Death of a Wayward Girl

by Joanne Glasspoole

This memoir is written in memory of a young girl I knew. Names have been changed to protect the identity of her family.

When I was a teenager, three young girls used to ride their horses to our house in the summertime. One of the girls was the same age as my youngest brother and six years younger than me. Sarah was twelve-years-old and had stick-straight, mousy brown hair and wore glasses held together with scotch tape. She was tall for her age and skinny. She often wore old-fashioned, thrift store dresses, and because her family was poor, her clothes were hand-me-downs and always a couple sizes too big. In the summertime, she never wore shoes, and I always wondered how she could stand running bare-footed on gravel.

She was a girl who was starved for affection, but nobody liked her. Even though Sarah was relentlessly picked on by other kids—including her sisters—she accepted their torment and rarely cried. She was hyper and easily excited and hopped up and down in a circle, clapping her hands, when she was happy. I felt sorry for her and tried to be nice—like once I baked her a birthday cake—but most of the time I pushed her away.

That summer, Sarah’s sister Theresa turned her on to sniffing glue and gasoline. One day when Theresa’s boyfriend was over, they locked Sarah out of the house so they could be alone. Sarah sneaked off to the garage. Later that afternoon, not knowing where their sister had gone and worried because their mother would soon be home from work, the two elder girls went to look for their younger sister. They found her unconscious in the garage lying next to a red gasoline can. Her little body was lifeless and limp. When the ambulance came, it was too late: Sarah had died from inhaling too much gasoline. The fumes were said to have burned her lungs.

Sarah has been dead for almost 20 years, but she lives somewhere in the back of my mind. Today she would be thirty-years-old, but I can’t imagine her as a woman because the last time I saw her she was a little girl.

When I drive past the cemetery where she is buried, I search among the tombstones for her grave. I didn’t go to her funeral and am ashamed to admit that I have never been inside the cemetery gates.

It was painful for me when Sarah died, but I still don’t know why.