Aftermath_(1)

A few days later, we all went to Micah’s funeral. The doctors didn’t want to let Tracy and me out of the hospital, but Sandra and our parents pushed for it, and so we sat up in the front row in matching wheel chairs, with Sandra sitting between us. It was so surreal. To this day I can remember sitting there thinking, none of us is crying, we should be crying. But we just sat there, three banged up and bandaged teenagers, one of us missing part of her leg, watching as person after person stood up and told stories about Micah. And we just sat there, basically numb.

I spent the rest of the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school working on recovering from the accident. There were endless days of physical therapy that at times seemed worse than the original injuries. But gradually, I regained most of the strength on my left side, and by the end of August I was well enough to head back to school.

Tracy went back home with her family to work on her own recovery, and it was years before I saw her again.

Sandra and I talked a little over the summer, but she was distant, and a few weeks before school started, the reality of what had happened hit me. My best friend was dead, and I’d been driving when it happened. I knew in my head the accident wasn’t my fault, but still a deep sense of guilt settled in on me; I couldn’t bear to look Sandra in the eye; and as school got closer, I realized that I’d lost two friends, and I started my junior year under a cloud of depression. I tried going back to the high school marching band, which had always been the one place I felt most comfortable about myself and around other kids. Unfortunately, while I’d mostly recovered from my injuries, my left leg would still give out on me from time to time without warning. That wasn’t conducive to holding a field formation, and I found myself sidelined even from the band!

As the school year started I sank deeper into my depression, and I started to drink. Mostly beer, but I’d partake in just about anything that was available. My grades suffered, and I started skipping out on classes, too. I found myself hanging out with a whole new crowd of kids, the ones I used to mock as stoners and losers, and to my surprise they welcomed me into their circle. I lost my virginity, drunk, with a group of people watching, at a party during our winter break that year. To be honest, I don’t even remember most of it, much like most of the rest of my junior year.

Sometime around March our mid-semester grades came out, and my parents saw how far I’d really sunk. They sat me down and we had a long talk about how I was throwing my life away, ruining my chances at this and that—the usual “let’s give the screw-up kid a wake-up call” conversation fodder. Not much of what they said had any sort of impact on me, until my mom asked if I thought Micah would be doing the same thing if I’d been the one killed.

That hit me hard, and as it sunk in, I started to realize over the next week or so, in a beer-and-schnapps-clouded, stupid teenager sort of way, that I hadn’t even thought of Micah since sometime early in the school year.