Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff (14 page)

Later, when we were in school, Donny and I would spend the night at each other's houses on the weekend. This is when we would talk. We had anything-goes, no-holds-barred conversations. We talked about what we thought about life and what we wanted to be when we grew up. Donny wanted to be a billionaire, and I wanted to be everything from a teacher to an architect. For me, it changed almost as often as my underwear.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother wanted to get me a new car. My father said, “Joyce, let him get a job and buy his own car. He will appreciate it more.” He has always been an advocate for working hard and earning the things you want. During one of our father-son talks, he told me, “Life has this peculiar way of leveling out. What I mean is, if you work hard in life, like I have, you will get a break. In my case, the break has been our financial stability and our wonderful family. If you take it easy, you will get knocked down later.”

I was young, dumb and didn't listen. I rarely did my homework, and I scraped by on the tests. I didn't cheat, lie or steal, not too much anyway. I just took it easy and put forth as little effort as possible to get by.

My mother wouldn't give in on the new car, so my father finally did. Mom bought me this cool black Toyota 4x4, with an earsplitting CD player and blinding KC lights. I felt invincible. The first thing I did that day was buy a radar detector. It became my “lookout man.” I never got pulled over for speeding. With my truck, I found a new freedom. With the radar detector, I acquired a new sense of rebellion.

My seventeenth birthday was the year my father's advice caught up to me. All day I had pleaded with my mom to lift my barely existing curfew for one night. Since I knew exactly what levers to pull and buttons to push, I got my way.

That night, Donny and I went camping with a couple of friends of ours. We took my truck and John's truck over Cook Mountain and down into the Lake Abundance campground. John and Rick made a stop in Cook City, while Donny and I drove on to the campsite. We had been to the site at least a hundred times with our Boy Scout troop, and knew the forty-five-minute drive like the back of our hands.

Donny and I started setting up camp. About a half-hour after we arrived, John and Rick pulled up. They unpacked John's truck and helped us finish setting up. Then we all relaxed around the huge fire Rick built. That is when John revealed the surprise he and Rick picked up in Cook City. They had found a bum standing at the edge of town with a sign that read, “Why Lie? Need Beer.” They made him an offer and he accepted. They paid him the change from what was spent out of fifteen dollars for a twelve-pack of Bud Light. He made somewhere around six bucks. I'm sure the whole thing was John's idea because he was always doing the kind of crazy stuff he could get into a lot of trouble over.

None of us had ever had more than a sip of our father's beer before, and I was kind of hesitant. My dad had lectured me on the responsibilities and dangers of drinking alcohol many times.

“Don't worry, it won't hurt ya,” Rick said, after he was halfway through his first.

That has got to be the weakest argument that has ever come out of anybody's mouth, but it was enough to convince me. I thought to myself,
Three beers, what is that going
to do to me? At the worst, I'll get sick and puke.

After we had guzzled, chugged and ripped apart three cans each, Rick spouted out, “I'm not feeling anything. We need some more.” It was time for a beer run.

Donny and I were voted to go, so we jumped into my truck and went tearing off towards Cook City. We were both kind of excited by this little campsite rebellion. It was the first time we had ever done anything we knew our parents wouldn't approve of—unless you count the time we snuck out of my house and got caught, but that shouldn't count, because we didn't do anything.

I was probably driving a little too fast, but I am not sure because things were a little blurry—not to the point where I don't remember anything, just to the point where things like speed and seatbelts don't seem to matter. Donny suggested we take the shortcut. It would cut at least ten minutes off the trip, so we cut across Rattlesnake Field.

It was mostly grass, the waist-high kind, perfect for lying on your back and watching the clouds roll by or a good game of hide-and-seek. The field was a whole lot steeper than the access road we had come in on. My truck would have made it on any given day, but it was night and we couldn't see very well.

The truck came to a quick stop with a loud thud. We had hit something and were hung up. I looked out my window. “I don't see anything; you got anything over on your side?” I asked Donny.

“Yeah, you hit a tree,” he said. “There is a rather large tree just behind your right front wheel.” It wasn't really a tree; I wasn't that drunk. It was a log that had been hidden by the tall grass.

At this point, I wasn't exactly sure what to do so I did what any young driver would have done: I floored the gas. The tires were ripping and spinning, and I was rooting for my truck. The log slipped out of place and threw my truck off balance. The truck started to roll. As I felt the truck start to fall off balance, I remember that feeling of panic you get when you know something bad is inevitable. I was almost immediately thrown from my door. Donny went through his window. I was thrown up the hill and out of the path of the truck; Donny was thrown downhill, under the truck and crushed as the truck rolled over him and on down. I remember hearing Donny yelp as the truck rolled over him.

I started to run for help, but I heard his voice pleading, “Don't leave me! Please, Drew, don't leave me!” I immediately turned back.

I slid down and crawled over to where he was. It was worse than I thought it would be. There was blood, a lot of blood. I think I even saw some bone. I wanted to run and get help, but I stayed there with him. I braced my self against the hill and set his head in my lap. He had a grass stain on his forehead and some blood-soaked dirt in the corners of his mouth. As I listened to him wheeze for air, I caressed his hair, the same haircut he had had since third grade. His broken ribs shifted with pain to the slow and inconsistent rhythm of every breath. I was crying as I held him. I felt like a first-grader who had been punched in the stomach by the school bully. An angry, sad, ashamed pit of emotions raged inside of me, like a pot of boiling oil. I wanted to scream, but I was crying too hard. I tried to apologize for doing this to him, but I was crying too hard. Then I noticed Donny's breaths were getting fewer and farther between. With one final sigh and quickening tightness of pain, they stopped.

