-1The Price of Friendship
Zach Payne
"We're going to remove the ventilator tube from your throat. Blink if you understand."
I blinked a couple of times, more of a reflex than an answer.
The doctor, who looked like my great Grandmother Anna without her ping-pong ball-tipped walker, gently pulled the tube from my throat that connected me to a big, weird looking machine. Even though she was careful, it hurt like hell.
"What happened?" I asked. My voice shocked me. It was raspy and deep, and it hurt to talk. Probably from the tube.
"You don't remember, Leandra? Shit, were you plastered, too?" My father walked into the fishbowl room.
Then I remembered. Images of the four of us sitting in the Explorer ran like a bad film noir through my mind.
I was defiant. "No, I wasn't, Jacob." He hated when I called his first name, but he had started it with his 'Leandra' crap.
He gave me a look that said 'yeah, right' so strongly that Dr. Granny picked up on it.
"We tested her B.A.C.; she was clean." She looked him right in the eye. "No drugs either. Her friends, on the other hand…" She trailed off, straightening her lab coat. "Just thank the sweet Lord Jesus that they all survived. My grandson was one of the paramedics out there, and he said it was ugly. He said that if they hadn't been buckled in, they'd have flown through the windshield and half a mile down the mountain."
Dad and I shivered.
"So you're telling me," he started, his voice slowly rising to its warning zone, "that you got in a car with somebody who was wasted, Leah?"
"No, Dad… I'm not that stupid. I was driving. They needed someone to drive them home, so I went along."
"Then what the hell happened?"
"It's simple, really."
"Kir," I shouted, "Turn down the goddamn radio." but she wasn't listening to me. She was singing along to the song, or more like shouting along, completely out of time, and her words slurred. Using the control on the steering wheel, I turned down the volume, but she groped along the control panel, hitting half the buttons, until she found the dial, and turned it back up.
I sighed, and looked in the rearview. The two guys in the backseat were fighting; managing to get most of their punches around the ditzy blonde that sat between them.
"James, stop it." I told my boyfriend, using that nagging voice that my mother used to love to use. "You're acting like a goddamn animal."
His answer was drowned out by the radio and Kirsten's crappy rendition of 99 Luftballons. I was ready to rip the radio out of the friggin' dash.
"Shut up!!" I screamed, barely able to hear myself over the noise. "I swear to God I'm never going to do this crap again." First the dang party, or rather, the smoke, gulp, snort, and grope fest; and now this. The price of kindness, of friendship. I would not make that mistake again. I didn't even know two of the people in the car. Kirsten was my best friend, and James, my boyfriend; but I didn't even know the name of the blonde girl in the back, and I only knew the name of the other guy, Kevin. James threw another punch at Kevin, but he hit Ditzie instead, square in the gut. She screamed like a banshee out of hell, and I pulled the steering wheel hard to the left. We went into the guardrail, a solid concrete divider. My head hit the steering wheel, and everything went black.
"All of these kids were underage," My dad said. "You should have called me to come pick you up. You should have called the police. You should have done something." His voice sounded angry. Probably because I wrecked the S.U.V.
"Oh, please, Dad." I snapped back. I thought I sounded annoyed. I hoped I sounded annoyed. "Either way, the same thing would have happened. There would have been a S.W.A.T. team coming in and breaking up the party. You'd be bailing me out of jail instead of sitting with me here in the hospital. You'd be just as annoyed. with me."
I paused for a second, but before he could get a word in edgewise, I added, "besides, I would never be able to go to school again if I had ratted out a party at Melody Clearwater's house."
"And why is that?" He scoffed.
I walked down the hallway, carrying three or four textbooks. I looked down at the cover of the top one, a Calculus book. Not because I liked the subject, but because I couldn't look up. I am a persona non grata. Nonexistent. I called the police on a varsity Cheerleader's party. I was dead to everybody. My best friend wouldn't look me in the eyes; she was too busy staring at and locking lips with my boyfriend… oh, wait, my EX-boyfriend.
Nonexistent. I ratted out a varsity cheerleader's party. It had been a week. I was lucky to still be alive.
Well, maybe that's a bit over the top. They wouldn't kill somebody, would they? They wouldn't be that cold.
I set the books down on the floor, and opened up my locker, my eyes struggling to avoid the transcripts of George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on T.V." that had been repeatedly etched into the paint.
I picked up the books, and slid them into the locker. Before I could slam the door shut, I noticed my reflection in the mirror. I looked like I'd aged fifteen years in six days. I didn't bother brushing my hair anymore, so it was frizzy, and black, like the skin right under my eyes.
Tripped. Twelve times since Monday. Jeez, these people sure love their smoke, gulp, snort, and grope fests.
"Stop exaggerating, Leah," my dad snapped.
Exaggerating. Yeah, right.
I sighed.
