Legitimate Paranoia

One of the bad things about being a paranoid, depressed teen, with low self esteem is that you see people's negative reactions to one another, done behind their mark's back. In school you see a guy who is horribly insulted and degraded in a way that he may or may not know about, but you couldn't possibly take it if it happened to you, and you have a growing suspicion that it may in fact be happening to you. Plus, you don't know what to do to this person.

OK, here's the story. We have the girl who is always made fun of. An overweight girl who was adopted. For most of her life, she has probably been only in outside circles. For her last few years of school, she was the only girl in her class in private school. Generally, that boosts moral, but given her circumstances, I think this was an exception.

It gets worse. See, early in the year, she worked in ���� ����� [Machsan Begaddim] (laundry) on the kibbutz. She was accused of stealing a skirt. Two kibbutznik girls claimed that they saw her wearing one of their skirts, and, I forget the details, but basically, she was accused of cutting off the identification tags off of the skirt, and taking it. In a kibbutz, where everybody's clothes are washed at the same place, and the tags are the only thing that differentiate your clothes from, in this case, around three hundred fifty other people, that's a rather serious transgression. She denied it.

The whole thing though, pretty much blew over, as I recall. The skirt turned up, whether she returned it, or whether it really was found was considered inconsequential, it was a first offense, and she was put on an unofficial probation.

That was early on. Slowly though, people noticed things missing. A tele-card here, twenty shekels there, a few CDs and tapes, stamps, chocolate bars, etc. Nothing too huge, but not a just a couple of coins, either. Nobody, to my knowledge, confronted her, but they suspected. Initially, it was probably due to the skirt incident, but after a while, they were more certain, and claimed that she was the only one in the room, etc, and were generally sure...

But, they never confronted her. Perhaps they should have, though.

After our first stay at the kibbutz was over, while at the midrasha, (the yeshiva for girls) some of the girls earned a few shekels before Passover, cleaning neighborhood houses. In the house that she was cleaning, there was an envelope containing three thousand shekels laying on the table.

This time, when it was missing it was not just ignored. This is second hand of course, I was not with the girls, but they all tell the same story. The police were all around the midrasha, the story was tried to keep quiet, both for this girl's shame, the family's sake, and the threat of deportation. However, this girl just went around the whole day crying, and apparently, she just opened up and told somebody, who of course, went and told everybody else.

The quote of hers is that, "I just wanted so much for it to be mine."

All sides decided it would just be best if she left, so she went back to the states, under the claim that she was just going back home for Passover. With one girl already in the know, however, this smokescreen proved about as effective The Great Wall of China for discouraging missile attacks.

True to form, I was the last one in the group to find out. It took about two weeks, before I was told, but suddenly realizations came into focus. She was the butt of all the jokes, posthumously, in a sense.