This is My Message to You

Red

RED

August sucked, to put it nicely. My mom had me go to a therapist a couple times to make sure I was okay, which I appreciate a lot more now than I did then. Luckily I had college to distract me; I threw myself into preparations for the fall, showing a lot more enthusiasm for clothes and dorm room shopping sprees than I usually would have.

I had been sad about leaving the people I'd known for years, but now I couldn't stand to be around anyone who went to my high school. The soccer guys had a bunch of nights where everyone would hang out and drink and smoke cigars and talk about Connor once they were drunk enough to not feel anything. I guess that was their way to cope with their grief, but I couldn't do that. I couldn't just drown myself like that.

Plenty of stories circulated about what had happened: drugs, pills, acid, I don't know. I didn't listen to them. Mostly I just wondered why I hadn't done anything when I lived right next door to him, when I'd watched him deteriorate and just thought oh well. But I guess I hadn't registered the depth of his alcohol and drug problems, or known about the antidepressants he'd been on for months.

That's what I tell myself now. In August, though, I fell asleep every night with earphones in and Bob Marley on my iPod, thinking through endless scenarios in which I somehow could have saved him.

Grace told me the truest version of the story. She knew, because her boyfriend had been the last person Connor talked to that day.

Connor had texted him in the afternoon asking to hang out after he finished his work shift at the restaurant. He'd had a rough night and just wanted to chill out before going back home to face his parents. Grace's boyfriend had said sure and then waited around for hours for Connor to show up. But he never did.

Because after work, he drove to the highway, and he got out of his car, and he walked across the meridian right into the path of an oncoming semi.

I couldn't picture it. I still can't. Not Connor, who always had to score the most goals and claim the best toys in the sandbox and tell the funniest jokes in class and earn the most detentions of anyone in the grade. Some things will never make sense to me, no matter how much reason people put behind it.

Grace told me they found traces of LSD in his hair, probably from the night before.

I hoped it was from the night before. If he had to die, I wanted him to go with eyes like the summer sky, not that awful black.

We got through it together, Grace and me. She had me over at her house for a lot of sleepless nights, let me cry on her shoulder and talk my way out of it. And I helped her be there for her boyfriend, who thought he was never going to forgive himself for somehow not interpreting something out of Connor's last texts.

One day, about a week before we left for college, we sat in her room scrolling through Pinterest boards of how to decorate our dorm rooms and stalking our future roommates on Facebook. At one point, I looked up at her and said,

"I've been thinking – I want to get a tattoo."

She met my eyes and didn't blink once, just said, "Okay. Let's do it."

We didn't ask our parents; we were newly eighteen and wanted to do something crazy and independent because we thought we were cool. But we weren't totally irresponsible: We did our research and found the least sketchy tattoo parlor around. The day before we both left for school (the least time possible for our parents to notice, in other words), we drove there together and held each other's hands because we're both terrified of needles.

My parents did notice, because they're parents and that's what they do, but when I told them why, they didn't question it. No one did. It's small enough that I can keep it my secret, to look at when I think of him. I never felt the need to tell anyone else about it; not even Grace knows the full story behind it.

But now you do.