One Small Step | ✔

Adam

I suppose the best place to tell Adam's story,

is next to Adam.

I bike down the long, winding street to his grave,

and sit beside it, tracing the letters engraved on stone.

He was my best friend.

Adam Bishop.

Popular once,

but middle-class in the end.

He was easy,

confident,

happy.

That was who he was in the beginning.

Then, in grade nine, there was a subtle change in him.

No one but me noticed.

His dad was too drunk to pay attention.

His mom was too busy partying with his stepfather in Las Vegas to care.

He became a little more reserved,

less outgoing

less making new friends,

a little quieter.

But no one could tell,

except the people who knew him well,

because Adam's "quieter" was the volume of a regular person.

No one thought it strange.

They simply thought

he had finally learned to 

grow 

up.

Skip forward two years,

grade ten,

he's found one night drifting in the nearby creek.

Accidental overdose is what they called it at first.

Lots of teenagers are sent to the hospital for overdose.

They said he was probably too high,

not thinking straight,

and thought he'd go for a swim.

But Adam didn't do drugs or alchohol,

he despised them.

didn't want anything to do with them,

knowing the aftereffects.

And all of us knew it.

Even the people who ruled it

an overdose at first.

But we all knew he liked to party too.

How he managed to party

without getting addicted

to anything

remains a mystery.

It's a mystery no one will ever solve.

His lips are sealed, In a coffin buried ten feet under.

He can't tell us,

and everyone else was too intoxicated to know the answer to the mystery.

Parties.

Crazy.

Wild.

Stupid teenagers wanting out but too afraid.

Adam dragged me to one,

once long ago.

Naked or practically naked

was the dress code apparently.

Beer cans and clothes littered the ground,

you had to carefully step around

the vomit

coating the grass.

Call me a goody-goody,

I don't care.

That party wasn't my scene.

Just as predicted, I hated it.

Adam left a suicide note.

Like all of the rest,

he remembered that courtesy.

But he only left one for me.

I found it in my mailbox much too late.

Who would check their mailbox at nine o'clock?

But I regret not checking it now.

Because if I did, he might have lived.

But enough about that.

Rewind to the past.

Grade two.

Seven years old.

It was the beginning of the year,

and just like every other year,

I held on to Carina's hand

for dear life.

The teacher tried to pry my hand off.

and failed.

Carina needed to get to class herself,

but she wouldn't if I didn't want her to,

The teacher gave up.

pretty quickly,

knowing it was futile.

another student came to try.

It was a boy I'd never seen before.

His brown hair was disheveled,

but he wore a bright smile.

He pulled something out of his blue backpack.

It was a really big pack of Lego.

"Come on," he said,

tugging at my hand,

the one that wasn't holding Carina's.

"I bet I can make the best Lego city," he boasted.

"I'm Adam."

"Tallulah," I said shyly.

I let go of Carina's hand and helped him build a Lego city.

Come back to the present, dear reader.

that was how Adam and I became friends.

We stayed that way

Until the end of his life.

He talked less,

yelled more,

got angry more often

but still we stayed friends.

But apparently I wasn't a good enough friend to keep him living.

They all say it's not my fault.

No one blames me.

But they're wrong.

I blame me.