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hi. i'm allison, i'm eighteen, and i just started college. i made this page
at home in may, on my mom's computer, and now i'm working on it from the
computer lab here. my roommate thinks i'm writing a paper. i'm not.
this page is for derek. we were friends from third grade on, all the way through senior year, in the same small town in iowa where everybody knows everybody. he played trumpet and i played clarinet, so we sat about ten feet apart in band for five years and passed notes the whole time. on february 6 of this year, his car slid on ice on the way home from an away basketball game, and he died. he was seventeen. it's been almost eight months. i'm three hours away from home now, where nobody knew him, and it's weird, because here i'm just some girl from iowa. nobody here knows that part of me is missing. so i keep working on this. at least here it's somewhere. ~ derek, in no particular order ~ * he wore the same ugly hawaiian shirt every single friday from ninth grade on. the parrots one. he said it was for luck. we never won a football game on a friday that i can remember, so. * he drove a 1987 buick the size of a school bus that he named "the boat." it had one working speaker and a tape deck that ate every cassette you put in it, and he was so proud of it. * he was going to be a band director. he already acted like one. he'd stand on a chair during sectionals and conduct us with a pencil. * he could play the high notes in the fight song that nobody else could hit, and every time he did it he'd look over at the clarinets like, did you see that. yes, derek. we saw. * he worked at the ice cream place on the highway every summer and gave everybody from band extra sprinkles. his manager knew. she let it go. * he was the one who called me every night for a week after my grandpa died in tenth grade, just to talk about nothing. i never told him how much that helped. i'm telling him now. * okay, i had a crush on him in eighth grade for like two months. everybody knew. he was really nice about it. then we were just friends again and it was better that way. ~ after ~ they had the memorial in the gym because the church wasn't big enough. the whole school came, and people from the towns we play against, and the band played the slow part of our fight song with his chair empty in the trumpet row. i made it through about eight notes. there's a white cross at the curve on the county road now. people keep it up. there are always flowers, and somebody left a trumpet mouthpiece on it in march and nobody has ever touched it. at graduation in may they kept an empty chair for him with a cap and gown on it, and his mom walked across the stage to get his diploma, and everybody stood up, all eighty-three of us and all the parents, and nobody sat down until she was back in her seat. the senior slideshow ended with that green day song, "good riddance (time of your life)," which was on the radio all last year, and now i can't hear it without crying in public, like at the mall, which is embarrassing. the band planted a little maple outside the band room with a stone that has his name on it. i'll go see it at thanksgiving.
~ a poem ~ (i wrote this in april in a notebook in study hall. i'm not a poet. i just needed to put it somewhere.) the chewed one, from sectionals, and nobody will move it. we tune without you now. the note is always a little flat right where you used to be. i look up at the curve every time we drive past, and i look up at night, too, and it's stupid, but i think you'd like it here, all these stars, all this room to be loud. people who have stopped by for derek:    
if you knew him, or if you just want to say something, write me. i'll add it to the memories page. [email protected] last updated 9/26/99 |