CHANCE

I took the same train to school and back each day, which allowed me to recognize some familiar faces on board.

Among those faces was a face I had never seen before. It was the face of a beautiful girl; roughly my age.

Judging by her smartly dressed, prestigious school uniform, she seemed to have gone to an all-girls private school on the outskirts of the city. Her stop was a few stations before mine.

The two of us never knew each other but we always shared the same carriage together.

Was it coincidence or fate?

As time passed by, I grew to believe that our placement on that train was determined by fate. Only I did not know it at the time of this story.

As days passed, I began to develop a crush on the girl.

From what I saw from afar, she was everything I admired in a girl. Petite, attractive, and obviously smart and well educated. A complete opposite to myself.

But there was one thing I found odd about her. She never smiled.

She would always be standing in roughly the same spot on the opposite side of the carriage each day just staring out the window with a sad and depressed look on her face as if something was troubling her.

What could possibly be troubling her? I wondered. Wasn't her life perfect already?

She probably had everything she always wanted: a good school, a great education, rich friends and wealthy parents. What did I have in comparison? I have working class parents that scrape every penny for me to attend a public school that offers no promising future for its pupils, except a career in low-end jobs and hard labor.

Beggars can't be choosers I guess. Well, maybe for some they can. And with me being in a different social class to her, only limits the chances I have in being with a girl like her.

But maybe that's what made her also fascinating to me in the first place. She was not like the other girls in my neighborhood or at my school. She had expectations and she probably expected a lot from her partner, whoever he might be.

You are probably wondering why I hadn't approached her yet. That was because I was far too shy and timid to do so. I was someone with not too much experience with girls; especially the rich, upper class type. So I just stood there, staring. And she never once noticed me.

Things took a different turn when one morning she never boarded the train like she usually did.

At first this took me by surprise. But then I thought maybe she entered on a different carriage.

As the train gained momentum, I peered over towards the carriages on either side of me, hoping to find her. But I couldn't. There were too many people, and the carriages themselves never remained steady enough for me to see too clearly. So I went looking for her.

As discretely as I could, I weaved between each standing commuter with my eyes darting from one face to the next, but I still could not see her.

Where was she?

Days passed without any sign of the girl on the train.

I began to think that maybe she was on school break or that maybe her rich parents took her traveling somewhere, who knows. But roughly over a week later at school, my friends told me something that changed my life forever.

As I entered into the classroom, my two friends were standing in between their desks having a conversation among themselves.

Entering their conversation midway, they instantly asked me if I had heard the news report that morning about a girl, roughly our age, committing suicide in the next town to where I lived due to severe bullying at her school.

I told them I hadn't.

One of my friends handed me his smartphone with the news article already open and told me to take a look for myself.

Reading through the article in the Flameborough Post, I came across an image of the suicide victim.

It was her. The girl from the train.

My heart felt as though it suddenly stopped within my chest. I became light headed as my mind began to race with images of the girl flashing through my mind.

The article stated that the girl left a suicide note to her parents stating that she had been a victim of severe bullying at her school by fellow students that she felt as though the only way to escape was to end her own life.

It was also said that not a single adult knew about the bullying - including her parents. She never told anyone and no one ever reported it.

I felt sick. I felt as though my heart had shattered into a million pieces.

Why didn't she tell anybody about this? Didn't she have any friends she could talk to?

The thought of her traveling alone to school and back on the train crossed my mind.

Did she have any friends?

The thought of whether I could have saved her life crossed my mind.

If only I had the courage to approach her, things may have turned out different. But instead I just stood back and watched her suffer like everyone else.

I felt terrible. Angry, even. At myself more than anything.

As years passed I had made a promise to myself to never let a single opportunity pass me by. Especially one that could have started with a simple "Hello" because you never know when or if that same opportunity would ever come back to you. And maybe that simple Hello could not only change your life but their life too.