Guilt

We got rushed to the front of the line because the lacrosse team was v.i.p. that night. Mike had basically won the game, our first win in three years so we got everything we wanted at the party, first choice of the hard shit, a free keg cup and some sketchy kid even offered us a sweet deal on a bag of coke. My girlfriend told him to fuck off as we all laughed at him and how he wasted his money on that shit. It had been the first win for the lacrosse team in over three years so it was a big deal; every one was at that house. Mike was the golden ticket; he had scored two goals, and he scored his third at the last second pulling us ahead by one. We cut the line for beruit and started a tourney, Mike and I on one team and Dave and Jon on the other.

We had been friends since I could remember, but we were nothing alike. Mike was a star lacrosse player and the schools play boy with his blonde hair and dark green eyes. He looked more like a movie star, tall and thin but muscular, than a small town high school kid. Dave on the other hand was short with dark hair and dark eyes and spent more time with his guitar singing about girls than he did with the actual female race. Jon was the smart one, “the good kid” who got into all of his colleges and who had a scholarship to BU, the school of his dreams. Then there’s me, Daniel, the average kid with dirty blonde hair and brown eyes and about five-nine with an average build. I play football but I’m not that great, I have a guitar that I haven’t touched in years and I got into most of the colleges I applied to, so I guess I’m sort of smart. I, however, was the long term relationship one out of all of us, I met Cassie freshman year and we’ve dated ever since; it’s one of those we are going to the same college and she probably already has her wedding dress picked out type of deals.

The party had seemed like one of the best nights of my life at the time. We had a month until graduation and Jamie Martin’s parents were in Europe until a week before graduation so we had a huge house to party in for the rest of the school year. The whole night people just kept giving us more drinks, and our three game beruit tourney turned into five games all down to the last cups. I had been trying to keep track of how much I had but I was close to the point where you start to forget your own name, never mind how many times you had filled the ugly red keg cup. That might be why I forgot the accident, or maybe I just block it out of my mind. Either way, everyone told me I grabbed the keys before anyone could stop me then me and the guys booked it out of there in my little red sports car.

My mom’s voice awakens me from my daydreaming and I remember we are in the car; sure enough she is lecturing me about car and alcohol safety, the same lecture I’ve gotten every day since that party and the accident. I go back to glaring out the window as I remember how much this day is going to suck. It even started out bad, I woke up late, threw on some clothes I found on the floor and pulled out the bag of coke from under my dresser but before I could even open it my mom was bursting into my room giving me just enough time to toss the bag into the top drawer of my dresser. She basically pushes me out of the room tossing the orange sash at me mumbling something about me being irresponsible or something along those lines. Now I have to spend the next three hours picking up trash on the beach, like I do every Saturday, except this time I have no high to get me through it.

I’m just glad the guys aren’t around to see this, when they were alive I would never have touched drugs except for the occasional bowl as we drove around at night. After the accident though, everything changed. I was in the corner at another party a few weeks later, when that same kid offered to sell me some coke. After shooting a look at Cassie dancing in the living room, I turned and followed him into the bathroom. A couple of people shouted after seeing two guys go into the bathroom together but I just flipped them off and closed the door. He pulled out a bag and I pulled out my money, and before I knew it I was snorting a line in the bathroom. I’m not sure why I did it, it could have been that I just needed an escape, or that I was overwhelmed and stressed, but I think mostly it was guilt, the one thing that has plagued me since that night.

I finished community service ten minutes ago, and I am in no mood to deal with Cassie’s apologies over being late. She starts to talk to me about her day and I just tell her to shut up as I reach for the seat belt. I never noticed before, but when you pull too hard on a seatbelt it locks. I close my eyes as I pull it slowly across my chest, thinking ‘That’s why I’m here, the damn seatbelt locked.’ I find myself wishing it had snapped; I wouldn’t be so guilty or so lonely if I was dead like them. We drive down Lisle street and when we pull onto Park, I close my eyes, I know there are three crosses, surrounded by flowers and candles and probably a few people who stopped to read the plain white poster boards hanging on the broken trees with the names, David Spaniel 8/12/87 – 4/26/05, Jonathan Beker 10/3/86 - 4/26/05 and Michael MacGregor 4/7/87 - 4/26/05.