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Chapter Eight: Family

Temperance Duke

I still didn’t know what to make of the past hour of my life. This was, without a doubt, one of the worst days of my existence. I tortured myself with the memory.

Pam and I were talking as we waited for the cross country coach. She arrived and told us to do sprints on the track. The problem was: we had a meet yesterday. I told the others to just do four easy miles.

Pam suggested we stay on the track to do them so Coach would not yell at us. I dismissed it. Coach was drunk and already stumbling off to the warmth and safety inside against the cold November weather. She wouldn’t notice and even if she did, she wouldn’t even care.

“We can just go in the woods,” I told her.

She wasn’t one to argue of course and I was too stupid to see the nonsense in my words.

We ran to the edge of the woods. Everyone kept their heads down as we passed the first sets of trees with signs and warnings saying that they won’t hesitate to shoot us for trespassing. No one had ever been shot though and we ran there every day for the first two months of school until the season ended. We never even felt the presence of another human being in those woods with us. We never heard their feet crumpling the leaves as they walked.

Even today, I swear I never heard them.

Pam was running up ahead but I wasn’t feeling well so I was in the middle of the pack. Suddenly, I heard a gunshot and we all stopped running right there and froze. No one knew where it came from. No one knew if more would follow.

“Temperance!” I heard one of the freshmen at the front calling out for me.

I sprinted to the front and—to my absolute horror—saw Pam quickly bleeding out with a huge wound in the side of her neck. There were tears in her eyes. Her lips were moving, her mouth vainly trying to form the ‘T’ in my name. I lapsed to my knees and took her hand. Her pupils moved at my touch but then they went dead. She was dead.

Some sophomores were already sprinting back to the school to get help. But it was too late. It was just too late.

Eventually we were all waiting by the main entrance. What were we waiting for, I didn’t know. Pam’s body was already being carried away in a body bag.

Our team stood there with other students demanding that we tell them what happened in the woods. Then I saw Rex walking outside and I tried to hide behind the rest of the team but he spotted me.

I did not want to have to be the one to tell him the only girlfriend he ever had, or at least the only one that truly mattered to him, was dead and gone forever and she was only eighteen and how could this have happened and . . . and . . . could it have been my fault?

Well, he asked and I hesitated and he pressed for the answer and I told him and he ran away before anyone could see him cry. That face he made with those sad eyes and his quivering lips falling into a seemingly permanent frown . . . I would never forget it.

I got home from school that day feeling pretty beat up. I had seen a news reporter at the school and she was on live. When I got into my car, my dad was blowing up by phone. It kept ringing for the entire drive home but I ignored it. I couldn’t talk to him or to anyone. I could not force words past my throat and suppress my tears at the same time.

I got home and my dad threw his arms around me and told me how worried he was. I glanced over at the TV. There was breaking news that a girl was shot and killed in the woods near Ashworth Memorial High School. She was a senior running with the cross country team she was captain of. That was me. But I wasn’t dead.