A Lesson Learned Late

Rachel

February 15, 2005

KONOS History of the World

When I was in high school, I made a mistake that I’ll never forget. My best friend Barb had started hanging out with a bad group of people. They were the kind of people who didn’t care if they killed someone while they were drunk. In fact, they thought it was cool to do just that. I tried to get her to understand that they were not the kind of people she wanted to be around, but she just told me I worried too much.

One Friday Barb came over to my house and told me her mom had said that she could spend the night. I was glad she had come over; I thought I might be able to talk to her about her "friends". Barb quickly let me know that she wasn’t actually going to spend the entire night, but she didn’t want her parent knowing where she was going. She asked me to cover for her while she was gone, and said that she’d be back later that night. I asked her where she was going. She told me that I didn’t need to know, but since I was covering for her, she let me know that she was going out with some of her friends. I knew I probably shouldn’t, but after I made her promise that it was just a one time deal I said I would cover her. This happened a second time and I told her I wouldn’t cover for her if she didn’t tell me where she was going. Barb told me that it was none of my business, and that if I wanted to be her friend, I would keep my mouth shut and keep her covered. I wanted so badly to be her friend and to help her see she shouldn’t be with these people that I agreed. That night when my Dad asked me where Barb was, I told him she had been invited last minute to go to the beach with some of her friends and that her mom had said it was fine. When Barb came back to my house that night, she looked a little different. I couldn’t tell what it was so I left it alone. A couple of weeks later she came back and again asked me to cover for her. I told her that if she didn’t stop going out on the town then I was going to tell her parents. She told me that if I did, I might regret it. She looked serious enough that I just stayed quiet. It was around 1:00 that night when Barb came back, and she smelled and looked as if she had been drinking and might have even been drunk. She immediately crashed into bed, but I stayed up thinking about what I was going to do. I couldn’t just let her keep going out and I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I was worried about what was going to happen if I told anyone.

The next morning after she left to go home, I was watching TV when I saw on the news three people who were shot the night before. Two of them had died and one of them was barely alive. The person who had lived had told the cops that they had been shot by a group of teenagers who looked like they were drunk; it was a group of four guys and one who looked like she might have been a girl. By the description she gave of the girl who had been in the shooting, and by what I knew of the people Barb was hanging out with lately, I had a bad feeling that that girl was Barb. I was headed out the door to go talk to her and her parents when she walked up to my house. She told me that she was going out again and to cover her. I told her that I wasn’t going to cover her anymore, and asked if that was her who had shot those three people the night before. She told me it was her, and that I should stay out of her way. Barb said that if I didn’t cover her and stay quiet I just might be the next one to go. I just sat there and watched her walk away. I knew that it was wrong to not do anything about it. I also knew that if I didn’t do something about it then more people were going to be killed. But I was really scared about what she had told me she would do to me if I told anyone. I wasn’t ready to die - at least not right then. So I stayed home.

That night Barb was killed. She and her friends had gone out on the town again with the sole purpose of getting drunk and killing more people. Barb’s drunkenness caused her to have a car accident, and she died. When I heard about her death, I knew that if I had just gone to her parents, or even mine about it, then no one would have gotten killed, and Barb might still be alive to truly be my best friend.