We never returned to the lake after the accident. No one could bear the thought of seeing their final resting place. I never would be able to get the image from my head, I would be scared forever. I could forever feel his warm blood on my hands and I can remember the look in his eyes as he took his last breath. Most of us would drift apart to different corners of the world but a scarce few would remain together for a while or even a life time. Some would leave this town and move to faraway places while others continued on with their lives in Argent, trying to erase the horrors of that day. But the truth was everything in that town would remind us of our friends, the ones who never left the lake and the ones we would never speak to again. No matter how different we pretended to be, we were all connected by a tragic accident. We, the class of 2013, were alike in only one way – we had killed our best friends and we would never be happy again. We can pretend too. We can pretend to move on, to be happy, to find love, and to forget. But we all left a piece of our heart at Brewster Lake on that Sunday afternoon.
Fourteen. Fourteen. The number of drinks I’d had. The number of times I’d kissed a boy. The number of days in Spring Break. The number of red cabins on the lake. And the number of friends I lost that day.
The police questioned all of us. Individually they shone that bright light in our eyes as we sat cuffed in the hard metal chair. Most of us were drunk or had some alcohol in our system. Everyone was crying. Some of the guys had tried to be strong but when they loaded us into the cop cars they started crying like babies. The police couldn’t get a decent reply out of any of us that wasn’t filled with tears.
They sent us all home with yellow slips summoning us for trial on a later date. I was being tried for underage drinking. Others had it worse. Sexual relations with a minor. Driving while intoxicated. Illegal possession of a firearm. No one walked away without a court summon. That day sixty-seven people were arrested.
Sixty-seven people. That was all that went home that night. Sixty-seven families that got to breathe a sigh of relief for it wasn’t their kids at the bottom of the lake. And fourteen families that would never see their children, brothers, and sisters again. They would close their doors and grieve. Then they would be forced to bury their children. No parent should ever have to bury their child. But yet fourteen fresh graves were dug and fourteen caskets were filled with memories because there was no body to be buried.
My family was one of the fourteen. My baby brother. Only sixteen and his life had already ended. He was smart. He was planning to go to Harvard. He wanted to be a lawyer. Everybody loved him. Who wouldn’t? He was funny, and kind, and just full of life. My baby brother, never to see graduation day. Never to see his acceptance letter to Harvard that came three days later in the mail. Early admission. It had never been done in Argent. No one had ever left before their eighteenth birthday. He was the smartest. He had the brightest future. Now all that was left was a cold headstone covered in flowers and my mother’s weeping body.
There were four suicides that year. One the younger brother of Jeremy Bryce – the star athlete. Jeremy hadn’t been in the initial accident but he had swam out into the flames and rescued Mary Elmwood from the wreckage. He went out one more time but didn’t return. He was a hero. He was the golden boy that everybody loved even in death. His family couldn’t take it. His father became a prominent fixture at the bar and his mother slowly became addicted to pain killers.
That year was painful. Everywhere you looked someone was breaking down, another student was drowning their sorrows in alcohol throwing their studies to the wind. Seventeen students would drop out before graduation. We used to one of the brightest counties in the state but by Christmas our test scores were so low that the average grade was a D-. We were all barely passing.
Some kids turned to church for a remedy to their sorrows. They threw themselves in whole heartily. More and more people lined up outside the church on the off chance that God would forgive them for their sins. I wasn’t one of those. My family had never been very religious but I saw my mother and father venturing closer and closer to the church on Sundays.
When it came time to apply for college only twenty students applied. I was one of them. I applied for a school as far away as I could think. I had to leave. I needed a fresh start where nobody knew that I helped kill my brother, my best friends. I got an acceptance letter from my fifth choice college. The others wouldn’t take me with the combination of low grades and police record.
We had planned prom as juniors. We knew what band was going to play. We knew who was going to run for prom king and queen. What dresses we were going to wear. Everything. We had the playlist already downloaded. This was supposed to one of the best nights of our lives. The teachers still put it on in hopes of cheering us up and getting us involved. No one bought tickets. No one went. We all found ourselves that night sitting in the dimly light cemetery holding hands and crying for the friends we’d lost. Some people woke up the next morning laying on the still fresh grave of their best friend. While others found themselves crying in the arms of their friends unable to face the day.
Graduation was worse. Twenty-four students graduated. Fifty-seven more were supposed to walk across that stage and in an ugly cap and gown to receive their diploma in the dingy gym at our high school. No one smiled. No parents cheered when their children walked across the stage. The principal told us each in turn congratulations that our lives were going to be so much better from this point forward. No one believed him. He was feeding us lies and praying that next year’s graduating class would be better.
I left the day after graduation and moved to Las Vegas. Before I left town I went back to the cemetery and said goodbye to the empty caskets and gravestones that had become my friends over the past year. My brother sat in the shade of an oak tree. I could imagine him there reading a book if he was still alive. He would have told me that everything was going to be okay. That we were going to make it. Maybe I would have believed him. But I know that it will never be okay again.
We all left a piece of our heart at Brewster Lake on that Sunday afternoon. A piece of us would always call us home to Argent. But most of us would never answer the call.