Member-only story
Rediscovering Empathy
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Marylou was the new girl who showed up at our school wearing the same dress every day — tiny blue flowers and a starched white collar. Maybe it wasn’t the same dress — maybe her grandmother got a deal on fabric and made the same dress five times.
My competitive streak began then. It started with my older brothers and then with Mary Lou, because she was also very good with words and I wanted to be better. That year we stood side by side in the school spelling bee and we both went onto regionals — regionals I had to win.
I was practicing hard — reading dictionaries, my whole family threw words at me from breakfast until Johnny Carson was over.
Mary Lou didn’t talk much that day. She didn’t have to talk to fill in the silent spaces. I excused myself to go to the small bathroom, where I found next to the toilet — a stack of dictionaries halfway up to the ceiling, one about twenty-five pounds.
All the pages I opened had been marked in red, blue and yellow ink.
The earth may have stopped spinning at that moment for me… my heart opened and ached for my friend. I began to see her for the first time as a girl without parents who turned to food and words and lions for survival.
I don’t remember the word I misspelled. I do remember feeling a kind of human…
