It was the age of MC Hammer Pants and Neon Slap Bracelets.Troll Dolls weren’t only a passing fad, but a lifestyle.

Acquiring a Troll Doll collection at museum level status wasnot only doable, but my ultimate goal. I was going to be the raddest kid on theblock. Of course, I had competition.

My cousin Lenora. 

Seeing that she was a few years older than me, at the age offourteen, she was a full fledged teenager and I worshipped the ground shewalked her LA Gear Shoes on. Although her Troll Doll collection reached thehundreds, filling every nook and cranny of her brightly painted pink room, Iwas not jealous by any means. I wanted her to teach me everything she knewabout being rad.

And boy did she.

Lenora had the kind of confidence that verged on dangerous,but yet, still innocent enough that the grown ups adored her. When my other boycousins and I would steal beer, sipping slowly of the three beers it took forthe four of us to become goofy with, she would turn the cans away and still berespected. I could never do that. I had to do everything I wasn’t supposed tobe doing to be cool. I still had to prove my worth as a bad kid. Because, as weall know, the bad kids got all the attention.

Lenora had proven herself and her “bad kid” status wasdetermined, it seemed, when she was an outspoken child who could easily talkher dad into buying her the really expensive jeans from the GAP only so shecould rip holes in them and paint them with neon green nail polish. To thisday, I still admire her guile.

With her curly brown hair and her beautiful olive skin shetook care of with only the finest Jergen’s lotions that she slathered herselfwith every hour on the hour, she was turning boy’s heads early. Her dad hatedthis about her, but yet, that was just one other thing to add to her list ofthe kind of teen I wanted to grow up to be.

Even though I was a young boy who tried desperately to stayjust as neat and tidy, my boy brain and ego could never allow myself to wearbright expensive jeans, cutting out the cute boys of Seventeen Magazine andplastering them onto the wall, and surrounding myself with beautiful waterglobes from various Texas cities and a Troll Doll collection for the ages.

I saw nothing wrong in that and neither did she which is whyI loved her more than life itself when she pulled me aside one afternoon andtold me, “don’t let them tell you what to do. You don’t have to be just likethem,” she was talking about my boy cousins who were starting to talk aboutgirls and the colorful things they would do to their bodies.

Of course, every trip down south eventually ended with thatlong eight hour trip back home to Lubbock. My wonderful days with her werealways limited to that one week stay at her house and I would always be backhome, remembering all of those times we got to read her Seventeen Magazine anddoodle on her new jeans with neon splashes of nail polish.

Years later, our trips became fewer and fewer and I decidedto hang out with my friends more and more during spring break.

At the age of fifteen, we had not visited South Texas inyears. A few spring breaks had come and gone and I had turned into a fullfledged active teenager who knew everything in the world but how to get agirlfriend. Of course, knowing now what I didn’t know then, I flooded my lifewith activities to avoid getting a girlfriend.

It was a summer afternoon when I heard the weeping comingfrom the living room. 

I was sitting in my room that was now void of Troll Dollsand neatly organized. I lie. Papers scattered the floor and my prizedpossession, my journal, sat in front me being filled with my most intimatethoughts and feelings. With nothing scheduled in my plans, save for a trip tothe library, I drug my angst-y ass out of bed to find out what all thecommotion was about.

She was gone.

Lenora, my childhood admiration, killed in a caraccident.

It would be my last trip to South Texas.

Things were not like I remembered them.  

The house we once stayed in was now filled with various people,some relatives and some Illegal Immigrants to work the fields during summer somy uncle could make a quick buck as a coyote, was smaller. Having nowhere tostay, we camped out on the floor of the living room and a stranger from Mexicoslept next to me.

Lenora’s room no longer had posters decorating the now whitewalls. Her make up was packed away in a corner of the room she shared withothers and she barricaded her bed with book cases that gave her the illusion ofprivacy. I imagined what her life must have been like those last few years.

A life surrounded by the coming and going of strangers that inhabityour house, your tool shed, your bathroom and even your bedroom. Strangers thatwere brought in by the truck load from across the border by your own father whocared only for the money that found its way into his pockets and another caseof beer.

Rifling through her personal belongings, in a sort of sickvoyeurism that comes with death, I wanted to find something, anything toconnect with her. I found a small picture of her in a blue and silvercheerleading uniform.

From within the picture she looked out at me with sadnessthat even at the age of fifteen, I could recognize. A sadness in her eyes thatcomes with losing total control of your life at a point when all you want to dois find your life.