told her Life At School was humiliating?
My mind was swarmed with these questions all through my classes. I couldn’t concentrate, and neither could the rest of the school.
The entire student population was in an uproar over Persephone. How she was upsetting the balance, she couldn’t be a real student, did she have any redeeming self respect? Didn’t she care what the Higher Ups thought of her? Seniors, for example, the big guns of the school, like Robby. Or the Cliques, with their labels and groups and strict unspoken rules for discrimination? Wasn’t she worried about fitting in?
“It’s just for the attention,” I heard Alicia Nicole Ramsey saying. She was the queen bee of the clique of preps that ruled the ninth grade. She was the diva, the fashionista, the one every girl wanted to be. Cheerleader, blonde, and at the top of the food chain for freshman high school students. Watch out.
I envied that girl, just like everyone else. She had it all: money, clothes, the car, the boyfriend.
Of course, like every other girl in Monte High, she wanted Robby. By now he was not only a senior and the “hottest” guy in school, but quarterback of the football team and ‘a real stud.’
You’d think his reputation would have gotten me some credit. Think again. It didn’t help that we were both good looking, and he was popular.
It wasn’t that Robby didn’t try to win me friends, he did. But the girls smiled and talked to me when he was around, and ignored me when he wasn’t. The only reason Alicia Ramsey had ever spoken to me was to give me a love-note for Robby. Then she told me not to read it, or it would melt.
So by the end of the day, (that fateful day!) I had suddenly become popular. Not in a good way, and not because of me, but because Persephone Hill, the freak new girl, had befriended me for no apparent reason other than I sat by her in homeroom and she thought I was pretty.
I wasn’t complaining. So far, Persephone Call-Me-Seph Hill had gotten me more attention that I’d ever had, even when I was a target for being naturally pretty.
As I slammed my locker shut and tried to conceal a smile at all of the stares from kids in the halls, I heard an ear splitting shout of, “HELENA!”
No one had ever called my name in the hallway without adding Handbasket to the end. I beamed as Persephone came galloping up to me, pink and blonde hair streaming out behind her, a wide smile displaying perfect white teeth, her cat eyes scrunched up in excitement.
“How do you get home?”
“I ride the bus,” I answered smoothly.
I thought Persephone was going to have a heart attack. “Me too! Sit with me!”
That was the best bus ride home I had ever had. We sat in the fourth row, towards the front, even in front of Robby and his two jock friends, and six rows before Marley and his geek friend Harold.
We talked and laughed, just like normal girls. Persephone even liked walking in the woods and reading, like me.
I could have listened to Persephone talk for hours. Her voice was pure magic, and she had been everywhere from New York City to the cliffs of Dublin.
“We, my Madre and I, moved here from San Francisco. You’d love it there, Helena, it’s beautiful!”
She called her mother Madre, because when she had learned to speak, they lived in Mexico, on the run from her mysterious father’s gang.
“He wasn’t a bad man, Hel, but you’ve got to understand: he wanted my mother to lay on a silken futon and lounge about all day in the finest clothing and dine with him under the stars on the most expensive wine and exotic fruits and cheese.”
“So?” It sounded pretty good to me.
“My Madre is an artiste! She has to be free, Hel.”
She told me how her cunning and beautiful mother had tricked her selfish father into thinking she had “taken ill” and escaping with Persephone under her shawl and climbing three stories down on a rose trellis before making a run for the guard gate and poisoning the guard there so that she could escape.
“And he’s been looking for us ever since,” she concluded grimly. “That man is just so in love with her! And who wouldn’t be? But he’s gone too far. My Madre is a free spirit, not to be caged and clothed in silk and fur and waited upon. She’s a woman of liberation!”
It was Persephone’s words that lured me in in the beginning, I think. She had a way of making everyday happenings like some higher power had dropped some magic nectar on earth and that event had occurred, just for us. She drew me in with her exotic flair and her piercings and the clothes that would have made anyone else look like a circus clown on drugs, but somehow made her a goddess of color and prints. I was absolutely mesmerized by her.
Of course, we had our differences. She wore makeup and fixed her hair and loved clothes and shopping. But she wore what she wanted to wear, and didn’t care what anyone thought. Words like ‘popular’ and ‘accepted’ and ‘fitting in’ didn’t mean a thing to Persephone Hill.
“Here’s what I think, Hel,” she said (and I didn’t mind it when she called me Hel), “If people can’t accept you for who you are, then they’re not people worth knowing.”
How she could think like that, I didn’t know. What I did know was that I had just made a friend. A real, true, honest-to-God friend. Someone to have sleepovers with and stay up late and talk about boys and go shopping with and do each others hair and makeup. I was so excited I didn’t want to get off the bus. I wanted to stay on with Seph and see where she lived. I thought it must be someplace absolutely magical, with glass ponds and fountains of sparkling crystal water.
But I got off the bus first, and walked backwards down the road to my house, watching Seph wave back to me like an elegant swan about to descend to the Heavens.

Dear Winston,

Today I met the most beautiful

girl in the world. I think she’s actually a Goddess in disguise, because no one in the school will acknowledge her existence, and yet she’s just breathtaking!
Her name is Helena McFadden, and I have the honor of sitting next to her in two classes! And she has become my first friend at Montesano High. So far, there has been no sun kissed golden hills, but there will be. I’m sure of it. Yours till Niagra Falls, Persephone Unique Hill

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.04.2010

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