Page 6 of Beautiful Victim

I didn’t know what she meant. Even then I think I knew I wasn’t supposed to. So I stayed quiet and watched her poke the dead worm.

And then I went home and asked my mom what the little girl with the tear-stained cheeks meant, but Mom didn’t know.

I didn’t see Carrie for three weeks and two days after that. But in that time my mom took me to the library and I checked out a book about worms. I read that thing from front to back and learned everything I could about worms. I learned that you can chop one in half and the front half will regenerate and the worm will live. But if you chop off its head it will just die. I learned that they can go forward and backwards, and that they have no eyes. But I didn’t learn anything about a worm being at the bottom and at the top.

When I next saw Carrie, she was sitting in the dirt again. She had on shorts that were tied with string, and I could see bruises on her legs. I asked her about the worm thing, and she looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. So I told her the story of how we met, and what she had said about the worm.

She said I was weird.

I wanted to cry.

I didn’t want this sad girl to think I was weird. Not her. Never her.

She stood up and hugged me and told me not to be sad.

Carrie said that all the best people were weird.

I knew I would love her forever after that, not just for a short time before I loved something or someone else.

My love for Carrie was the always kind. Even when I wished it wasn’t.

Later that night, when my mom was washing my hair and getting rid of the mud from my knees, I thought about Carrie and decided that she was weird too.

But Carrie was wrong.

The best people weren’t weird. Sometimes the weird people were something else entirely.