Woozle/Jenny/story

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you're the magic that holds the sky up from the ground you're the breath that blows these cool winds 'round trading places with an angel now −BF5

This page is about my friend Jenny. I only really knew her for about two years, but she completely changed my life. I learned a lot from her, I learned a lot from the mistakes I made as her friend, and I learned a lot when I had to deal with her not being there anymore.

Jenny Meets Woozle

We lived in the same academic suburban neighborhood, but didn't really meet until shortly before I changed schools (from DA to CFS). Our parents knew each other from the University, though my dad & hers were in different departments. Our street numbers were almost the same -- 2719 versus 2715 -- but on different streets about 3 blocks from each other. We were born the same year, 1965 (The Year That Was), but about six months apart.

I think the first time I remember recognizing her as an individual rather than as one of the sea of faces belonging to children of people my parents knew or some other such broad category was when I was with my mother at the Museum of Life & Science and we ran into her with her mother. I thought nothing of it except that while the the two moms were talking, she was looking at me. There were radio signals going out. I could feel them coming across, but had such low expectations as regards to friendship from interesting people that I filed it along with my other idle people-fantasies. This would have been the summer of 1979 or so.

In the fall of 1979, I changed schools. I was in ninth grade, J still in 8th, so we didn't meet much except that we shared a bus. I remember occasionally trading jokes with her on the bus, talking about various books on occasion. I remember seeing Tigger with her, though Tigger doesn't remember seeing me. I don't specifically recall seeing C or E during this time; C kept pretty quiet, I guess, and E rode a different bus.

My family visited Mexico for the month of August, 1980; I remember thinking about J as a potential friend, but didn't think it very likely. She wasn't the only one I was thinking about either, which probably shows how much I was paying attention.

In the Fall of 1980, J & C & E all graduated to the Upper School. I don't think we interacted all that much right away; in fact, I can't remember what drew us together. Odd. I'd never even thought to try and remember that. Too painful, maybe? Her first note to me is dated October 15 and came after (what I recall as) many notes in the other direction (a typical pattern for me). So I had to have started inundating her with notes pretty early on in the school year. (I remember them being generally in a surrealistic humor sort of vein. I signed them "The Mysterious Person Who Writes Stupid Things on Blank Pieces of Paper and Puts Them in People's Lockers", aka TMPWWSToBPoPaPTiPL, so maybe that will give you some idea.)

For awhile it was the four of us -- "The Goresum Foursum", a name inherited from two years earlier when Tigger had been the fourth member -- Jenny, C, E, and me. We would hang out together on the deck for lunch and in between classes (n.b. the final shot of Jenny in the photo section is on the deck, looking away from the building). We weren't exactly an in-group, but we didn't fell like outcasts. J and C seemed to have this sort of special status where there were a lot of people (out of all 130 or so students in the high school...) who quietly respected them; then again, CFS was never the kind of place where you could get away with systematically excluding anyone if they didn't want it.

I'm not quite sure about the order of things here, but the following things happened at around this time.

Oh, little jennifer, I’d give a penny for What you’ve got on your mind It seems like most of the time you’re lying here dreaming −Jimmy Ibbotson (lyrics)

J and I decided we wanted to get together after school, to continue unfinished conversations from school in a less interruptable environment. We were both too embarrassed to mention each other to our parents, so we opted for a quasi-secret meeting place in the woods up the street (about 1/4 mile from both our houses), which apparently had somehow become known as "Egypt" in Jenny's family. (This is now the site of Someone had started to build a residential subdivision there and ran out of money, so there were all these curbs and cleared areas with trees just starting to come back. Sort of a post-civilization, Planet of the Apes scene.

(this part of the essay still under construction)

Jenny Is Missing

well there's always someone you cannot replace −The Grays

1983. I was trying again to integrate myself into the academic world, mostly failing miserably (sometimes succeeding moderately for brief stretches), and generally hating life. It was a Thursday, and I had almost decided to bicycle out to school and, despite fearing her reaction, tell her that I still loved her no matter what. (Never mind whether she thought I was too immature because I probably was, never mind if she never wanted to talk to me ever again -- I just really appreciated who she was, and would support her efforts to be herself to the best of my ability given the opportunity, and didn't want her to think that I had lost interest in her and was staying away because I preferred to. I wanted her to know that she had a supporter if she needed one. I probably wouldn't have been all that eloquent, but it's all true.)

The next day, we (myself and family) were packing to go to the beach when I got a call from C (with whom I hadn't spoken in months -- more about this later, I suppose) asking if we'd seen or heard anything from Jenny or had any idea where she might be.

...but you're hiding something deeper you can't face as you wander around, just feeling out of place. −The Grays (ibid.)

Because of the suddenness and the coincidental timing (just as we were about to go out of town -- and nobody saying "gee, maybe we should hold off on this"), I was eventually able to convince myself that it was one of those things that happens every so often when everyone's all worried and concerned about something but it turns out soon after to have been nothing to worry about. I didn't know what had happened, but it couldn't have been that serious. Nothing serious ever happened in my life. People didn't die, let alone kill themselves. Not for real. Certainly the melodrama of someone killing themselves and rotting in the woods for the better part of a year before their bones were discovered was simply out of the realm of possibility. Especially not my best friend Jenny.

So I went to the beach for the weekend, and when we came back she was still missing.

Jenny Is Still Missing

Durham Morning Herald

It was when we got back from the beach and heard she was still missing that I got on the bike and went out hunting for a couple of hours, passing within yards (how many yards? I still don't know exactly where...) of where she was later found, possibly even then still alive. Though I find this possibility highly unlikely, I still like to torture myself with it every now and then -- that and the fact that I almost visited her at school the last day of her life, to tell her that I loved her.

I had been writing her a letter. Since I couldn't deliver it -- part of our "agreement" being that I was not to write her anymore -- it got kind of long. It got much longer very quickly right about then, and even more depressing than it had already been. (I don't have it with me right now, so I'm going on memory.)

The things about that summer and the following year that stick in my mind are (1) the endless speculation -- she often went for early morning walks unaccompanied; what if some stranger had attacked her? someone thought they saw her getting onto a bus... (2) setting these deadlines in my mind -- if you don't show up by the time school starts up, if you don't show up by Christmas... and then the timing of them finding the body just in time for graduation. I think the deadlines were for when I would give up and kill myself, but I don't remember for certain. (3) The strange, frightening dreams I started having around that time, and which have never really stopped.

She would have been a senior that year, and the school set aside an empty chair at the ceremony. She had always been terrified of her frequent inability to concentrate on her schoolwork -- and now she was being graduated (albeit symbolically) despite having missed over a year. I'm sure they would have graduated her for real if it would have brought her back, and that's part of what I don't think she ever realized: that her problems just weren't as huge as they seemed to her. Or maybe they just looked smaller from the outside. (But that's getting into the whole issue of why she did it, which is a separate discussion.)

Dreams last for so long Even after you're gone −Jewel

Now she's the "Jenny Hall Teacher's Fund" or something like that. Another memorialized dead person.

But you don't understand -- she was my FRIEND.

The End

I don't remember the name of the boy who found her; somebody told me, but I was in too much of a daze to remember or make notes. When she disappeared, I went looking for her on bicycle myself, touring the few places we had walked together and then (for lack of any better ideas) the places I used to go by myself. On the way back from one of these I passed through the intersection of 751 and Woodburn Road, and went right past her. I have a vague memory of dismissing a "dead animal" smell as I passed by -- thinking that it was just crazy to imagine she would actually be dead, much less that I could be going right past her.