Heathers, or Veronica Passing

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  1. I wasn't one of the cool kids.

    I was an outcast, a freak, and I told myself I liked it that way.

    Maybe I did. There are words other than depression, although they sometimes come hand in hand.

    Introversion.

    Sincerity?

    Or am I being judgmental?

    But a decade or so ago, one of the cheerleaders died. Twenty years after high school, twenty years after I last saw her. We weren't friends, but we had a couple classes together.

    She was blonde and blue-eyed and beautiful and bubbly and fit, and every Friday she and the others were in their jail-bait uniforms because what good is an underage teenage girl if you can't sexualize her for the foobaw dads to spank themselves silly over.

    I'm pretty sure I spanked myself silly over her on more than one occasion, but what goes on in private stays in private, at least until the statute of limitations runs out.

    There was no crime, just a lonely boy in his room with a tube of lotion.

    So she died, and a few years passed, and I got word that she'd died, and I looked up her obit which someone shelled out to make "perpetual," but none of the usual clues were there.

    Died after a long illness means cancer.

    Died unexpectedly means suicide. Or a car accident maybe.

    Overdose.

    The thing to look for is the "in lieu of flowers" requests, they'll always tell you what really happened, but hers didn't have any.

    Like the reasons she treated me and the other freaks like human beings, it remained a mystery to me for years.

    I remember, I think I remember, maybe I remember a certain sadness in those lovely blue eyes. Dead before forty, was she secretly one of us?

    Did I just admit to struggling with depression?

    Well, that should have been obvious by now, but I'll never be diagnosed, I ain't that stupid.

    And another reunion rolled around, and I finally got the courage to ask if anyone who knew would PM me because she was just such a nice person, a Veronica amongst the Heathers, but Veronica was a bit of a bitch too, especially at the end of the movie.

    How did her movie end?

    The flu.

    Influenza.

    The best of all of them, the one who would talk to us without judging or mocking or telling jokes behind our backs, the one who was even more beautiful (according to the pics in her obit) at thirty-eight than at eighteen got a cough one day that just didn't go away and got worse and worse despite whatever modern suburban medicine could do for her and she's gone.

    That's all.
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