moon river ; g.d.

four

And though I'd never seen his face before, in real life, I knew exactly who he was.

My parents used to be best friends with his. Our dads knew each other in college, and when they graduated and got married, it was only a matter of time before them and their wives were all hanging out as one big group under one big roof. When Grayson and his twin brother, Ethan, were born, their parents named my parents as the godparents on their birth documents if something were to ever happen to them. And a few years after that, mine did the same when my brother was born. Out of all the relatives both families had, they chose each other to be trusted with their own children. That's just how close they were.

That wasn't how it ended up though. Things eventually went wrong between them, my parents never enlightening my brother and I on what exactly happened. They'd give us vague reasons, but we were both smart enough to know better. Out of all the stories and pictures and memories the four of them had made together, we knew better than to believe that it all ended over political disagreements or a little white lie. But it was clearly a touchy subject, so the older we got, the more we let it go.

Ethan and Grayson were only five years old, my brother four and me just turning two when they went their separate ways. I was too young to remember any of it, and went along my merry way like nothing had changed despite the empty seats at our kitchen table and loss of extra voices when I went to sleep at night. I didn't even realize how torn up my parents were until I was at least four, and my brother would recollect any memories he had of the four of them. He'd tell me stories of all he could remember.

I was just turning fifteen when we got a call from a distant relative, a friend of a friend, that I'll never forget. Whatever the person on the other end had said, it was enough to immediately bring tears to my mothers eyes and have her dashing through the house for my father. I sat in the living room floor with my Harry Potter books, curious as to what was going on, but knew better than to ask in that moment. I could hear them both crying from whichever room she had ran into to find him, and heard them profusely apologizing to each other.

I was so confused. I'd never seen either of them cry, at least to this extent, but the moment they turned the corner to join me in the living room, I knew I never wanted to see it again. My father called me up onto the couch, and sat me down in between them. My mother pulled my legs across her lap, and I was instantly comfortable. I still didn't know what was going on, and still didn't know if it was the right time to ask. They were both so incredibly quiet, and calm, that it almost felt like the room would shatter if I said anything.

They talked amongst themselves for a good fifteen minutes, until the front door came swinging open. My brother, who had just turned eighteen years old, ran over to them in tears. Not just tears though. He was sobbing uncontrollably, and was slowly crumbling into a million pieces. The time before this was almost peaceful, with underlying chaos. I knew something was wrong, and was choosing to overlook it and do what I could by simply being with my parents, but as soon as I saw my brother like this, I knew something was seriously wrong.

My brother is my hero, always has been. We've always had the very close bond that all siblings really have, but few show. We fought, of course, and I hated his guts about fifty-one percent of the time, but at the end of the day I don't think I ever turned down an evening run invitation with him. So to see my hero, the person I looked up to the most, in such pain, was jarring to say the least. I was more than confused in that moment, I was scared. I began crying too, just by seeing him like this, and was terrified over whatever it was that was going on.

Only a few hours later did we learn. Our parents told us that Grayson Dolan, Sean and Lisa Dolan's son, had died yesterday evening at a party. A party hosted by the very kid that hosted all the parties at whatever high school he went to. He was a senior, and it was the last party of his high school career before he was supposed to go off to college. He was accepted into BYU, a D1 school all the way in Utah. His friends dragged him to one last party, where a drunken idiot decided it would be a good idea to whip out his dad's shotgun and start shooting shapes into the ceiling.