It was the best of times--high school--and it was the suckiest of times: high school.
Would I trade it, though?
If I could unkill six people, not make the whole town of Lamesa, Texas gnash their teeth and tear their clothes and have to go to funeral after funeral that searing-hot July?
Okay, I’m maybe exaggerating a bit about the clothes tearing. Though I’m sure some grieving brother or friend or conscripted cousin split a seam of their borrowed sports jacket, heaving a coffin up into a hearse. And I bet a dentist or two paid their golf fees with money earned spackling the yellowy molars a whole town of restless sleepers had been grinding in their sleep, not sure if it was over. Not sure if I was gone.
And, yeah-- “golf fees”?
I don’t know.
People who wear plaid pants and hit small balls aren’t exactly the crowd I run with. The crowd I do run with are ... well. We’re the ones with black hearts and red hands. Masks and machetes.
And until I was seventeen, I never even knew about us.
My name is Tolly Driver. Which isn’t just this grimy keyboard messing my typing up. Tolly isn’t short for “Tolliver,” and Driver was just my dad’s random last name, and probably his dad before him, and I don’t know where it comes from, and even if I did, even if I had my whole family history back to some fancy-mustached dude reining mules this way and that, it wouldn’t change anything.
In 1989, a thing happened in Lamesa, Texas. No, a thing happened to Lamesa, Texas.
And to me.
And to six people of the graduating class, some of whom I’d known since kindergarten.
It also happened to my best friend, Amber.
She’s why I’m writing this all down at last.
I don’t know where you are anymore, Ambs.
Maybe we weren’t meant to ever see each other again, after we were seventeen?
In real life, I mean. Because I still see you every night, the way you were the summer between our junior and senior years.
What was Cinderella’s big song on the radio, then? “Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone”? I should have taken Kix’s advice, though, and not closed my eyes. Not even once.
I know now that we never should have gone to that party at Deek Masterson’s, Amber. What I wouldn’t give to let us just make one more round up and down the drag instead. To have sat on your tailgate at the carwash and watched classmates roll in, pile into different front seats and truck beds, and then leave again. We could have eventually eased out to our big oil tank on the east side of town, done the two-straw thing with our thousandth syrupy Dr Pepper from the Town & Country, and watched the meteors scratch light into the sky then fizzle into lonelier and lonelier sparks, each of us holding our breath, not having to say anything.
When I look back, that’s how I see us best: in the last moments before we turned right on Bryan Street, to slope out to Deek’s on the north side of town, the Richie Rich houses. I’m riding shotgun in your little Rabbit truck, with the bucket seat that slid forward on its rails every time you braked, conking my head on the windshield.
You stopped short a lot that summer.
And me, I laughed until thin blood sheeted down my face. Until it outlined my mouth. Until it was dripping off my chin like I’d been bathing in it.
Don’t look at me like that, please.
That’s not who I really was. That’s just what I ended up doing.
I was a teenage slasher, yeah, okay. I said it.
And it wasn’t because my career placement test told me what I was, and it wasn’t because I’d been harboring secret resentments since sixth grade, about some traumatic prank.
It was because I had, and still live with, a peanut allergy.
How’s that for motivation?
“Tolly Driver’s rage built over the years, seeing his classmates eat trail mix with apparent impunity, until it finally simmered over, resulting in a swath of destruction four days long and six bodies deep.”
That’s the 60 Minutes version of me. If the world had cared enough about Lamesa, Texas to even notice.
Or maybe I’m more 20/20 material?