Your Friend, Jordan

Fourteen

Present..

"James, tell us the truth. Why were the cops here the other day?" my mom asked as I headed towards the door the following week, as I still hadn't explained fully what happened the last Friday. It wasn't like they hadn't asked though, they kept bugging me for the whole weekend, but I put in my earphones every time they entered my room, trying to drown out the sound while my music practically broke my eardrums. A few times my mom had gotten annoyed, ripping them from my ears and asking me another question, but then I would only exhale deeply and book it out my room, trying to get away. I dodged their questions every chance I got. I didn't want them to know what happened, what the two officers were trying to accuse me of. Don't ask me why, maybe I was just embarrassed that the police would even think I had anything to do with Jordan's death, or maybe it wasn't that at all. I don't know, I just didn't want them to know.

  I couldn't keep them from hearing the other news though, it was all over the stations and channels that very day.

  "Death of Oakland Teen Confirmed a Homicide."

  It was over the headlines of papers, sprawled across the top of black and white newspapers and spelled out on the screen of the tv. Everyone knew about it, I couldn't hide that from my parents. But the other part, the other half of the conversation—or interrogation—the cops bombarded me with, that I kept to myself.

  Grabbing my converse and pulling them on, I reached my hand in the small dish by the door where the keys were, and began to head out the front entrance. My parents had started letting me take the car to school, they were fine with just staying home most days now. I thought for sure though that my mom would snatch the keys from my hand and not give them back till I gave her some answers, but that never happened, to my thrill.

"Come back here, we aren't finished talking," my mother said in a harsher voice, sounding like it had become the only one she owned. Her light hair getting in her face, she didn't pull it back as she focused on the conversation, wanting me to talk to her.

  "Mom, I can't talk right now. I'm gonna be late, and I've already missed a number of days. We'll talk later," I said, pulling the door open and walking out in a mopping way, beginning to step towards the driveway as the chilly wind blew in my face.

  "You keep on saying that, but we never talk about it!"

  "I have to go. Bye," I said to her one last time as she begun to step onto the porch, while my dad hung back in the house. He seemed to not be as involved as my mother, well, in this case anyways. Maybe he thought my mother was just overreacting, maybe he thought everything was fine. But my mother was right to be worried, considering what the police were getting at when they spoke to me days earlier.

  I took one of the spots in the far end of the parking lot like usual, locking all the doors and hitting the alarm before I went in the doors. To my surprise, I wasn't late this time, while students and kids filled the halls and the tables set up around the school. Glancing at my phone, the time read 8:35 am, as I still had fifteen minutes to get to my class. Making it to my history class for once, no thoughts came to my head at all around the topic as I couldn't remember what we were even talking about. Between sleeping in, skipping my first period class and missing school all together, I hadn't showed up to history for about three, four or five days. Whatever, it's fine, I'm sure I'll catch up.

Opening my locker door, I grabbed for my textbook and threw it in my bag, shoving my folders in there as well while I thought of my other classes, trying to get all my stuff prepared. However it seemed moments after I walked through those doors to the school, I was taken back in time to the week earlier, brought back to my last week where everything hectic and chaotic seemed to keep happening. Our first hockey game. Our win. The party afterwards. Jordan disappearing, and then the cops showing up. The questions being asked, the missing persons investigation. And then his body found. More questions being asked. And now this, his death being ruled a murder. Everything happened so quickly thinking back to it, that all occurred within only a week. How could things go by that quickly? How could things happen one after another like that? How did things turn out so haywire? Where did everything go wrong?