The photograph on the cover of the newspaper is black and white. I'm in it, blocked by other students, recognizable only from the shape of my nose and the half dozen friendship bracelets around my right wrist. One is red, black and white, the school colors, and a thicker one is of greens and blues. I'm writing, my head tilted back, arm above my head, short hair standing back from my forehead.
I don't know what I was writing that particular time. Not once when I passed that poster could I go by without stopping to write something else. Three times, total, I stopped to write. The first was something inane. Something about how sorry I was. How useless those words were. How the tears made the pencil-fine letters that I wrote look thick and ugly.
The second writing, I remember.
I wrote about milk. Grey milk, particularly, but milk of all shades. Red. Purple. Green. Blue. Black, once. Any color imaginable that could be created with food coloring. About elementary school kids, crowding over the long tables, standing to peer over the blockade of Jaret's lunchbox, to see what color his milk was that day.
I don't know why his mother colored his milk. To make it more interesting to drink, I suppose. I can't imagine any other reason. Sometimes, usually, it worked. Rather than being simply white, it would be a vibrant, unexpected shade.
One day, though, it was grey. Not just grey. A sort of sick, purple-tinged grey, the color you might expect from a festering wound. There was nothing to do, really, but admire the putrescence of it, and watch in prepubescent awe as Jaret drank the stuff.
Fifth grade. Kenai Elementary School. Jaret and I were both in town that year. My family'd moved; I suppose his had, too. It was the first time I noticed how cute he was. His milk had always been more interesting before. Brown hair. Good smile. I don't remember what color his eyes were. Brown, I think. He was handsome.
At the end of that year, I moved back to North Kenai. Travis McSomebody asked me to be his girlfriend. I didn't want to, and somehow he knew I had a crush on Jaret. I suppose I must have mentioned him. Travis told me Jaret had a girlfriend, but I still didn't want to go out with Travis. I always felt vaguely guilty about that, through high school.
Seventh grade. Petersen Bay. Jaret, Matt and Derek decided to take a dip in the Cook Inlet at the end of May. Ice was barely off the water. I still don't know what possessed them; sheer bravado, probably. Jaret came out blue, goosebumps all over, with wrinkled, dark blue jeans clinging to his legs. I think he was a competitive swimmer by then; at any rate, he had a better body than twelve-year-olds are supposed to.
Tenth grade. Kenai Central High School. November twentieth. The radio that morning said there'd been a plane wreck outside of Homer. Mr. Ruckel was dead.
Mr. Ruckel'd taught social studies at Kenai Junior High. His method of discipline for unruly pre-teens was push-ups. There were some kids who did them daily. I remember doing them once. A hundred, I think. Badly, by the end. No "girl" push-ups for Ruckel.
It wasn't until I got to school that I found out Jaret'd been on that flight, too, hunting with his dad on Kodiak Island and twenty-four other people. Twenty-one were dead. Jaret was alive, in Providence Hospital in Anchorage.
The morning was surreal. Everyone at KCHS had had Mr. Ruckel in junior high, and no one could quite believe he was dead. Worse, almost, were the ones still alive. Jaret. Shane. I didn't know Shane personally; he was a year or two ahead of me, and though I recognized him, I'd never spoken with him. Jaret was the one I was worried about.
It simply wasn't possible that he might die. He was fifteen. We all were. Immortal. Healthy, strong kids. Death didn't belong to us yet. And so I waited that morning to hear that Jaret had pulled through, gone from critical to stable, that he was going to be okay.
I didn't pray. I couldn't. I don't believe in God. No. I simply believed he was going to live. There wasn't another option.
I don't remember if Mr. Craig gave us our math test that morning or the next. I do remember that I failed it, and that I couldn't believe he'd been heartless to give us a test when we were barely holding together from shock. Maybe he thought the normalcy would help.
Lunchtime. I probably ate. I don't remember. We sat and talked quietly about how Jaret was going to be okay. About Mr. Ruckel'. About the time in Mr. Ruckel's class that Derek Fandel had written on his test that the Japanese had won World War II. The day the tests were handed back, Derek was wearing a t-shirt with a Japanese rising sun on it.
