When I was 16, part 3
Rursday, August 30, 2001 - 23:51

It was a phone call that officially ended my childhood.

It was the last Saturday of Christmas vacation during my junior year of high school. I was over at my friend Amy's house and was going to spend the night there. It was very warm and quiet in her house. We were in her room, lying on the floor looking at college brochures. Amy was looking at a brochure from a business school in New Orleans. In a year and a half we would be starting new lives. It was exciting to think about.

Then the phone rang, piercing the quiet of the house. Amy's mom answered it. "Aim," she said, "it's for you."

Amy went out to the kitchen to answer.

As she left the room, I thought about how Amy had always struggled with school. Here she was thinking about going off to college. I was really proud of her.

"Hello?" she said. "Oh, hi Mandy. What's going on? What? An accident? What happened? Is he okay?" I thought Mandy's loser boyfriend Paul might have gotten into a car wreck or something, since it had recently snowed a lot. I pictured a little fender bender in the town 45 minutes from where we lived. Meanwhile, Amy was getting louder and louder. "What? What?! No!"

She came running into her bedroom, screaming "Brian's dead! Brian's dead!" As soon as I heard her say that, I became numb and I felt like I was in a dream. I went out to the phone and said, "Who is this? What's going on?" I was hoping it was someone fooling around with Amy, who was kind of gullible. But it wasn't. Mandy had heard that our friend Brian had died in an accident on the ski hill. That's all she knew.

Amy was freaking out, screaming and bawling and sobbing. I just sat there, numb, ripping apart kleenexes, the kind with the built in lotion. They got all sticky in my hands. I couldn't cry. I didn't really believe it.

The next day I went home and tried to convince God that if he resurrected Brian, we wouldn't tell anyone, even though it would make a good story for the tabloids. I also tried to make myself cry, but didn't really succeed.

All my friends were kind of fucked up after that. I thought about it non-stop for two years straight.

A week later, a kid at school was badly burned in a fire.

A couple weeks after that, a kid in my biology class killed himself.

A month later, I turned 17.