It would be ten years before I’d try therapy again.
That Tuesday or Wednesday, there had been a school-wide memorial assembly: Celine’s teachers, friends, and coaches giving tributes to her, the “girl who has been so cruelly taken from us.” I hadn’t had the guts to be there that day, or back to school at all.
Friends told me that, before the end of the assembly, a teacher stood from the crowd. This was a guy I barely knew and didn’t very much like. He walked straight to the microphone. It was a surprise; the teacher hadn’t been designated to speak.
“Along with the sadness,” he said, taking the mic from the principal, “I know there’s a lot of anger here.” This teacher wasn’t a hippie, but he was given to wearing pullover baja shirts in his social studies class and I’d laughed behind his back many times. “Great emotion is justified in tragic events like these. But we should take a second to remember that Darin is a student in the North Shore community, too.” (Our school had about five hundred and twenty students total.) “The reports tell us he wasn’t at fault, and I am sure we can agree he’s a good person.”
It was years before I wrote to thank him, this guy I didn’t really know, who was decent enough to perform a simple kindness, the kindness of remembering the young man whose well-being it would have been easy, at that moment, to forget. I didn’t say a word to him the rest of my high-school days.
As I waited to decipher the forming pattern of accusations and consequences, I returned to class. It was early June, about a week after the accident and a few days before the funeral.
I was met at North Shore High’s front door with a stormy look from Melanie Urquhart, one of Celine’s friends. I had prepared for this, or something like it. What high-schooler wouldn’t glare hard at the boy who killed her friend?
I had the hunch, as I contrited my way from class to cafeteria and back, that my day would be filled by these black glances. I was wrong. With frightened eyes, I looked everywhere, at everyone. And in the homerooms and corridors, there quickly grew around me a zone of silence and inviolability. Except when my friends would suddenly mount brief, haphazard campaigns of everything’s normal, quoting lines from Fletch and slapping my book bag or calling me a dick.
All the same, the inescapability of what had happened — what was happening now as I showed my face in the clogged thoroughfare between classes — threw who I really was into shadow, even to myself. It felt somehow like living at the last limits of objective reality. I seemed less real than the plain, plump truth did. Because I’d driven a certain road, someone who had been alive was dead. I had killed someone. And yet, that wasn’t the end of it. Because now the daily me was back: the residue of that accident returned to school. The shambling or smiling or lurking person who’d run down the girl. I remember the first time after the accident my name was called in class, the feel of pause and hush in the room, like deer scenting something strange. Everyone’s ears and tails flicked. Speaking aloud here meant, all at once, that I was a student again. I’d have to work to be as present, as definable, as real as the accident was.
Before lunch, Jim — the guy who’d been such a jocular monster at the movie house — apologized and tried to explain himself. This was like that surprise tribute my social studies teacher had given at the assembly, a case of spot kindness. Jim was telling me that when we’d seen each other, he’d heard only that there’d been some kind of accident. And if he’d known that a person had actually been seriously hurt, let alone died, he of course wouldn’t have ever dared or even dreamed of, etc. Who cared what he said; his hands were on my shoulder. He asked three or four times how I was, and his grip on my arm felt good. When he saw I couldn’t answer, he’d interrupt my pauses. His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren’t right even as he couldn’t stop presenting them.
Another buddy, Eric, assured me that he and others had started in on the high-school equivalent of push-polling, of caucusing for votes. Come on, they’d say to anyone still on the fence, the undecideds. Wasn’t it a little suspicious how she just turned into his car? You ever think of that? To her friends they’d say quietly: We have to be there for Darin, too. We have to support him, too.
For all that, my inviolability zone wasn’t airtight. An AP English teacher, rancorous and grim, squinted my way: I’m almost positive he shook his head and grumbled as we passed each other. But more often what happened was vague. Students in hallways passed looks back and forth, telling one another: Hey, go on tiptoes around a griever like this. Or they just shunned me — quickened their pace, hid their heads in open lockers. I got a sense of which look signified what. Grievers become connoisseurs of the averted eye. My stomach was wincing the entire week. Except now and then, on the second and third days, when a few non-friends dared talking to me. At those moments, there would be that echoed thump! everywhere in the chest.
On the off chance I would need to chat, I’d prepared a whole, verbatim pitch. (“The entire thing happened in like an eye blink.”) When I delivered it, I’d see myself as poignantly sad, even a bit aw-shucks, with sundown lighting and uncertain piano tinkles right out of Hollywood, a scene trembling on the brink of discovery.
Again, most people steered clear, but a few—“Hey Darin, that morning did you have any, well, accidents happen, whatever — I’m sure you weren’t, I mean, who gets drunk during the day, but I’m just asking, did you …”—a few kids did say things that demanded I address the accident. I’d chew off my monologue piece by piece, fussily clearing my throat, letting out a chunk at a time. It was the version I’d settled on, official and even true, but in a way that seemed to go against the spirit of truth: facts with edges sanded, corners rounded. (“Again, I didn’t really see her cut in front of me until pretty much, you know, impact.”)
The kids who did talk to me usually said: Most of us understand it wasn’t your fault, or some other soft response. And I even got awarded this: in front of my locker, the football team captain face-gestured my way. (With, I should admit, infinite disinterest.) He was the physical king of the class; his nod played up his good chin, the charisma of his nose … But so what seemed to be happening to me was a surprise. I don’t mean that North Shore High accepted my return with a gentle yawn. A fatal accident will remain a trusty motor of cafeteria scuttlebutt — I could intuit that as I humped around carrying my lunch tray. I felt like a paper cutout, poised there, being snipped into conversations at every table.
The school also had, of course, a few death fetishists. Kids who drew intricate pen-and-ink arabesques on their notebooks, who scratched BLACK SABBATH or ANTHRAX in their official fonts on the spine. These kids jostled over again and again, offering condolences but wanting accounts, details, details. I was a figure to them; to them, I may as well have been walking the halls with a black cowl and sickle. There was one girl in particular. She had mannish hair, cut in a greasy style. It was obvious, as she interrogated me — the wide eyes, the thrilled cheeks — that by talking about this, she felt close to something decayed and vibrant.
But still, what now seemed a qualified acceptance of me at NSHS came as a relief — compared to my own serfs-with-pitchforks visions. My reception exceeded what I’d hoped for. All the same, a new unease came shyly into my heart, as if on tiptoe. I didn’t know what it was. And then I did.