Who deserves to die? (A kind of whodunnit)

 Candidate Number One

Yulie and I were friends. You could even say, best friends. She would cook hamburgers for us on Saturdays when her mother wasn’t home. They were really tasty and I think it may have been the only thing that Yulie knew how to cook.

There used to be an expression:  Tall, Dark (meaning dark hair), and Handsome. Well, on Saturdays when her mother wasn’t home, this man would come by with his little boy, who I always found annoying. But that’s neither here nor there (another old expression).

How he knew Yulie I’ve long forgotten.  I think he had started out as a friend of the family or of her mother’s.

Anyway, he was short, dark of hair and, I thought, ugly.

He looked as if he ought to go for a good scrub down and bathe in an astringent.

He was married, but always kidded around, touching and flirting with Yulie, and to my dismay, she flirted right back.

Yulie was, what we called in the 1950’s, well developed for her age. He treated her as if she was an adult, an equal.  When Yulie told me, that he had told her, that he had started to keep track of her “monthly” (which she had just started to get), it made me feel uneasy.  I was a very sheltered child, but I wasn’t stupid. Something was very wrong here, or was soon going to be.

So, I started to distance myself from Yulie and her situation. It was easy to do.  The beginning of the new school year. We began to hang out with different friends.  I willingly let Yulie slip away.

I wasn’t all that much older than Yulie.

But Yulie was just going on 12.

 

Who deserves to die?

Stay tuned for Candidate Number Two--

Coming soon in another blog!