Post by Emma Louise on Jan 23, 2023 18:49:56 GMT -6
The coffin sits in the middle of the room. The minister stands at the right of the service at his podium.
“I believe Emma has some words to say about Andrea.”
Emma Louise gets to her feet and walks along the red carpet toward the podium on the left of the room. Emma sits her notes in front of her.
“I first met Andrea when we were at nursery school together. I don’t remember the exact meeting but I remember her being there. I don’t remember much about my time there. I was only 4. All I remember is standing on this climbing apparatus thing while the class sang ‘we’re all going to the zoo tomorrow.’ as we literally were going to the zoo next to me. I remember Andrea being on the apparatus next to me. Primary 1 I was in Miss Aitken’s class. She was in the other. We’d meet at interval and hang about together. Used to be me Andrea and Lindsay. We were in the same class from Primary 2 ‘till 7. I remember her showing our teacher, Mrs Harris a pencil she had just because the make of the pencil was a Harris. We would hang out in classes, we’d sit next to each other. We’d play together at intervals.”
Emma looks around the room as she turns the page in her notes.
“In secondary we lost touch, Our surnames meant they put us in different classes so we saw less of each other than we would have liked. We would meet up where we could but she had the friends she made in her classes and I had the friends I had in mine. I do remember joking with her and her would be boyfriend, Larry, about sending a Valentines via post during a postal strike.”
Laughter from the mourners.
“The nail in the coffin for our friendship, if you pardon the pun, was the friends she had at the side of the Science annexes. At the far end of the block was where the smokers would hang out. Andrea was one of them. She liked to partake in a marijuana cigarette. She never carried any of her own out of fear of getting caught with them by her teachers or her parents. So she would acquire one from the many other smokers who would hang out at the annexes. I don’t know how it started, not did I want to but they came up with a way of payment for these. They would hand her a spliff and she would kneel before them and ‘provide payment’ for her cigarette. Her rosy cheeks, freckles bright ginger hair and emerald green eyes looking up at them meant she was never short of someone willing to make a trade.
One day they were all caught.
She was caught spliff in hand and on her knees. Was suspended for two months.
She blamed me. I wasn’t even there. I was in an empty math class room with another friend, Erin along with my brother and his friend. We were playing Hangman on a white board. It could have been anyone that told on them. It could have been the security cameras. It could have been a teacher that just happened to see them as he passed by the science block. It could even have been an ordinary member of the public that was walking down the road past the science annexes.
All I know is it wasn’t me.
Andrea barely spoke to me after. She blamed me and fell out with me. The friend I used to have broke up with me at 16.
Over the years I would see her in town. Sometimes she would stop and talk. Some days she would talk about getting clean and wanting to get a job driving buses like her father. Some days she’d talk about wanting to get clean. Some days she was nowhere near clean. High on who knows what looking for money for her next fix. Every time she’d have her hand out she’d promise that this was the last. Something to ease the cravings and she’d get clean. Sometimes I’d believe her. Other times I wanted to believe her. Sometimes I’d see her with a boyfriend. I saw her with this guy once and he looked like such a nice guy. I thought to myself ‘this is they guy that will get her clean.’ He was so clean cut and pure and level headed that I…
I found out later that instead of him lifting her out of whatever pit of addiction she was in, she dragged him down. Mister Clean Cut died a few short months later of an overdose.
I always believed she would get clean. Or at least I wanted to. I wanted to believe in anything other than the reality before me.
The last thing she said to me was about a year ago. She was wandering around the shopping mall like she normally did. When she spoke she was somewhere between ‘so high that she was incoherent’ and ‘high but coping’. She would speak to me and I understood some of it but she’d ramble and it wouldn’t make a lick of sense to anyone. She was back and blaming me for getting caught behind the science block all those years ago. I told her that I wasn’t playing along. I said that school was decades ago and I had moved on and grown up. I suggested that she should too. The last thing I said to her was when I yelled at Andrea to clean herself up and to grow up.
When I got the call that she’d died, I knew how. I still asked in the hope that some tragedy had befallen her now she was clean.
It wasn’t to be.
I lost a friend years ago over something really stupid. Andrea lost her life over something else that was equally stupid. However, I know that addicts are not going to quit because I or anyone here wants them to. They are going to quit if and when THEY want. I just wish Andrea had long before this was the end result. I know when I sit and think about her, I’ll think of the friend I had. I’ll think of her smile when she laughed. I’ll think of her dancing.
Thank you.“
Emma folds her notes and heads back to her seat.