Jessica

Cedar Posts is going to take a divergent path the next couple of weeks, under the title Jessica.

This is not going to be a pleasant journey. 

I have actually struggled with telling what I know and putting it all into perspective. The words don't come easy. 

Let me start with the end. Jessica is dead, she was only 18 when she took her own life.

I'm going to tell not of her death, the details or the reasons, as you the reader I will leave that in your hands, but rather her life and the time during which got to know her.

The words may change, I may put some down only to decide later that I've told too much, or that the picture the words paint is too troubling or worse too critical. 

I'm older than her father, but that doesn't cross my mind as I watch her bound out of the passenger side of red honda that has parked too close to my Lexus SUV. 

I watch with the leering eyes of a dirty old man watching teenage girls along a South Carolina wind sweep beach during the heat of midday in August, the constant sound of the ocean and salt filling the air. 

For an instant she glances my way as she stumbles and catches herself on the right front fender of my truck. I smile, she laughs an acknowledgement that there was no harm, no foul. 

The driver of the Honda emerges I instinctively suspect boyfriend until the angry look slams my lustful daydream back to reality. Short cropped hair, auto repairman work shirt and full of hate. Jessica's boyfriend is a dike. Mean angry man hating and as I quickly notice, very controlling full blown bitch dike.

The dike, who in the months to follow I will learn is called Cat is really Katherine Elizabeth but Cat fits her.

Cat's look is pure hate, she says something to Jessica and the young girl's playfulness dissolves to stoic as Cat arms up with her pulling her away like an arresting police officer.

If close my eyes and I can still see her smile, her hand on the side of my car and her unbridled joy of her youth. Over the last few months I've visited denial, anger, pure overwhelming grief and now thankfully acceptance over the loss of someone I only met in person a dozen times but had countless exchanges with over Facebook and Twitter.  

I'm in my car waiting on Mrs Cedar at a place called In-XS a hair salon, I have the Yorkie, who sits on my knee looking out the window for all to see.  It is the Yorkie that lures Jessica to the drivers side window a few minutes later. Cat is nowhere to be seen and Jessica is a bubbling 18 year old again, 

Can I say hello? I offer that the Yorkie is very friendly. Much making over my wife's four pounds of happy fur continues until Cat rains on Jessica's fun. She grabs Jessica's hand with such force I'm temporarily thinking of saying something, but I look away.

A minute later the Honda winds up and charges down Providence Road, never to be seen again or so I thought. 

About a week later at the Harris Teeter I hear an unfamiliar voice: "Hey you're the guy with the little dog aren't you?" I'm caught off guard then it clicks Jessica from In-XS. She's with her parents and expands on "the yorkie" and how she'd love to have one. Her parents seem kind and caring as they endure my sales pitch for rescued dogs and YorkieRescue.com and Cat is nowhere is sight and Jessica seems to be all the better for that.

It would be a month maybe longer before I'd bump into Jessica again this time she's with Cat who has a grip on her arm Walmart Security taking a suspected shoplifter in for questioning. 

I'm hard to miss, but not a smile, a hello or even acknowledgment from Jessica. Cat clearly is in control, the tension is thick yet the other High School kids seem at ease. Laughing and doing what High School kids do at Chipotle after school.

I'm inside with Mrs. Cedar when I see a young man and not Jessica approach my car and leave a brown napkin under the windshield wiper.

A half hour later the napkin reads "can you email me the website for the Yorkie rescue place. Pleeeeeze! Jessica" with her gmail addy.

I'm not in the habit of emailing teenage girls. It takes me a week to respond. When I do it is from my company email with no so much as hi, just the web address: YorkieRescue.Com

A month later I get an email that says "Thank You soooo much I found a Yorkie to rescue and I'm going to pick her up in Raleigh on Saturday.

Included is a facebook link with a dozen pictures of furry cuteness. And sure enough within a week there are dozens of photos of a little Yorkie named Boo.

Boo lived about five months before she found him dead in her parents back yard. During this time I have no contact with Jessica, a random facebook post would show up in my newsfeed. All seemed well, but the photo of her and Cat seemed off.

Somehow I sensed not all was well, not that they didn't look like an openly gay couple, just that they didn't seem to click. Her facebook posts stopped after her RIP Boo photo.

A month later she posted a comment on a photo of my two labs. I commented back and a day later a massive long email showed up.

"I need some advice and I don't trust my friends or family"...... the rest of the email I'll just truncate to these facts, Cat had killed her dog, her relationship with Cat began as a dare, and she felt compelled to have their relationship out of peer pressure, in order to fit in with her friends. She had a "real boyfriend" but everyone hated him. But Cat was abusive and controlling, Jessica says she had once broke off the relationship only to be beaten so badly by Cat that she missed nearly two weeks of school. She didn't want the cops or her parents involved but wanted to end the relationship with Cat somehow. But she feared rejection from her friends and didn't want to be alone.

The last part was a cry for help that I didn't recognize "I've thought about killing myself to be with Boo" but can't afford to buy enough drugs lol"

More....

(Cedar Update: The more never came. I ran out of words. Now ten years later I'm still haunted by what I saw, what I know, what I should have done. When I was in high school there were no gays, no dikes, no trans, no non binary or any other bull shit. Just normal boys, who liked girls, and girls who like boys. The greatest peer pressure in high school was to "do it" and then tell about it. What have we done to our children?)

I took the random posts and put them here in one place year it happened. I have photos of Jessica and Boo and of Cat. I will not post. But I can't delete them. I didn't know Jessica and might have spoken to her parents once in the grocery store. I've never seen an obituary, didn't attend a funeral or memorial service.  

I should have done something. We all need to do something.