Morgan stood next to the boy’s parents, looking down as the casket was lowered into the grave while the parents looked on. The mother held on to her husband, both of them struggling to fight back the tears, as they were saying their last goodbyes to their seventeen-year-old son, Carl, whose almost completely pulverised corpse was returned into the ground. Morgan had never been that close to Carl, them only being family friends that exchanged the occasional greeting to one another as their parents shared drinks together, but still, she couldn’t imagine what it must be like for them, to lose their only son to a stupid drunk driver, one who’d ran over their daughter that fateful night, head woozy and bottle clutched in hand, just a few nights back, at the end of the party that he hadn’t told his parents he’d be at. She couldn’t even bare to look at them, or their equally despondent nineteen-year-old daughter, Amy, let alone raise a hand to make some half-baked attempt to bring any of them any physical comfort; that’s how terrible he felt.
Morgan was only fifteen years old after all. She’d only just become a freshman in high school and was having trouble navigating through her emotions as it was. She and Carl seemed to be attached to the hip by fate since the beginning of the school year, always in the same classes, always sat a few seats to her right from the very first periods on the first day of school. Had she ever mustered the courage to speak to him freely they might’ve even become friends somewhat; he was into the same kinds of music as she was, judging by the time she’d looked over his iPhone and spied many songs and bands of her same musical taste. Perhaps they could’ve talked to one another about girls, another subject that Cindy was mustering the courage to confront about herself. Despite rarely directly interacting, the two always happened to be naturally in sync. Morgan and Carl always walked one behind the other on their ways to their next lessons, they both ate alone together and they studied silently in the library during the same times.
Against both of their normal social inhibitions, they both decided separately to attend the ill fated school party that night, awkwardly mingling and capitalising on the free beer until both of their social batteries were drained. The party had mostly wrapped up by midnight, which was more than fine for them both. Morgan finally spied Carl when he was about to cross the street to walk over to a friend’s car, when a car pulled up out of nowhere and struck him headfirst, sending him barrelling over the hood and rolling onto the rough tarmac on the road. Morgan gasped in shock as the person who’d just struck him simply continued driving, rolling over Carl once more and putting to bed any hopes of his survival. Someone called the police and got the license plate, reporting the incident as a hit-and-run. The police got after the car, arresting the driver later on for driving under the influence. Meanwhile, an ambulance was called in, and Carl was rushed to the hospital, where he sadly died of internal bleeding several hours later.
Carl wasn’t the most popular kid in school. He’d never prioritised sport or anything that really required socialising at all, preferring to spend most of his waking hours studying, playing video games, or watching anime. Morgan knew this since, drily enough, she shared a few of those same interests and often noticed when Carl would bring in a new manga book tucked underneath his armpit so that no one would see the probably lead cover on the front. His social circle was pretty sparse, only including two close friends that barely talked to one another outside of a console lobby. There was no girlfriend to speak of and, even before he’d died, it didn’t look like he was in the process of getting one anytime soon either. Another weird tidbit was that the two teens only lived a few blocks away from one another. That made things really quite convenient when they were both younger, with Morgan actually spending the night once at Cindy’s house, where they stayed up late just to watch anime and debate their favourite characters.
Now that they were older it seemed that the grave couldn’t have pushed them farther away from one another than they’d already been. Morgan was petite and a tad curvy, with awkward, spikey black bangs and blue eyes while Carl was tall and athletic, really more so than his preferred activities would’ve warranted, with short blonde hair and clear blue eyes as well. Carl sometimes seemed to stare at her forlornly for a moment or two to long, as if regretting not keeping their childhood friendship into adolescence (or perhaps for something more). Morgan herself had loved to hang out with him and was frustrated that not many other people seemed to share the same passions she had. She was just now beginning to come to grips with the loss of her first and only real friend.
When the funeral was over, Morgan quietly went back home and changed clothes. She put on her apple bottom jeans and t-shirt, and sighed as she lay on her bed. She dozed off for a few minutes. Suddenly, she woke up with a start. She looked around the room. For a moment she thought she had heard Carl’s faint voice speaking to her from her bedroom…
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