Death of a Friendship

He was blond, and I was seven years old. It was love at first sight, especially after he kissed my cheek and I kicked him in the shins for taking such liberties. Not wanting any more bruises, he apologized; not wanting any more cooties, I did the same. We pinky-swore to seal the deal, and soon after became the best of friends.

From the second grade on, Scott Tyler and I were inseparable. I taught him to pay attention in class; he taught me how to ditch without getting caught. I was Lois Lane for Halloween; he was the Joker. While I negotiated with the girls he fell in love with for phone numbers and love letters, he strong-armed the boys into saying “hello” (at least until they cried “uncle”). That’s just how our relationship was: completely equal amounts of give-and-take, as long as Scott ultimately got what he wanted.

And then middle school hit us, with the full force of an eighteen-wheeler and a deer on a deserted highway. Those around us were a new species of human, a species we had never before experienced in our meager decade-long life spans. Suddenly, boys and girls couldn’t just be friends anymore, but instead had developed this strange mating dance of name-calling and torrential tears and kissing behind the auditorium. There also seemed to be a line drawn in the sand, with boys on one side and girls on the other and death to the traitor who crossed that invisible barrier. This was a scary place; I missed the friend who swore to protect me from all things potentially life-altering. In my eyes, though, Scott became a jerk with greasy hair and sleazy salesman tendencies. In his I became a plain-Jane super-nerd with scuffed Keds and too many brains. So, we did what any normal middle-schooler would have done: we began an all-out war.

I, of course, being a female, lived up to my gender’s reputation for playing completely fair; I slandered him to every girl I knew, denouncing him as a womanizing fiend who ripped out girls’ hearts and ground them into tomorrow’s cafeteria meatloaf. “Trust me, I know”, I would knowingly confide. “We used to be BEST friends. Did you know he’s impotent, too?” Of course, I wasn’t totally sure if “impotent” meant some obscure sexual term or a big stupid person who shunned his friend and acted like an ass, but any person who opposes sex education for children should know that it makes a difference (After all, it provides girls with plenty of much-needed ammo).

Scott, on the other hand, resorted to the typical male tactics of blacklisting a girl: he told everyone to stay away from me or he would beat them up. This was a surefire tactic, because middle school boys reside in the Land of Idiots and they had made Scott their king; everything he said was a direct order from their fearless leader. Besides, most of them remembered and did not wish to re-enact the “Uncle” abuse from grade school; they much preferred to mock me from afar. It was because of our war that I was ultimately forced to bring an out-of-town date to the winter dance of our eighth grade year. I pride myself on knowing, however, that Scott had NO date.

And so, as Hemingway said, we beat on, boats against the current. Our war ended with middle school and the beginnings of maturity, but the indifference that replaced the battle was a much more powerful weapon. I had all but forgotten about my friendship with Scott until I ran into him the summer before my sophomore year of high school. It was a driver’s education class, and as uneasy as I was about driving, I was even more uneasy about how we would interact after such a long time. We chatted, of course, caught each other up on our lives, but our minds were borne ceaselessly into the past; after all, what else did we have? Soon we were laughing and joking about how things used to be, and I felt not only a twinge of nostalgia but also a ray of hope: had my Scott come back to me after all?

The next day he handed me a letter. I smiled and rolled my eyes as I read how he had been gawking at the twins who sat in front of me: isn’t it a blessing, he asked, that two girls could have such beautiful breasts? My smile faded, though, as I continued to read the letter. My girlfriend last year was beautiful, it said, I wish you could have met her…would have liked her…died in a car accident coming to see me…all my fault. The unspoken message was, how do I cope? How do I confront my grief? Why does a boy so suddenly have to become a man?

Ah, but I had no answer for him! This was Scott, the Joker, the prankster; surely he wasn’t serious? So I said nothing. Another letter came, one week later. Again, there was an unspoken message, not a question this time, but a challenge: I dare you to prove to me that I can go on, that I will overcome this. I attempted to offer my condolences after class, but I could see the emptiness, the desperate disappointment in his eyes. My fourteen year-old heart couldn’t soothe him his time, and because of it I had let him down.

Again we parted ways, and time flew as we quickly became juniors in high school. I was planning for college, and from what I heard, Scott was planning to get drunk over Thanksgiving break. One sunny Sunday morning the phone rang. It was my friend Casey, and I grabbed the phone to talk to her; we had plans to negotiate an overnight visit for the weekend. For some reason, though, the words came out all wrong. Instead of plans to visit her, I heard “Dad went out on a call last night” and the words “Scott”, “gun” and “suicide”. I shook my head violently, trying to clear it. I must have heard wrong, it was all a big joke! Scott was the Joker, the prankster; what did she mean, dead?

My sorrow was both oddly inevitable and harshly painful. I went to school the next day teary-eyed and grief-stricken, not only for the death itself but because I truly believed I had killed him. I vividly remembered the letters, and his face when I had nothing to say. I saw many girls that Monday, all crying harder than me, and I hated them with a vehemence that frightened me. I loathed them, the skinnier, sexier girls who sobbed into their tissues and prettily streaked their mascara. What the hell did they know?, I angrily asked myself. They lost him once; I lost him twice.

I wore my inadequacy and guilt like a shroud, and it trailed around me as I attended the wake. It billowed around my feet as I gazed down into the casket and saw his white face and blond hair, and it settled around my shoulders as I watched the gold buttons on his navy blue suit for any sign of movement, as I willed him to move. I told no one of my guilt because I was ashamed, and so I welcomed the collective wail at the funeral as my own. Many teenagers had come to mourn him, some for sadness and many others as a mark of status. I enveloped it all, punishing myself relentlessly for crime I had committed.

My guilt carried me well into my teenage years. Through the grapevine, though, I began to hear bits and pieces of what had been too raw to discuss after the funeral. Scott had begun to use drugs, had several girlfriends, and had a huge fight with one of them the day before he decided to put that gun in his mouth. It was then that I realized something: his death was not my fault. As simple a statement as that, and the burden was lifted. I finally came to terms with the fact that there was no Joker, no prankster…only a sad little boy trapped in a grown man’s body. I stopped mourning for him and mourned instead for both of us: he wanted to recover from a girlfriend he couldn’t save, and I was recovering from a boy that I lost. The lesson was a tough one to learn, a harsh reality that comes at a high price. Not only as children but simply as humans, we want so badly to save the world that we forget to ask for help and guidance when we cannot succeed. And when we fail? We either accept and go on, or risk being totally destroyed.