With my birthday this week and my ten year high school reunion next week, I have been thinking about the past.
I was flipping through my high school yearbook when I came across the memorial pages for the two students that died my senior year. Every school has a couple of kids who, for whatever reason, don't make it to graduation. There are car accidents, the "hey look at me" accidents and well, there's always murder. My high school has been no stranger to the sudden deaths of students. My senior year we lost two. Kenny Jarvis was killed in an auto accident involving another student, and Melanie Richey was murdered the summer before our senior year began.
When a student dies in an accident, you recoil at the horror, cry at the funeral and someday, somehow you begin to remember good things. When a child is murdered, it becomes very difficult to get beyond the anger, resentment and grief to find the wonderful memories.
When the complete horror story of Melanie's murder was told, we all realized that we had been sharing lockers, football games and walks in the common area with murderers. These were not the guys that 'looked strange'. These were the cute wrestler from out of town, the guy that we had gone to school with since middle school, and the guy from our rival school. We never got the heebie-jeebies from these boys; and we all realized how scary that fact was.
This was not meant to be a rehashing of the horrors of Melanie's murder, or a tome on the dangers of young people driving; it was meant as a warning.
School has just started. For some, it is the beginning of four years in high school, for others it is the end of an era. Please, please be careful. Here are a few things I wish someone had told me when I was in school.
:Your parents will not kill you for being late, so don't drive like Dale to meet curfew.
:Taking drugs, even for the first time can kill you.
:Drinking can kill you in many ways, and they all hurt.
:If something looks wrong, feels wrong, smells wrong; it usually is wrong.
:Burying your friends before graduation sucks.
:Taking drugs, even for the first time can kill you.
:Drinking can kill you in many ways, and they all hurt.
:If something looks wrong, feels wrong, smells wrong; it usually is wrong.
:Burying your friends before graduation sucks.
~Sarah
Written in 2005