TITLE: I Had These Friends By Monique Jordan 05/09/05 |
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In high school we were best friends. My dad called Lauren, Brandy, Nicholas, David (my twin brother) and I “the crew.” We did everything together. As long as we had each other the world was just right.
We made a well intended pact to stay in touch after graduation. Brandy and her violin had been accepted to Julliard. David and Nicholas were going into the Marines. They spent our whole senior year wolfing at each other and barking, “Semper Fi.” Lauren and I were headed for North Carolina to study to be missionaries at the Billy Graham University. Since we were in middle school we had spent countless hours dreaming of building churches and orphanages in third world countries. We had plans to go to college together and then to the mission field. But our plans were changed when Lauren’s grandmother became bedridden. Mama D raised Lauren since she was eight months old. When Lauren was thirteen, her mother died of a heroin overdose. Lauren was all the family that Mama D had, she would have to stay behind and care for her.
Mama D died the next year. We all came home for the funeral. Who knew it would be a decade before we would see each other again?
“I guess that’s why my mother used to shoot up between her toes and under her tongue.” The sound of Lauren’s voice brought me back to the cold, gray visiting room of Texas State Prison for Women. She had caught me staring at the tracks on her arms, they looked like tree roots growing under her skin.
“I’m sorry,” I said, breaking my stare.
“So, Mother Theresa, did you come here to judge me?” Lauren said with an attitude that made me wonder again if the guard hadn’t brought out the wrong person.
“No, Lauren, I’m not here to judge you, I’m sure you’ve done enough of that to yourself already.”
“How did you even know? Weren’t you off in Calcutta saving the world or something?”
“Nicaragua actually, I flew home as soon as I heard,” I said with a weak smile. “David told me when I called him.” I picked at a piece of string hanging from my sweater as I recounted what I had heard, “He saw Brandy at the Houston symphony last week. She said it was all over the news that you had shot a man while you and some of your friends where robbing a house. The man was the eighty year old father of the man who owned the house. You and your friends didn’t know he was there. He startled you all, they ran and you shot him.”
Lauren’s face broke into a smile, “Remember that time when we gave all of our clothes away to the women’s shelter and we only had the clothes on our backs left, so we swapped outfits back and forth for a week so it didn’t look like we were wearing the same thing everyday. And then old Mrs. Riddle from fifth period Sociology found out what we had done and brought us new outfits from her husband’s boutique? It was like Christmas in spring.” She was gazing off, remembering a better day, a better life.
Gradually, her smile dropped and tears rolled down her face. “We were robbing the house for drug money,” she confessed.
So much had changed in ten years. The crew had broken up after graduation. In the last decade we had formed new families, launched new careers, found new friends.
“Lauren,” I spoke from a heart weighted with compassion for the girl I once knew, “what happened?”
“What happened,” she repeated?
Again the air grew thick and deafly silent. She studied my eyes, searching for words to explain how her life had gone astray. She slumped back in the chair, her searching gaze dropped to the floor as though the words she would speak were written there. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and began.
“You see, I had these friends…”
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