Rachel

“I actually dropped out of high school,” she whispered softly.

“Ohh okay,” I awkwardly responded.

When I asked her what school she went to, I never anticipated a response like that. I never imagined that I would be volunteering alongside a high school dropout at the YMCA.

Rachel looked nothing like your typical high-school dropout. She was a sweatpants and hoodie kind of girl with a long, pale face, sprinkled with grains of tender cinnamon. The imprints left from her thick glasses were tattooed permanently onto the sides of her nose.

Her eyes were lonely black holes in search for something—anything to swallow—but nothing ever came their way. She had a beautiful smile. The kind of smile that melted away any rust of remorse and illuminated the deepest darkest parts of you. It’s a shame that it rarely surfaced.

Champagne-blonde hair framed the melancholy expression she wore on her face. Rachel was living, but she looked far from alive. She never went anywhere without her cell phone. Every morning as the tiny campers trickled in, she would never smile or speak or welcome them in any way.

Rachel would sit by the full-length glass window, clutching her phone, and her eyes would frantically search the azure sky for answers. Perhaps she was searching for a cloud to somehow pacify the pain of letting her mom down. Perhaps she was trying to free her mind from the stubborn shackles of defeat and guilt she had tied to her own feet. She was like the seagull in the parking lot who tried to fly away from the slightest scent of danger.

She didn’t know how to run away from danger.

The camp counsellors were far from her biggest fans. Every week, the “unlucky one” would try to quietly convince the others to take Rachel in as their counsellor in training for the week. I always watched her hearing their conversations from a safe distance. They were not quiet. Every week they would argue and every week my heart broke as I saw the arsenic-grey words stinging her mercilessly; so merciless that mist lined the bottom of her eyes. This went on for two weeks before I decided enough was enough.

Week three was the week where we were both placed to volunteer in the same camp. The morning of the first day was a blur of awkward silences and shy eye contact. Lunch was different. Stay away from her, my brain screamed, but my heart had other plans. I listened to my heart. I finally worked up enough courage to ask her how she was doing and what her name was. Her responses were quick and soft as if conversation was a foreign concept to her.

The next morning, she broke the tension by welcoming me with a smile. For a moment, I felt as if I was meeting a close friend. But the smile dissolved into her lips just as quickly as it had arrived. I looked behind me to discover the camp counselor scrunching his eyebrows in confusion. Still, I was happy with my progress.

We started talking more and more. It was only after our conversation about high-school that I got to know the real Rachel. Sure I was shocked to learn she dropped out of high school, and I promised myself I wasn’t going to let something so trivial interfere with our friendship, but it was the reason she left that made me ache.

She used to be a straight A student who sat in her mother’s lap and confessed her dreams of becoming a veterinarian. Her mother would hug her and tell her how proud she was of her daughter and just how proud she would be when her daughter saved other lives.

When she was 10 her mom became a nothing more than a few words scribbled across a memorial plaque in the graveyard across the street.

She had no father or sister or uncle to turn to, so despite her desperate pleas to stay near her mother’s grave, she was sent away from the city and stuck inside a house that was not a home. Colour was drained from her life and nothing mattered any more. The world was grey and she was invisible. High school was pointless according to her new friends, so she let their decision over take hers. Her new family didn’t really care what she did except for her new older brother. Concerned for her future, he signed her up for the YMCA summer program and told her he would pay her to go. She wanted the money, so she decided to come. Her friends left her because they told her she wasn’t spending enough time with them.

I stopped forming preconceived notions of people from that day onwards. From the surface, Rachel appeared to be a plain-white blank canvas, but I found something in her fragile voice that suggested otherwise. She was a canvas enveloped with shades of magenta laughter, swirls of blue empathy, and splatters of coral kindness—yet she had hid it all under coats of white paint.

As the summer days grew longer and hotter, we became closer and closer. I would save a seat for her beside me on the bus, and in turn she would tell me the same old crimson-coloured jokes, but we both ended up in fits of laughter anyways. She started smiling without a second thought, and it was as if a dried up rose was beginning to blossom once again. I saw her as a person with a different blueprint design life. The fact that she wasn’t in school was as irrelevant as the pay phones peppered around town.

I respected her decision and learned to be thankful about the colourful memories she gave me. Rachel was a paintbrush and I was her canvas. Each smile, each laugh we shared added colour to blank spaces within.

The biggest surprise came on my last day. As we all said our goodbyes, she asked me if she could talk to me for a second. Her eyes looked like a pool of galaxies beaming with thousands of stars. She took my hand and with tears gleaming into her eyes, she began talking.

“Neha, thank you for being a great friend. Thank you for all those times you didn’t give up on me when I was too afraid to smile back at you.”

I just stood there in shock. I mean, this is what I always did. I always smiled at my friends and talked to them, but this was new. No one had ever thanked me before.

“I mean I was just doing what a friend’s supposed to do. It was really nothing.” I must have looked really shocked, because she started laughing.

“No no, Neha, you don’t understand. I’m going back to school. Thank you.” I was dumbfounded, and all I could do was give her a hug. My eyes became misty as I managed a soft whisper.

“No,” I said. “Thank-you.”