What's With That Evan Kid?

I still remember when Evan died. I didn’t know his last name, and I really didn’t know him, but his memory is something I think I’ll carry with me until forever.

Evan sat behind me in home room in high school, and a few rows forward and to the right of me in math. We never really talked, and I don’t think that he was the kind of kid who had a lot of friends. His hair looked like a hospital mop, his eyes were always tired, and his clothes looked like they were mostly second hand buys, or at best hand-me-downs from an older brother he may or may not have had.

“So, what’s with that Evan kid?” Callie would ask at lunch some times. And if some one asked me to describe him in a single sentence, that would probably be what I could tell them.

What’s with that Evan kid?

Our high school wasn’t all that big really. Maybe six hundred students in all. It was a typical inner city high school, I expect. The students were a pretty typical cross section of middle American races, classes, and creeds, though the student body was a little more liberal and a little more Hmong than I bet other schools were. The hallways were always horribly lit, so by third period we’d often find ourselves ready to doze off. At our ten year reunion, actually, I remember Barbara Rush, who was just finishing her doctorate in applied psychology, told us that she was doing her thesis on the effects of indoor lighting on teenage development.

“It’s amazing, really,” she said, “that more high schoolers don’t wind up offing themselves. We’re only just now starting to collect human data, you know, but from the studies of rats and rodents and even some small primates we’re starting to see just how prolonged exposure to low intensity lighting can severely alter attitude, eating habits, and sleep patterns. All typical causes of clinical depression.” She sounded so excited as she continued to cite medical journals none of us had ever heard of and drop names none of us really cared about. None of us had the heart to tell that she was boring us to tears, so we all breathed a sigh of relief when we realized that she was wrapping up. “I guess what I’m trying to say,” she told us, almost orgasmic after having put her research into words, “is that prolonged exposure to low intensity lighting, combined with the changes in the hormone levels that occur in the high school demographic, leads to an emotional distress very similar to the already established Seasonal Affective Disorder, only the effects some times are magnitudes higher.”

“Fascinating.” Jon said flatly as he another long drink.

So, what’s with that Evan kid?

Maybe it was the lighting. Maybe it wasn’t. The point is that on the morning of March thirteenth, 1989, Evan woke up and decided he wasn’t going to go to school. Instead, he took a knife from the kitchen, walked into his closet, shut the door, and slit his wrists.

I’m not sure how I found out about it. It was a few days after the fact though, I remember that much. And I remember being so angry that I stormed out of school, walked straight to my car, and slammed the door shut. You have to remember that this was taking place before Columbine and all of that, so walking in and out of the front doors of a public high school was no real big deal. At any rate, I sat there in my car in silence just being angry. At first, I thought I was mad at the school. Why didn’t they make an announcement? Then I thought I was mad at myself, for just not being there. But that didn’t last long. I wasn’t one of the kids who teased him or anything. In fact, no one really teased him. He was just kind of there, an oddity for us to observe and debate. “What’s with that Evan kid?”

Now, I sometimes think that maybe that’s why I was angry. He took something away from us we didn’t even know we had. That probably sounds selfish, and it might not even be true, but most likely, at that moment, the real person I was mad at was Evan.

Regardless, I eventually calmed down enough to turn the keys in the ignition and get onto the road. I had no idea where I was going at first, but as soon as I saw the flower shop, I knew that I was exactly where I wanted to be.

I hurried inside and bought a single red rose. That was when my anger climaxed. Everything after that was falling action.

I drove myself back to school feeling a lot calmer. It was noon, and math class would be starting in a little bit. Again, I had no problem walking through the doors, but I got a few odd looks and blank stares carrying a single rose with me through the halls. Some girls laughed or hid blushes behind text books, probably wondering which lucky girl they were for.

Once I got into Miss McNye’s room everyone was already seated at the same desks, never formally assigned to them, mind you, that they had been sitting in all year. Evan’s desk was empty. Miss McNye was late, as usual.

Now, if this were a tear jerking, Oscar winning, coming of age, high budget Hollywood production, the room’s conversation would slowly fade out and the heads on each one of my classmates would have slowly turned to me. But no one stopped talking, and no one noticed me at all. Which was a good thing, really. I didn’t want to have to explain anything to any one. I set the flower down on top of the empty desk and took up my seat at the exact moment our teacher walked in, filling the room instantly with the smell of her lunch, which for Miss McNye was always half of a pack of cigarettes, unfiltered.

We all opened up our texts books to the page she told us to, but gradually, people started shifting uneasily. Something had changed, and ever so slowly people began to realize that something had happened. Or maybe was happening. Over the course of a few minutes, everyone’s eyes had shifted from our teacher, who was scribbling frantic triangles and cosines on the green black board, to Evan’s old desk and the single rose.

It’s hard to describe what the mood in the room was just then, but I’ll give it a try, because it’s important. It was like Evan wasn’t really ever gone. The rose did a perfect job of filling in for him by just being there. It sat there, quietly, exactly like him. The stem, crooked like an old man’s finger, proper it up in just the wrong way. The petals were already beginning to wilt. Even the way it was oriented on the desk made it look awkward and uncomfortable. And we soaked all of this in for most of the class.

Then minutes before the bell would ring, it all happened in reverse. We let it go. And things were back to normal again. Picking up conversations left an hour ago, we all filed out of the room, into the low intensity lighting, and off to our next classes. And I still remember, so vividly, lunch the next day, when Callie, plunking her red lunch tray down, opening her milk, and tossing strands of hair from her face, looked around our table and asked us,

“So, what’s with that Evan kid?”