Shadow Girl

©10-19-2020, Olan L. Smith

Once upon a time a girl never was, until she was, like a surprise shower in April. Suddenly, she just appears on the list. Yep, we graduated high school together, but no one remembers her. You grow up in a small town, a class of sixty students, and some move away, others move in; schools merge, more students, and some dropout, or worse die, but in the end, there are thirty, and we matriculate into adulthood together. Now, we are forever bound together by this passage. There are reunions, some attend, and others don't, for whatever reason, but that's okay. It is a small class; you know each other well, and you keep track of each other on Facebook; we are family. 

Then forty-five years later you read the list of graduates like you have many times before, and there she is, the one girl no one knows, no one invites to reunions―she's a ghost. You ask around, but no one knows her, one says, "I feel so guilty that I never asked her to attend a reunion," but there she is in black lettering on the school list, the list each of us has read but no one ever noticed. How could this be? The list is precise, and the invitations to reunions are automatically taken from the list. Who was this mysterious woman? One classmate says, I think I remember her, but his description is vague. Looking back through the yearbooks, and the graduation photos, she is nowhere to be found, a wisp in the night, a shadow person, and the question I ponder is did I create her by noticing her name?

I'm the one waving at the camera, aged about 12 years. This was our annual Fall Fair and Festival, parade of students. The top photo is me graduating in 1971, the colors have faded over time, but the gowns were a vibrant avocado green.