"Just because you wear their t-shirt, Derek, doesn't mean they won the war. What language do you speak?" Ruckel was teasing; Derek and Jaret had been friends since third grade, and teacher and student knew each other well.
After lunch. English class. The teacher didn't even bother trying to teach. We'd all grown up with Jaret, the kids in this class, all of us from North Kenai Elementary. We sat, and waited. No one spoke. I started writing a note to a friend.
1:10pm. Our room was right next to the councilor's office. There'd been audible crying all class period, but it suddenly elevated. The teacher looked around as we raised our heads, still silent, and then she left to see what had happened. A few minutes later she came back and, awkwardly, said, "Jaret just passed away."
I hate that. I hate the euphemism. Dead's dead, and it's no prettier if you try couching it in gentle terms.
Tod, one of Jaret's best friends, just lowered his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. I stared at the note I was writing. Stared at it, and then, very carefully, wrote, 'Jaret just died.'
After a moment or two the words turned to a blue blur.
Next hour was history. I wandered in late. So did half the rest of the class. He said something, pretty words I don't remember, about what happens after a person dies. I remember they affected me, and I remember telling him I wished I could believe what he did. Then I left and went first to call my mother, then walked to the other end of the school to tell my father.
He hugged me, and told me that the first death was always the hardest. I hated him for that, for the cliched bullshit of it, and left almost immediately, trying to outdistance the sickness in my gut.
The next morning. Kenai Central's halls had been carpeted that summer, only a few months before, to cut down on the sound of foot traffic.
Every step could be heard that morning. There were no voices, nothing that suggested eight hundred teens were involved in their daily ritual of going to homeroom. Nothing but the padded echoes of their steps on the new carpet.
Someone put up posters for the families, posters for people to share their loss on. The milk wouldn't leave me in peace until I'd written about it to Mrs. Ruckel. It still didn't leave my mind. It never will.
There was a memorial service that afternoon. Jaret's best friend spoke. The only thing I remember him saying was how he didn't want to be there. How he'd refused to speak until Mrs. Ruckel'd asked him to please say something. He was peculiarly calm.
Thirteen months later a car wreck killed another girl in my class, and the doctors had her best friend sedated. I wondered, then, if Paul had also been sedated, or if he simply had massive, painful control.
What I remember most vividly from that service was the swim coach. Mr. Oberg. No one liked Oberg; he was a less than competent coach, tall, gangly, unattractive, and completely lacking in people skills. He got up on stage and told a story about a race in which Jaret had swum his personal best, but had finished behind another Kenai swimmer. Oberg said how he'd congratulated Jaret, and that Jaret had replied, "Thanks. It wasn't bad, but I still didn't beat Ricky."
Jaret might have said that. What I can't believe is that Oberg congratulated him; the man never congratulated anyone. Ever. Maybe he did that once. Maybe.
Hah.
My hands were bloodless, wrapped around the auditorium seatrests. How /dare/ Oberg take Jaret's death and make himself look good. How /dare/ he. It was unforgivable, and none of the swim team could let it go. To each other, we snarled and growled. I don't think anyone ever spoke to Oberg about it.
I still don't know the truth of Jaret's death. I know that his mother decided to donate his organs, and that two people were able to see because he died, and someone else got a liver. I hung onto that, as if it made a real difference. It didn't. Not to me.
There were two stories at school, about his death. One was that Jaret had woken up before dying. He'd asked after his father, and nodded to hear that Mr. Ruckel'd already died. He told his family he loved them, and asked his mother to tell Yvette, his girlfriend, and Paul that he loved them, and said goodbye.
The other was that he'd died without waking, letting go of a badly injured body for painless nothingness.
I don't know which I believe. I don't know which I want to believe.
A week later we had a substitute teacher in one of our classes. She called out names from the roster for roll call, and read, "Ruckel, Jar--oh."
There was an uncomfortable silence.