The Friends I Left Behind

The last remaining days of summer before school started were always a flurry of activity. New school shoes, hard, and not eager to be worn in. It would take the entire year and by some sort of strange magic, they would finally become comfortable just in time for a new pair. The plaid uniform came out of the back of my closet where it hung surrounded by tank tops and summer dresses, that were always bought for me but never worn. My uniform always smelled like the last day of school, notebooks, and broken crayons.

I can still picture us. Two best friends playing the most awesome game of tag because we were finally old enough to run around on our own that summer. We chased each other across streets and behind parked cars. He liked the fact that I didn’t run like a girl. I wasn’t into lip gloss, New Kids On The Block, or the Coreys. Even though I would feign interest when other girls were around just to be included. I liked the fact that he was able to get past my nerdy and shy exterior to see the cool person underneath.

We were always aware of one another. Living side by side in a neighborhood where living the good life meant you were able to grow up and afford a house right around the corner from your parents but we never played together until that summer. At that age, best friends seem to roll in and out of our lives like the tide at the Jersey Shore.

It’s amazing how some moments become so etched on your psyche that four decades and a diseased brain can’t manage to give up the ghost. I was playing Zelda, or some other Nintendo game, the details of that afternoon are shrouded in the mist your brain uses to shield itself from traumatic events.

“Didn’t you play with him all summer?” My mother asked and then handed me the City Paper. I took it from her hand and scanned the headline. Then I saw the picture, a mangled car surrounded by trees.

“Yes,” I said. My kid brain not fully comprehending the words on the page. It said he was deceased. What did deceased mean? I knew what it meant. My brain just wouldn’t let me retrieve it.

“They’re going to have his funeral in a few days, I don’t think you should go.” She left the paper in my tiny hands and exited the living room, headed toward the kitchen. That was all she would say about it and I knew better than to protest. My friend was dead and all I had left of him was a crappy newspaper article I would cling to for a week before my mother threw it out.

The day of his funeral I sat on the top step and waited. I lived only a few blocks away from the church and could see the sea of black suits and dresses. I watched them linger for a bit before getting into their vehicles. My brother was home that day and turned on MTV. Heaven by Warrant filtered out through an open window. I watched as the hearse containing your coffin drove by slowly, carrying you through your old neighborhood for the final time.

It’s funny how music always seems to bring me back to a moment in time that I can see it so clearly. Whenever Heaven plays I am always that little girl, sitting on her top step, watching you ride by. Even though I knew what death meant, I never quite understood the finality of it, the unanswered questions. Our friendship began and ended in the same summer.

And I was never the same.

I don’t know what it is about summers in the city. The heat wafting up in waves from the hard concrete sets people on edge. Makes the guilty feel as though they are roasting in the fires of hell for a crime they have yet to commit. They do it anyway, if only for a release.

I often wonder if your father felt that way. If his reasoning for walking into your house gun-blazing was to release himself from the oppressive fire of a mind gone haywire with alcohol. I replay it in my mind, the stories I’ve heard woven in with fantasy. I always see you, standing there protecting your mother from the one person who made a vow before God and everyone to protect you both. He failed that day. He was the cause of your destruction, the reason why your name will forever be on a spreadsheet. White female, murdered, gunshot wound, 16.

My mother tried to avoid a discussion on a topic so foreign to her it could have been in another language and she wouldn’t have understood any better. She handed me a newspaper article and asked, “Did you know her?”

“Yes,” was all I could get out before she took her leave. My mother avoided hard topics like people avoided whole towns in the 14th century when the plague rolled through.

There wasn’t anything she could do. Emotionally absent, she was unable to console me. I turned instead to the things I had left of her. A folder colored to the hilt on the outside of our doodles. A testimony to the life and times of a teenage girl. A listing of who we were down with and boys names crossed out in anger and rewritten when all was forgiven. I saw her hope in the hearts she doodled above the “i” in her name. My heart ached when under our names scrolled together she wrote B.F.F. A lifetime of moments that were never given a chance to materialize all ended the last day of August 1995.

Three decades later I still carry that folder. It followed me after high school graduation to a place one hundred and sixty miles from home, from where you stayed and never left. It traveled with me in boxes packed and unpacked in the subsequent moves that made up the story of my young adulthood. I watched my daughter’s tiny fingers float over the blue ink, a little less bright with the passage of time as she asked me about the contents of my memory box.

I told my daughter about her and how she had thought of me as her best friend. I didn’t have many friends, let alone best friends. But she understood me, the creative side of me that was shyly trying to emerge. She encouraged me, read my writing, and feigned jealousy at my talent. She was a true friend and a wonderful human who never should have met such an awful end. No one should die at the hands of someone they trust.

“But why do you still have it?” my daughter asked.

“It’s all I have left of her, to remember her by when time steals away the memory of her face.”

“But why would you want to remember when it makes you sad?”

“Because she deserves to be remembered, I owe her that much.”

I don’t think my daughter understood what I meant but I left it at that. One day, unfortunately, she will have her own list of friends that have gone on before her, her own folders to carry.

In all my life’s moments, I have remembered them. The ones that died too young. The ones that never had a chance to go to prom, or toss their graduation cap in the air. The ones that never got married, had kids, and a dumb dog that always gets into the trash. The ones whose soul mate walks around a little diminished and doesn’t quite know why. I remember them all, not just in August but in all of life’s little moments. They are the ghosts that follow behind me, matching me step for step.