The Yearbook Committee

For Danielle-Nova Najem, Tammi Ireland and Viola Bechara —

the friends I found in unlikely circumstances.

And for my siblings, Milad, Marie-Claire and Josie —

the friends I was lucky enough to be born with.

You are the best team-mates a girl could ask for.
I hope you are all in the yearbooks of the rest of my life.

I stayed with David after everyone had disappeared. It didn't seem right to call them friends now — sitting in the living room and looking around the empty house that was littered with bottles and plastic cups and vomit, it was obvious that they were just revellers who were only there to celebrate when it was all fun and easy. I wanted to say ‘I told you so' to David, tell him yet again that you had to be careful, but even after the events of that night I was still wary of David's criticism. Fun police, he'd called me earlier. And maybe I was.

Until, of course, the real police had shown up.

I sighed and reached out to rub David's back. I wondered if I should stop — it seemed like a really girly gesture — but David didn't say anything. He just sat there, shoulders hunched, unusually silent.

‘Maybe you should go call your parents,' I said.

David looked up and nodded. ‘Do you think it will make the news?' he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I don't . . . don't know.'

‘I'll call them just in case,' he said, rising.

He returned a few minutes later, a look of shame on his face.

‘They're on their way,' he said, tossing his phone down onto the couch.

‘Are they mad?' I asked, regretting the words as soon as they came out.

‘What do you think?' he growled, his eyes flicking up at me. ‘Come on, let's sit outside. I need some air.'

‘I'll be right out,' I told him, as I looked around the room. ‘Let me tidy up a little more.'

I threw some more things in the garbage bin against the outside back wall, then followed David back up to the front entrance of the house, where I joined him on the cane chairs and waited. Waited for news from the hospital; for trouble to come knocking; for his parents, who would probably say that this was the last straw in his long line of bad behaviour.

David's voice cut through the silence.

‘You should say it,' he said. ‘Tell me I was wrong to invite everyone on my Facebook list.'

I scoffed, but said nothing. That wasn't the only issue, I wanted to say. There was no security, no order, no one keeping watch. Just a bunch of dumb, hammered teenagers who thought they were so much older than their actual age. But there didn't seem to be much point in saying any of that now.

Still, not everything that had happened had been David's fault. Nothing about this party seemed different to any of the other parties we'd been to as seniors at Holy Family High School. Sure, there were a few extra people in the mix, but the basic ingredients were the same: smuggled booze and clueless kids high on hormones, their parents' cash and the quest for high-school popularity.

But something must have been different this time; none of the other parties had ended this way before. Maybe it was the excessively hot November weather; maybe we should have paid more attention in that first-aid lesson; maybe it was that end-of-year fever that had everyone thinking a little more recklessly.

It was hard to think through the sirens still echoing in my ears, even though the ambulance had long gone. Moments later, David drifted off, and eventually so did the moon, a large beam of light shrinking into the bay before me as the hours passed. But my eyes wouldn't close.

I was glad of that — if they did close, I'd see it all again. The police notebooks being flipped open, my classmates' faces contorted with shock, the limp body strapped to the stretcher. Still, zombie-like, almost shrunken. Even with the minor signs of life that flickered on the monitor as the paramedics shut the ambulance doors, I knew there was no guarantee.

Everything seemed uncertain, different, damaged. Just like the promise of our youth, now irreversibly changed due to a night whose sinister warning had been brewing steadily beneath the surface of our teenage dreams.