My school had only 400 students, grades seven through twelve. I hung out with the nerdy band bunch, and though we were ostracized and ridiculed by the beautiful and popular, we weren't treated like a small handful of students, the poorest of the poor from a dirt poor town. One of these kids was a girl named Trish. She was one year younger than me, a seventh grader, with a halo of frizzy blonde hair and watery eyes. I never heard her say a word. She sat alone in the lunchroom, never eating, never bringing or buying a lunch, never cracking a book or a smile, a pale goddess of the poor. She sat and stared into space, and I found myself watching her over the course of the year, wondering why she never ate. These days I realize she was too poor to even bring a peanut butter sandwich, but in my eighth grade mind that kind of poor was for people in books, not in my school, not across from me at lunch.

I saw Diane and her pack of rabid cheerleaders torment Trish. Diane wore feathered roach clips in her hair and her older boyfriend drove a Camaro. She poked Trish in the back with math protractors and tripped her on her way out of the lunchroom. I wanted to protect Trish, to jump in between them, to grab Trish and run to the office, but I never did. I never did anything. Trish never cried, never ran to the office. She picked up her books each time, and walked away, eyes watery, back ramrod straight.

That Christmas I made homemade cards for my friends. I wrote funny poems and taped a candy cane inside each one. I applied glue to envelopes and sprinkled it with colored glitter. I made one of these for Trish, too, with a cotton ball snowman on the cover and these words inside:

Dear Trish, I am sorry that everyone is so mean to you. I would like to be your friend. I like your hair. Sincerely, TechnoLemurian.

I kept that card for a week, up until the day before Christmas Eve, our last day of school before vacation. I kept it in my blue canvas book bag, at the very bottom, under my math text, where no one could see it, and waited for a moment when I would find Trish alone. But that moment never came, and I was too afraid to slip it inside her books, or inside her locker where others left her mean notes.

Trish didn't return to school after vacation. I never found out why. Maybe her family moved. Maybe she died of loneliness or malnutrition or beatings from her father. I wish I knew. I wish I gave her that card.