I didn’t mean to make light of the girl in your school (or R.), but I hope my deep ambivalence came through in my blog post: that as much as I hated the circumstances I was relating, I was also relishing, in an inappropriate manner, the almost-cinematic aspect of telling the story.

Gladys: I don’t think very many people knew; the teachers kept a pretty tight lid on it, apparently. Very few of my classmates had heard the story when we talked about it at subsequent class reunions.

Of course I wondered at some point whether the whole story itself was untrue, but it was so elaborate (and confirmed things that weren’t necessarily public knowledge) that I couldn’t imagine it being made up. (My source was also pretty high up.)

I remember there was a girl in our school who had some sort of retardation that all the kids teased. One of my friends pretended to be ‘in love’ with her, only to one day cruelly tell her that it was all a big joke. She swallowed insecticide in the girl’s bathroom that day; fortunately they were able to rescue her before it was too late. She was transferred to a different school. Later on our teachers told us that she was essentially a ‘normal’ kid, except that she had terrible epilepsy; and the reason why she seemed so out of it all the time was a side effect of her anti-epilepsy medication.

Like you said, there’s one in every school.