Sometimes the Truth is Ugly

As a teen, I wasn't like my friends. I was insanely cautious. I bent over backwards to avoid a confrontation. I only communicated with my peers and teachers via email and saved the responses onto a USB stick. Actually, I don't think "cautious" is the right word. A better word for my mindset was "paranoid", and the reason I use that word is because I have paranoid schizophrenia. I didn't think I was Napoleon or anything, I didn't think anyone was spying on me through the microwave, but I did think that the school would judge minor transgressions more harshly if you're fat. My mom, my therapist and I were trying as hard as we could to get rid of that one, but something happened that made it stick in my mind forever.

And that was what happened to Marlene Dillinger.

Marlene wasn't small, but she wasn't super-fat, either. She was easily 178 pounds (which she frequently insisted was muscle, but anyone with half a brain could've seen right through it, as she was only 5'4" with a tiny frame). The best word I could use to describe Marlene was "pudgy". However; she was fat enough that the school would really let her have it when she screwed up. For example, if any of the thinner girls swore, they'd get a warning or a detention at the very worst. Marlene was suspended for "near cussing" once (and she didn't even "near cuss"; the teacher's hearing aid wasn't working properly.) Regardless, she was still suspended, and she was warned not to talk in front of people who might be old enough to need a hearing aid. Thankfully, she was gone for only three days.

When she got back from suspension, she was given a laptop for her AP Statistics class. Now, she was really worried about getting in trouble again after getting suspended for something that wasn't her fault, so she made sure that she kept her laptop safe. Since she had six little brothers, an older brother and two older sisters, she had to keep it away from her siblings (especially her little brothers, as they had a penchant for breaking things). Apparently what happened was she hid the laptop under one of the couch cushions. It might have been safe from her brothers, but I wasn't safe from her! She'd completely forgotten about it and wound up sitting on it.

Come Monday, she noticed something wasn't right about the laptop. The screen was completely cracked, and the laptop itself wouldn't turn on. Since repairing a laptop is very expensive ($80 if you do it yourself, and roughly $200 for a professional repair), she informed the techie on duty at the school library that she sat on it. She told her not to worry about it, and that it would be fixed fairly quickly. Marlene didn't even have to foot the bill for anything. All she had to do was be more careful about not breaking school property in the future. Problem solved from her end, right?

Nope. Not. Even. Close.

After Marlene left the library, the techie saw just how damaged the laptop was and called the police. She didn't bother fixing the laptop at all. Later, the cops showed up at Marlene's house and arrested her for property damage. Only Marlene Dillinger, the girl who got suspended because a teacher's hearing aid wasn't working, could get arrested for accidentally sitting on a school laptop. At the time, I figured Marlene would be back in school after a week. I figured the longest she'd be gone would be two weeks. The reason I thought that was because this would be the point where her parents would put their foot down and say, "Nope. This is it. You've crossed the line from harsh but still somewhat deserved discipline into un-fucking-believably vexatious punishment. You're bullying her, plain and simple. Cut it the fuck out!" They would've been insane not to do tell the school to back off at that point. Marlene had to be back in school not too long after this.

She wasn't. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen her since.

At first, I just attributed it to the fact that her parents put her in a different school or homeschooled her after the incident with the laptop. Hey, maybe they'd moved away. Yeah, seems right. Marlene and her family moved away. And why wouldn't they. Even after they succeeded in confronting the school, staying as if nothing had happened would be pretty tough. At the very, very least, she would've been transferred to another school. What had happened to Marlene would be a pretty damn good incentive to leave everything behind. That was genuinely what I thought. Marlene Dillinger moved away. And I believed it right up until mid-December.

My mom and I were at some Christmas party at her friends house, and we ran into Mr. Dillinger and his new girlfriend, Alicia. Alicia was an investigative journalist who had this unhealthy fixation on female body image. Every story that she covered always involved something bad happening to women, and the reason everyone turned a blind eye to it was because the women in question didn't look like models. Her argument was always (or at least it was supposed to be), "Women are judged for their appearance to the point that when they're in danger, no one comes to their aid unless they look like a model". To me, it always came off as "If you're a girl and you don't look like a model, anything and everything will try to kill you". To be honest, everything she wrote was so negative. I couldn't help but think it only existed for its shock value.

The party was in a not so good part of town, so my mom made me stay with her the whole time. I was not happy about that. I was especially displeased about not getting to ask Mr. Dillinger how Marlene was doing. Stupid Alicia kept going on and on about this shit show that was going down in a soap factory in Mexico. She went on about how the whole thing was dismissed as an "accident" by the local authorities. She made it very clear that "accident" was a bald faced lie intended to cover up the more sinister truth: it was pretty obvious that the "accident" was foul play.

The victim of this "accident" wasn't an idiot. She was a good, hardworking girl who almost got thrown in jail for property damage. The judge decided to send her to rehab instead, as she was a nonviolent offender. Said rehab program was actually forced labour in a soap factory in Mexico. The conditions were awful, the pay was literally nonexistent, and the hours were gruelling. Apparently, her fellow workers thought it would be funny to turn on the soap machine while she was in there, cleaning it out. What happened next was literally a bloody mess. The high torque, low speed auger pulled this poor girl through the machine. It was a slow, painful process.

Alicia didn't hold back when describing the details, either. I got this long, juicy bit about how they couldn't pull her out of the machinery without turning it back on and killing her. They kept her alive long enough to have the boss come and tell her that she's fired, then they turn the machine back on and pull her out. You couldn't ask for a more gruesome way to die than that.

I didn't believe what Alicia was saying. I was pretty sure she was making it up to get attention, or to grind her body image ax. I didn't really get the point of her story, and quite frankly, it put me in a bad mood for the rest of the party. But my curiosity got the better of me, and when I looked up "rehab soap factory accident", it shattered any illusions I had that Marlene had moved away.

When Marlene was arrested for sitting on the laptop, her parents didn't try and stick up for her. When she was in court, her parents didn't even come (according to the article, her mom committed suicide while her dad took off with Alicia, basically abandoning Marlene.) Poor Marlene was so scared of going to jail over a simple mistake, that when the judge offered her the opportunity to go to rehab, she took it. Beaming. What she got was a miserable job in a soap factory in Mexico where she was threatened with jail time if she got injured or got fired. Worse, she died a horrible death on her second day. I couldn't believe that that girl Alicia was talking about was Marlene.

Granted, Marlene's case is only an isolated incident, right? The odds of that happening are pretty damn slim, right? Wrong. Shit like this happens all the time. It's awful, but it's real. The worst part is, if you worry about it, people will think you're crazy. Well, you'd have to be crazy not to worry about it! When people tell you to calm down, they're really hoping you'll let your guard down long enough to screw up. Once you do, they'll show no mercy, coming down on you like a sack of wet cement. It's almost as if they're waiting for you to make a mistake, just so they can get rid of you.