Witness
I think I heard the shot. It sounded like a door slamming upstairs. Sometimes the doors slammed like that when the language teachers left their classroom windows open. I was probably in the library when I heard it. I was probably with my friends in the library like usual, but when I think about where I was when I heard it, I think alone.
This kid Hollis found the body later, this kid Hollis who always smoothed his bushy eyebrows over and over with his fingertips when he was standing on the diving board about to do a dive. Hollis was decorating the auditorium with the prom committee, and he went upstairs to get something, some crepe paper or something, and he found the body in a dressing room above the stage that we only used during musicals. Hollis saw the body and he went and got Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Harrison saw the body too. Months later Mr. Harrison read this thing he wrote about seeing the body. He read it to our junior English class. I don't know what he expected us to say. It was like he wanted us to help him carry it, or something, that memory. He said that the body was pale, slumped against the wall. He mentioned the blood. For a long time after that I would imagine the body when I closed my eyes in the shower, imagine it slumped against my parents' bathtub. I imagined it the way Mr. Harrison described it. I never heard how Hollis described it.
The next day when we were posing for prom pictures at Cascade Park, Carrie said Hollis was "pretty shook up". She said it like of course he was, anybody would be. Veronica almost cried but stopped because of her eye makeup, and she said she didn't know how we could enjoy the prom now, after what happened, but she was just saying it to get attention like always. She was lucky to get attention for feeling bad about that kid instead of for her prom dress, which was so slutty that when she went to pick up her blind date, who was a freshman at another school, she made Carrie pretend to be her. The blind date's parents weren't fooled.
Veronica didn't know that kid who died and neither did I. Neither did Hollis. All he did was wrestling, and nobody went to wrestling meets. Or matches. Or whatever.
But some kids went to his funeral, and they said the casket was plain wood and people wrote messages on it in Sharpie. They said people put bottles of alcohol in there with him, and joints, and Metallica and Iron Maiden CDs. I wonder what his parents thought about that. I wonder how long it had been since they knew him that well. They said he definitely knew before he did it that they weren’t going to cut the wrestling team after all. But he still did it.
We had the prom and we had graduation, we had college, and some people got married and some people had kids. It was like we were all on a train going away from high school and every once in a while the train stopped and somebody got off. That kid was the first to get off. And I didn't have anything to do with that kid, nothing at all except for this: I heard the shot.
This kid Hollis found the body later, this kid Hollis who always smoothed his bushy eyebrows over and over with his fingertips when he was standing on the diving board about to do a dive. Hollis was decorating the auditorium with the prom committee, and he went upstairs to get something, some crepe paper or something, and he found the body in a dressing room above the stage that we only used during musicals. Hollis saw the body and he went and got Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Harrison saw the body too. Months later Mr. Harrison read this thing he wrote about seeing the body. He read it to our junior English class. I don't know what he expected us to say. It was like he wanted us to help him carry it, or something, that memory. He said that the body was pale, slumped against the wall. He mentioned the blood. For a long time after that I would imagine the body when I closed my eyes in the shower, imagine it slumped against my parents' bathtub. I imagined it the way Mr. Harrison described it. I never heard how Hollis described it.
The next day when we were posing for prom pictures at Cascade Park, Carrie said Hollis was "pretty shook up". She said it like of course he was, anybody would be. Veronica almost cried but stopped because of her eye makeup, and she said she didn't know how we could enjoy the prom now, after what happened, but she was just saying it to get attention like always. She was lucky to get attention for feeling bad about that kid instead of for her prom dress, which was so slutty that when she went to pick up her blind date, who was a freshman at another school, she made Carrie pretend to be her. The blind date's parents weren't fooled.
Veronica didn't know that kid who died and neither did I. Neither did Hollis. All he did was wrestling, and nobody went to wrestling meets. Or matches. Or whatever.
But some kids went to his funeral, and they said the casket was plain wood and people wrote messages on it in Sharpie. They said people put bottles of alcohol in there with him, and joints, and Metallica and Iron Maiden CDs. I wonder what his parents thought about that. I wonder how long it had been since they knew him that well. They said he definitely knew before he did it that they weren’t going to cut the wrestling team after all. But he still did it.
We had the prom and we had graduation, we had college, and some people got married and some people had kids. It was like we were all on a train going away from high school and every once in a while the train stopped and somebody got off. That kid was the first to get off. And I didn't have anything to do with that kid, nothing at all except for this: I heard the shot.
posted by Elizabeth Thorpe at 12:07 PM
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