From the drafts folder

Tonight I sat in the Taxi in the rain with the engine running and the hood up, my battery connected with jumper cables to the battery of a van with no door handles at the end of a dirt road.  I read Harper's while one guy clicked the handle-less van's ignition and another guy kicked it, rocked it, talked to it. 

I looked up from my magazine and watched them for awhile, and thought about this girl I met at community college ten years ago named Ashley.  We sat near each other in an English class, and I found out one day that she went to a private Christian junior high school named Brethren, which is where one of my friends from high school went.  "Did you know Kelly Pepperidge?" I asked.

Her eyes got big.  Ashley was one of the prettiest people I had ever met in real life, and she was friendly, and she had good fashion sense.  If I was a jealous god I would have disliked her.  "Yes," she said, slowly.  "I was really mean to her.  I kind of started a club against her."

"Oh my gosh," I said, remembering.  "You were the one who came up with PAK?"

She cringed, visibly, and said, "Yeah.  You heard about that?"

PAK stood for People Against Kelly.  Kelly was, and is, really, really nice.  When I met her freshman year of high school she was bubbly, studious, and as confident in herself as any of us were freshman year, which is to say not really at all.  She told me one time that people were really mean to her in junior high, that in fact there was a club of people who hated her. 

I was teased in school at various points, but the bullies never organized.  They never formed a union.  I'm not sure of the details of PAK - did they have meetings, a clubhouse, collect dues?  I don't know.  Ashley put her head in her hands and said, "I feel horrible about that.  Ugh.  I hated that school - a lot of the other kids weren't allowed to play with me, because one day on a beach field trip we were next to some people playing a Violent Femmes song on a boom box, and I started dancing, and the moms were like, [whisper] 'That girl is evil.'"

A couple weeks after I found out about PAK I walked into English class visibly upset - it was raining and I'd left the headlights of my 88 Honda on all day.  The battery was dead.  Ashley asked me what was wrong and I told her, and after class she asked me where I was parked, and met me there in her car, and she had jumper cables in her trunk, and she knew how to connect them, and she jumped my car battery in the pouring rain.