A couple days passed. I was able to leave the hospital first. Ditzy, James and Kevin were able to leave too, a few casts, a few stitches, but nothing too damaging. But Kirsten…
Kirsten hadn't been wearing her seatbelt. I told her to put it on. I put it on her, and she unbuckled it, not missing an off-beat in her song. I should have pulled over to the side of the road until she put it on, but I wanted to get the night over with. And when we hit the rail, she went headfirst into the windshield.
And now she was in a coma, on a ventilator. It was hard to look at her; probably because she looked so normal, like she was sleeping… I'd seen her sleep a million times before; all of the sleepovers, planned and unplanned, that happened since the first grade. The only difference was that she wasn't snoring, and that most of her head was covered with bandages.
I visited her a lot, I sat there with her, alone, except for the occasional nurse that visited to take something called a Glasgow test; something that involved taking her temperature and checking her reflexes.
One night, Dr. Granny came in, followed by Kirsten's parents. It was only the second or third time that I saw them visit her. That made me worry, because Kirsten's parents had always been nice. But now, they looked angry.
Dr. Granny stood over the ventilator, and paused. She took off her thick lenses, and rubbed her eyes.
Kirsten's mom, a sometimes-sweet lady that suffered from a Napoleon complex, as my dad would say, looked annoyed. "Do it, now," she ordered through gritted teeth. "Or do you need to see the CO again?"
Dr. Granny sighed, and pressed a button on the ventilator. It stopped. She looked at the heart monitor, and I did too. The large number started to drop, fast. 85, 60, 45, 20, 8, then zero. The machine let out a loud whine, and Dr. Granny flipped it off.
"Time of death, 19:34 and 22."
My eyes rolled back into my head. Everything went black.
Filmstrips passed before my eyes. A little blonde girl and a little brunette sitting on little plastic chairs next to each other. Flash. The little blonde girl holding a hammer and crying as an evil-looking woman held a wad of toilet paper where one of the girl's front teeth should have been, while a brunette girl with a noticeably-chipped front tooth laughed hysterically. Flash. A bunch of elementary-age kids playing four-square; a blonde girl laughed as a brunette classmate was smacked in the face with the rubber ball. Flash. Two middle school girls passing a notebook across a classroom, stifling laughs and writing in messy cursive. Flash. Two bodies hidden under sleeping bags, amid bags of popcorn and empty soda bottles, as Kate Winslet called in vain for Leonardo DiCaprio. Flash. Two girls in a bathroom, hunched over a toilet; one holding back the other's hair as she spewed into the toilet. Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash…
"This is absolutely normal, Sir," I heard Dr. Granny's now-familiar voice. "She's in shock, and who wouldn't be? She just lost her friend, for Chrissake. This is how the brain reacts to emotional extremes. Don't worry. She'll be able to go home soon, maybe even tonight."
I sat up in bed slowly, my body slightly shaking. "Is Kirsten really…" my voice failed.
"Yes, sweetie, she is." Not from my father, who was standing in the doorway, but from somebody who was sitting in the chair next to me. I knew that voice… it was the same one that had commanded Dr. Granny to pull the plug. "She was dead as soon as… as soon as her lungs stopped working on their own. The hospital… had no right to make her suffer."
Dr. Granny made a clucking noise as she left the room, and Kirsten's mom glared after her. "Incompetent hag," she muttered under her breath.
"Anyway," she continued, "Kirsten's had a 'do not resuscitate' order since she was born. That means that the hospital had no right to disturb the Lord's natural course." She paused, and pursed her lips. "You probably saw her medic alert bracelet."
I nodded. Kirsten hated that bracelet, and wore it only when her parents were around. She always said that life… that life was too short. I guess she was right.
"This was… some kind of sick punishment, wasn't it?" I couldn't keep the words in. "You wanted… you wanted to punish her for partying, didn't you?" Kirsten always told me that her mother came up with crazy and weird punishments, like deleting all of the contacts off her cell phone the time she'd stayed out past curfew, or siphoning the gas out of her car the time she forgot to take her license when she drove to the liquor store.
"Don't be upset." She put her hand on mine gingerly.
I shrunk away from her touch, the word 'murderer' forming on my lips. But I never said it. I was too cowardly.
The day of the funeral came. James sat next to me on a wooden pew and tried to lace his hand with mine, as my eyes wandered stained glass windows, depicting various saints. Part of me wasn't there, but it was reliving the night of the crash. Wishing that I'd stopped her from going, or had called the police, or had made her put her seatbelt on.
James knew where my mind was wandering. "You did the right thing. If you had called the police, we'd all be sitting inside jail cells right now, and you know it. You did the right thing." He tenderly rubbed my hand.
"Kirsten. Is. Dead." Through gritted teeth. "My. Best. Friend. Is. Dead. You. Callous. Bastard." If eyes were daggers, he'd be bleeding.
He shrugged. "Better dead than behind bars or in rehab. You know what her parents would have done to her. Better that she's with him now." He pointed toward the crucifix at the front of the church.
You could hear the sound of my palm on his face throughout the suddenly silent church.