In seventh grade I made a list in my diary of deceased acquaintances and friends, which now stretches on for two pages and a half.
Every time another person dies, I faithfully record them into my book. I do not want to forget anyone. I would hate for them to forget me.
People die of many different causes and for many different reasons. The memories of some will stay with you forever.
One person that I always reflect fondly upon was a male classmate of mine from junior high. The top honor had been bestowed upon him of being my 6th-7th-grade crush.
I had faithfully loved and obsessed over him for two years. I could recall each conversation we had ever had, and every compliment he had ever paid me. I sat next to him in class, and described him to my girlfriends as, "a silent, strong… prince charming type."
No one had the faintest idea, least of all me, of his intentions. He was first clarinet in the school band, a marvelous student and an A-grade athlete to top it all. He had also already won a full scholarship to prestigious music school somewhere on the hoity- toity New England coast. He had a great life ahead of him. His potential could only have been for the greater good.
I had taken a shine to him right away. Though I must confess it was not until nearly the second quarter that I spoke to him.
The first days I did not notice him. The clarinets sat across the room from the Keyboards, and they were hard to see behind their tall black music stands.
I was very much then still infatuated by my fifth-grade crush Rusty, an electric guitar player extraordinaire. I watched his face constantly; neglecting my music completely to instead observe the way his fingers could play two notes at once and still have time to wipe the blonde curls off his forehead. Rusty dropped out of school a week later and never came back. The circumstances of which are still a mystery. It left me quite devastated. I could not believe that I had spent so much time on a lost cause. However, I was ready to jump up and start again.
On the first day of sixth grade band placements, Brian finally spoke to me. I had a few weeks before noticed him alone in a practice room playing some Clarinet concerto. It was at that moment that I had decided to set my sights on him.
Everyday, I closely observed him from my seat, trying to not to be too obvious. And I began to tell my friends about him.
Triumph came most unexpectedly when after practice one day, just outside the band room door; he told me that I deserved to be first chair.
This was quite a compliment, since the other female pianists were ten times more popular than I was, and wore tight, low cut shits. There, wallowing in my shallow pre-teen adolescence, I felt heaven bound. But, I played it off like usual, I didn't want him to catch on that I like him. I gave him a sneer and the standard, "umm okay… thanks."
"Since your obviously the only one with any talent. I hope you get it."
He left me to sulk at my stupidity. Why hadn't I said something better than just, "okay?" What must he think of me?
A few weeks after, I was assigned to sit next to him in Math class. He helped me with the difficult problems, and I spent the class period admiring his 'academic wit."
As sixth grade drew to a close, and seventh reared it's ugly head, we had become more than acquaintances. Dare I thought at the time, maybe even more than friends.
Through seventh grade I did not see him much, but for band practice and math class. And finally our paths grew distant.
The day that Brian died, I showed up only for afternoon classes. I had thrown on a big stretchy one piece dress and forgotten to comb my hair. My mother was wearing faded sweat pants, and the over sized white tee shirt she had slept in. She practically had to drag me onto the campus.
For some time, I had been having problems with depression and wasn't able to pull myself together enough to go to school. My arms were covered with safety pin scratches and I spent most of my time in the nurse's office sleeping or complaining of some untreatable illness.
When we got to the office to sign in, I sat in a chair to pout while my mother talked to the secretary. She told my mother to prepare me for terror before I went up to class. My mother asked me if I would just rather go back home.
I told her no and hurried upstairs, still numb and curious to see everyone and their reactions. I did not want to miss the excitement of mass chaos.
I did not cry, because I did not yet believe it. It had not hit me that he was gone. I had seen him yesterday.
The halls were vacant and cold, ripped paper strewn everywhere. Just the kind of hallowed atmosphere you'd expect for this situation. It took me nearly fifteen minutes before I found another human being.
Some blonde girl with pasty white skin that I barley knew waved me over. She was finishing a project in the hallway and asked me if I'd heard about, "that kid who died." I told her yes, but that I didn't know how it had happened.
She made a gun with her fingers and pointed it into her mouth. She clicked her tongue and fell over onto the floor laughing.
I was so nauseas I went into the bathroom and cried in the corner. A tall, thin dark haired girl who was trying to out on Malibu pink lipstick yelled at me until I stopped. I was so embarrassed I wiped my eyes with the ends of a paper towel and went back to class.
All students had mandatory counseling sessions for the rest of the day. I sat there silently, thinking about how stupid people were and how they took their lives for granted.
Sean who was Brian's best friend and I sat in a darkly lit room and talked to the notoriously harsh crisis counselor Mrs. Fry. After fifteen minutes, she instructed the other children who were with us to go back to class. She kept the two of us a while longer because we seemed to be in the worst shape.
I could not stop whimpering. Sean looked frightened and desolate. He kept shaking his little thirteen-year-old head and mumbling audible things. Finally he rose his head from the desk top and said gravenly to the woman, "I tried to kill myself once. It didn't work."
She was startled; you could see it in her large black pupils. Her body did not shift, pink-skirted legs remained crossed, lips calm and pursed, glasses just barley off the bridge of her nose. But in her eyes she was distressed, and she did not know quite what to make of it, any of it.
Mrs. Fry shook her head with no nonsense sigh and handed me a tissue.
"Clean yourself up girl. It's time to get back to class. You should be fine now. You have already been here long enough."
I didn't know quite what to say, or what to do. I got up, walked out and went back to the bathroom.
I looked into the mirror, and stared at my reflection. What if I had told him how obsessed I was with him? Maybe he would have known that somebody loved him. Maybe he wouldn't have killed himself. On the other hand, I wasn't that special, just a confused little girl.
I began to cover my face in layer thick mask of makeup. I tried desperately to use shallow beauty to make myself feel better, but I only became even more disgusted with myself.
What good could makeup do, if you didn't own the color Malibu pink in the first place, and if your cheeks were far too piggish to ever be called sexy without some major plastic surgery?
At home my family was slightly more sympathetic, but suspicious of me mooching of the attention. I resigned myself to being alone for a while and writing in my diary. I decided to start a list, starting with my grandfather and moving onto a ten year old girl who had died of heart failure in the fifth grade. She had been a friend of mine and my parents allowed me to attend her funeral with great reservations. Death was never the same, not after I saw her dead body, fragile and white, like a plastic dummy sleeping peacefully. I have never been to a funeral since.
I will always remember Brian, simply because of the impact that his death had on my life, and my mentality. In a sick sort of strange way, I identify with his suicide, and if I were him I would not want to be so soon forgotten.