How do you remember high school? I usually see it in broad strokes: this was the year I spent inexplicably sick, this was the teacher I hated, these were the people that I loved, or envied, or that made my life difficult.
How do those memories change when you find out the person you're remembering is dead?
Maybe this is too raw to write about right now. (Maybe I don't care.) But it seems to me that my high school is picking off its students one by one, and I can't help but stop to think about how it all is affecting me.
The first one was, I think, last spring, when a girl in the year below me was in the car with her mother and got hit by a drunk driver. I didn't know her.
The second was this past fall, the former drug dealer who, in tenth grade, decided he didn't want to live past 25 because it was all downhill from there. He'd gone on to be really popular and active at college. On his way home from his 21st birthday party, walking home by the side of the road, he got hit by a car.
The third was in the spring, another automotive accident. This was my class valedictorian, the model prep school student. Frankly, I thought he was pretentious. But he was genuinely a nice person, and he was probably going to find the cure for cancer or something. He got hit by a truck at 10 AM on his way biking home from crew practice.
And now this. A friend kills himself. And that's all I know right now - it happened on Saturday, his 21st birthday, he hadn't been doing well lately and he'd been doing lots of drugs, but I don't know how it happened, or whether it was accidental or on purpose. Or which would be worse. I think I'd rather it was on purpose. At least it would've been what he wanted.
You know this guy. This is the really good guy who experiments with lots of drugs, and you hope it's just a phase he'll grow out of. The one who plays the guitar in the corner, the one whose response to a hello could either be a smile or a snarl (though only his very meanest of mean faces was meant un-ironically), and you could never predict which.
Every morning, we had our first two classes together: French and Calculus. Every morning, I'd be just about ready to leave the student lounge and get to class on time, and the two of us, making fun of our teacher (whose name sounded very much like a solo sexual practice and who had a personality to match) the whole way, would buy hot chocolate at the cafeteria and arrive in class, laughing, 5 minutes late.
He referred to everyone, male or female, sometimes affectionately and sometimes not, as a slut or a cunt or a whore. He wasn't as technically good a guitarist as another friend of ours, and this bothered him to no end - I can remember the awkward way he'd move, as if he wasn't comfortable in his skin or on the ground, as he demanded, "Mike, stop being such a cunt and let me play the guitar!" When, halfway through my junior and his senior year, he realized that I no longer cared what he called me and stopped calling me names, I was proud, both of him and of me: I knew I had earned his respect. And when you'd get one of those rare, genuine smiles - the ones that weren't tinged with sarcasm or exaggerated to mask a real feeling - you could see the boy who just wants to goof around and enjoy his life, and whose manic depression and problems at home were too much for him to handle.
The little memories you have of someone.
The memory of the last time you saw the person, at New Year's 2005, when he looked like he was doing so much better.
The memory of trying to go see him (was it last summer? or winter break?) after he was already in bed, and leaving a crazy note with his doorman that I never knew if he got. I think I drew a dinosaur on it.
And the memory of finding out that his funeral would be today.
How can the present change the past? When you can see the full length of a person's life: what you hoped for the person and what they wanted for themselves, the way you saw them and the way you wanted them to see you, and, in the end, the ironic twist or quiet failure that all those memories lead up to? When the story has an ending, does the plot make any more sense?
