Nine months lost

Today is my nine-month anniversary. This is a different kind of anniversary, one of a journey. My journey will never end as long as I live, and I will always remember that life taken away.

On Feb. 8, 2007, I remember driving to Glen Rock High School in the morning just like any other day. I turned the corner to try to find parking and found myself slamming on the brakes as I nearly drove through some haphazardly laid out caution tape. Puzzled, I turned my car around. I found one of my good friends, Suzanne, who would never fib about school, and she told me that there was an emergency. I turned around and drove back home.

I was later awakened from a nice nap by my father, who had a startled look in his eyes. I will never forget his words.

"Someone committed suicide."

I was shocked and terrified. Yet I even found myself laughing on the inside. It served my awful, small town right for a disaster to happen. But my father wasn't finished.

"...They think it was Zack."

I stared blankly at my wall for a good 20 minutes in silence. Zack was my best friend. I became nervous and flustered and reached for my cell phone. I texted Zack, pleading, "Please talk to me."

I was panicking, unsure why I was unable to cry. I visited some of Zack's and my closest friends to comfort them and still found myself devoid of tears. Eventually an emergency message was sent to our house saying grief counselors would be available in the school building. I found the courage to go to the building. In retrospect, I find it pathetic that of the nearly 800 students, only about 50 showed, most of whom were not even in the senior class.

When I entered the auditorium, all my closest friends were waiting. They turned to me in silence and came to embrace me. It was not until then that a rush of emotion came over me, and I lost control.

It's hard for me now to even fathom how exactly I shed so many tears in those days following. A friend showed me a text message that Zack had sent out to his closest friends ... that entirely disregarded me. The next day was perhaps the worst day of my life. Each class sat in silence. In my first-period choir class I desperately tried to pull myself together while sitting next to the roses placed on his seat. People continually inquired about why Zack did what he did, the answer to which I did not know.

After school that day, my amazing friend Amy and I organized a memorial service. Among other meaningful objects, a box was placed upon a table into which hundreds of students, faculty and friends silently dropped messages for Zack. I saw the lost and pained looks of Zack's parents. It was the most emotionally taxing experience of my life.

Zack had jumped off the roof of our school after midnight on Feb. 8, 2007. All anyone knows is that Zack apparently had a sense of never being good enough. Yet Zack was the smartest person I ever knew, the kid who read 40 Dean Koontz books by the time he was in fifth grade, the kid who got an 1130 on the SAT in seventh grade and the kid I thought of as my best friend. We had one day even talked about how awesome it would be if we both ended up at Princeton. But he never applied early anywhere, like I had. I'm told it's because he couldn't take even the idea of rejection. I went through a period where I thought everything I was had killed him. I had been accepted to Princeton and felt horrible for it. I would not touch the piano for a while because I remembered how he once told me he wished he could do something, anything, like that. I could not even bear to keep secrets; after all, secrets did Zack in. Tension erupted between my parents and me as I made a much larger deal about my homosexuality than was necessary. And yet, I would still wake up hysterical in the middle of the night, wanting to embrace my mother.

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But now, I've come so far, and I've reached a state of bitterness. I now find myself referring to Zack as my "former" best friend. Because of everything that's happened, I am now best friends with his cousin, Andrew. I keep no secrets, as any of my friends will attest. I am almost too open an individual. I remember writing my message to Zack, telling him I could never hate him. But if I could see him now, I would punch him until I broke his nose. Many of us have been through hell and back because of Zack. But at the same time, he is still a friend I dearly love and miss every day. While writing this, I cried over him for the first time in a long time.

Zack was an amazing person and a waste of greatness. I agonize then and again whether to see Zack more for his betrayals or for the friend I once knew him to be.

And yet I wonder if this was some despicable gift in disguise to help me combat all my own secrets. Would I be the person I am today if I could have saved him, if I knew the secrets he hid inside?