I set his head down and started running. I didn't stop until I had reached the campsite. I am not sure why I went there first. That is just where my legs took me. Rick and John were asleep by the fire. I splashed them with water, explained what happened and started running towards Cook City. John and Rick just laid there stunned into half-soberness and scared into solemn remorse.

I made it to Cook City in about thirty minutes. I went straight to the twenty-four-hour convenience store where Rick and John had bought the beer. I asked the clerk to call 911.

I led the police to the accident. Donny's body was still lying there limp and cold, like an old doll nobody wants, tossed into the closet. The police questioned me all night, and then there were more questions the next day. “How did this happen? What did you do then? Why did you do this instead of this?” I was sick of all the questions.

I hate that night. I wish I could forget it ever happened. I don't think I ever talked to Rick or John again. I saw them in the halls at school, but none of us made eye contact.

When Donny died, so did a part of myself. I was a junior in high school, and I nearly didn't finish that year. I could feel the other kids staring. I could hear them in the halls. I cried myself to sleep every night asking Donny to forgive me. The guilt was overwhelming. I dropped out of school my senior year. I just couldn't concentrate, and I couldn't take all the kids asking me if I was all right all the time.

It has taken me a long time, but I have progressed. I don't cry myself to sleep anymore, although sometimes I wake up, in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat crying out for Donny. My fiancée, Jennifer, has gotten used to it. At first, it scared her even more than it did me, but now she calms my nerves and sings me back to sleep. Tomorrow is our big day. I am going to marry her and begin a new chapter of my life. I only wish Donny was going to be my best man.

Garrett Drew

[EDITORS' NOTE:
This story is not entirely factual. Some
aspects have been fictionalized.
]

Turn It Upside Down

I spent a little over a year working with Kris at the Creamery, an ice-cream shop in our city. He was a year younger than me, about sixteen. We didn't attend the same high school and didn't have a lot in common—we simply worked together for an entire summer and school year. Outside of work I didn't know a lot about Kris. He was close to his family, talked about his friends and his girlfriend a lot and was active in his church. But at work, I knew him well.

Kris was probably one of the most uplifting people whom I have known. He loved to joke around, often blockading one of us into the huge walk-in freezer where all the ice cream was kept. He was a tall guy with smiling brown eyes and sideburns that he grew really long. He had so much energy and was always the first to do the jobs the rest of us hated, such as cleaning out the bathrooms or taking out the huge bags of sticky trash. I loved nights that I got to work with him. They went by fast and were fun. Plus, he was the only boy working at the Creamery, so I felt safe when I walked out the door, sometimes around midnight, to go home.

I remember one night in particular. I came in at 5:00 P.M. that night to work the closing shift with Kris and Melanie. It was a hot summer day, and I was in a terrible mood, not at all looking forward to the night ahead. Kris could tell right away I was in a bad mood and tried to cheer me up, but it was pretty much to no avail. I had decided that it was just going to be a rotten day, and there was nothing anyone could do to change that. We finished up early, took out the trash and were walking to our cars after saying goodnight. Suddenly, I heard someone chasing after me. Before I could turn around to see who it was, Kris had picked me up and successfully turned me over so that he was holding me in the air upside down. I screamed until he finally let go, and I yelled at him, asking what in the heck he was doing. His reply was that he had to get me to smile at least once that night.

“Well,” I told him, “it didn't work. I didn't smile.”

“Yes, you did,” he said. “You just had to be upside down to see it.” He was basically implicating that my frown had been turned upside down. He flashed me a smile and said goodnight, and I smiled all the way home.

After a year and a half at the Creamery, I decided I wanted to move on, so I wasn't there the night it happened. On July 15, 1999, they had just finished closing and Kris was the only one behind the store when he got into his car around 11:00 P.M. He never made it out of the parking lot.

I was eating breakfast and watching the news the following morning. I listened with absolute terror as the reporter recounted the story. “A seventeen-year-old boy was the victim of a random act of violence last night. Two fifteen-year-old boys and a seventeen-year-old boy are in custody for what was appears to have been an attempted carjacking in Old Colorado City.” My heart stopped, my whole body went numb, and I knew even before his picture flashed on the screen and she said his name. “Kristopher Lohrmeyer died instantly from a single gunshot wound to the head.”

Something changed for me the night Kris died. I realized that nothing in our future is certain. The only thing I am ever going to have control over is my own attitude. And the most important thing I can do is to open my heart to everyone, just as Kris did to all of us. And it is because of him that I now know how to turn my own frowns upside down.

Jessie Williams

Sorrowful Lesson

The mall was overcrowded, shoppers rushed from store
to store;
Nobody paid attention, as she crouched there on the
floor.
She didn't look in trouble, and she didn't seem afraid;
Apparently, she stopped to rest, she did not need my aid.

A little girl of eight or nine, and cute as she could be,
I wondered, should I stop and ask, if she needs help from
me?
I wondered if her mother had just left her there alone,
I thought, as I walked by her, in my haste to get back
home.

As I left the mall, I could not get her off my mind.
Did that little girl need help? Was I just acting blind?
It bothered me so much, I had to go back in the mall;
I had to get this settled in my mind once and for all.

The mall began to close, I heard some chain doors coming
down,
But, as I looked, the little girl was nowhere to be found.
Is it my imagination, that again is running wild?
Thinking I had lost my chance to help this poor lost child.

I guess she must be fine or she would still be sitting here,
I get way too emotional at Christmastime each year.
I had to leave and get back home, where it is safe and
warm,
The weather forecast for that night, a chilling winter storm.

Late that night it happened, as the weather station said,
Frigid cold and heavy snow while I was snug in bed.
In the morning, I awoke to winter's nasty caper,
The only place I'd go that day was out to get the paper.