I'm doing this because my school has decided to put on a "mock DUI event" the week before prom. By 9am they'll have all the juniors and seniors gathered up onto the bleachers and ready for the show. They've been bolstering it on the announcements these past five days- opening act will be a quadriplegic whispering of the night she was thrown from a truck, followed by a mother who lost a whole pair of twins to a day-drinker, and then, for the grandest act this Central Floridian school has seen since the last bomb threat, two students will drive junk cars across the football field into a head-on collision.
It's supposed to be a secret, but we all know- a semisweet leadership girl who lost the school election has been given the absolute honor to die tomorrow. She'll be pulled out of the twisted metal and shattered by a helicopter, the ripped tule of her prom dress flying out in the wind around her lifeless body, and won't be seen again until Monday.
They have a beautiful memorial planned for her. They'll set up a stand with roses and her senior photo in the cafeteria, something her friends will have the solemn task of posing with for their Snapchat stories. But, don't worry, she won't sacrifice too much of her life. Someone has agreed to take over her streaks while she stays home and lets everyone contemplate her loss.
It's guaranteed that people will cry. Girls have been joking they won't even bother with mascara beforehand. Girls and boys will cry over this, girls and boys to whom the worst thing that's ever happened is failing algebra or a speeding ticket. Girls and boys who will nod this all away when the bell rings and text at stoplights on their way home.
Attendance mandatory.
This, however, won't be happening for me. I would just skip school outright, but I know that my dad will get on me about it and then I won't get anything done. Show up for Spanish in the morning and a bit of macro in the afternoon. Library for all the rest.
I have a family member who really did die like that. I have another family member who was struck in the street by a drunk-driver and had all his talents and independence dashed out of him. And yeah, they didn't get to come back after a three-day weekend. You know what they got? Not the roses, not the memorial. Not a locally-trending hashtag campaign. The only place their names still exist are engraved on a weed-covered rock and on their door in an assisted living facility.
The best way for me to get through tomorrow would be to choose not to speak. If I open my mouth for a hello, this really might come out instead. And if I contradict, if I refute something that we really put a lot of time in it and why don't you just be respectful and sit this one through, my last few weeks of high school will be difficult indeed. And it's already been difficult.
So I'll just shut my mouth and stay somewhere on the complete opposite side of campus and hope to God that I won't be able to hear the helicopters, hear the screeching, hear the collision, hear the screams, have to have any idea of what it was real-life like for them on the nights that they were called to be a tragedy.
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