The Story of a Girl

This was the headlines that everybody in the town could read five days ago in the local newspaper. I cannot think of something else since I read the news.

Mary, the girl who was found dead, was a classmate of mine. Beautiful, smart and admired by everybody for her intelligence she was a popular person with the whole school. Half a year ago she fell in love with an older guy, she was 17 and he was 20. Her friends thought it had been love at first sight. Flowers, telephone conversations and long walks in the park made us think it was a relationship that appears once in a lifetime. She had actually said a couple of times this was the man of her life.

Mary left home two months ago. Her parents immediately phoned the police and informed the authorities about their daughter’s disappearance and about a large sum of money being stolen from the house. Since then the police has been searching her. Someone came up with the idea she was kidnapped while others thought she was killed.

Five days ago everybody’s impatience to find out the truth came to a tragic end. A boy found her dead body on the bank of the lake 2 km far from the town. The police officers started an investigation and it became obvious that Mary had committed suicide. She drowned in the lake in a desperate attempt to escape the situation she had entered. After leaving home she moved with her boyfriend. She remained pregnant. In a long suicide letter, found by the police at her boyfriend’s place, she wrote the guy she was with had been cheating on her with a former girlfriend of his. Given the situation, her pregnancy and the shame of having been cheated on, she made a stupid decision and committed suicide one week before Christmas.

The local community is terrified. A well behaved young lady, the only child of a respectful family found her terrible death in a stupid way. Personally I regret her death. Young people like her often do mistakes because they lack experience and because they do not communicate with their family and friends. This tragedy could have been avoided if she had been helped and advised by family, friends or social workers.

The secret of the eternal youth

Brooke Greenberg, 16, is a daughter of Melanie and Howard Greenberg. The couple has three other children, aged 13, 19 and 22 – all of them females. The other Greenberg girls are growing like all other kids. Brooke, who already turned 16, seems to be stuck in her infancy. Her appearance has not been changing for 15 years already.

Brooke weighs about 7 kilos, she is 80 centimeters tall. The girl has a baby’s body and face. There is no other human being like her anywhere in the world. Scientists say that the parts of the girl’s body live independently from one another. For example, Brooke has infant’s teeth and brain, but the structure of her bones corresponds to those of a ten-year-old child.
Modern medicine knows many incidents of premature aging. There are about 20 children living in the world today, who suffer from an extremely rare disease known as progeria. All of them look
like elderly people, although they are only ten years of age. The disease develops as a result of genetic mutation.
Scientists originally believed that Brooke Greenberg had an opposite of progeria. A closer insight showed, though, that the girl was not suffering from any known genetic diseases. Since the phenomenon is obvious – the girl is not ageing – scientists believe that she gives the world an opportunity to find out why it happens. They hope that they will find the gene or a group of genes, which make people change with years and eventually die.

The little girl does not speak. She can not eat alone either – her parents have to use special tubes to feed the child. Nevertheless, the secret of everlasting youth is hidden somewhere inside the poor child.