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All content (c)2004, 2005, 2006 Adam Smith
A Short Story by Adam Smith When I look back to the many years I spent growing up on the coast, I know that one particular image is going to haunt me long after those picturesque sunsets and waves ebb and fall away like the tide. In it, the stars are out, twinkling as they always are; the moon is a crescent, in the process of waning away to the black new phase. In it, I can hear the waves of ocean crash against cliff walls in the distant space below me. But this unfading memory isn�t merely the sum of its parts � actually, to be honest, its parts are practically irrelevant; when a person lives by the sea as long as I did, things that seem to be wonderful and majestic and glorious to the layman hardly seem to faze you. No, when I�m sitting alone in my old age, tired and frail and lonely, then my youth will be defined by the image of Tiffany-Amber Frehley�s face - the sadness and weight in her eyes, the way she had her cheek cringed up, as if to offer me her apologies. The face she wore right before she killed herself. Tiffany-Amber doesn�t sound much like the name of a maritime girl, does it? As it rolls off your tongue, you immediately think of those stereotypical valley girls, all make-up and fashion, not a thought in their pretty little heads beyond what party they�ll be going to that night. A spoiled suburban girl. Tiffany-Amber wasn�t like that, but she didn�t fit in quite right along the sea, either. She had her friends call her Amber, or sometimes Tiff. Her enemies would call her Tiffany-Amber, or sometimes just Tiffany. That kind of thing rubbed her the wrong way; one of our fondest memories of her was from grade two, when Andrew North made the grave mistake of calling her one of the forbidden names. Amber retaliated by delivering a sucker punch to his face, knocking out his loose tooth and leaving him in tears, blood pouring out of his mouth. She was, in retrospect, a bit self-centered. She had this idea that everything should go her way � she could never step back and look at the big picture; she never could believe that in the grand scheme of her life, tiny little day to day mishaps amount to nothing, and that in the grand scheme of the universe, they amounted to even less. When word got around in tenth grade that she slept with her boyfriend of three years, Bryan Evans, jealous guys and jealous girls would call her �T&A�, a lame insult that stemmed from their own insecurities, as most do. But Amber didn�t see things that way � she spent a week at home from school, crying in her room about it. Even when she decided to join the rest of us again, she�d never talk to anyone, and was terrified of looking people in the eyes. Eventually though, she came around, and things slowly returned to normal. For a few months, anyways. I was friends with Bryan, and I can remember the guilt that he carried on his shoulders after that incident. He blamed himself, felt like he had pressured her into it�it was all typical teenage melodrama, but to a typical teenager, nothing is more important than that. That guilt never let up. It only got worse, in fact; Bryan died of a cocaine overdose not long after dropping out of school in twelfth year, and everyone knows that he began using drugs as an escape from the guilt. He blamed himself for Amber�s death, of course; this wasn�t because of a self-centric world view, though - Amber blamed him too. You see, right before we all finished grade eleven, right before the best and worst summer of our high school lives, Bryan decided to break up with Amber, ending their four year relationship. Now, the average person shouldn�t be expected to take something like that all too well. But Amber wasn�t average, in a lot of ways, and she took it even worse. Nothing we could do would help her let go, none of us could suffice as painkillers for her heartache. We called her, visited her, took her gifts, took her out, but she never had fun, never could find that good buoy in her sea of sadness that she let go of when she devoted herself to Bryan. Maybe we should have seen it coming, but that didn�t make it any less shocking when her mother called me up and told me about the note she left on her bed. �You�ll find me on the rocks�, it had said, among other things, and as soon as I heard that I set off on what I thought would be a futile journey to search for her, to try to stop her. In the end, it was, as I thought it would be, futile, but as the optimist always fails a little more than they want, the pessimist always succeeds just a little more. I thought, as I ran by the Atlantic on the high
cliffs that watched over it, that I was too late. That she had already jumped.
So I was overjoyed when I saw her standing by the edge, preparing to do just
that. Naturally, I called out to her. She heard me, but she didn�t seem
surprised to see me in the slightest. �Don�t try to stop me,� she said, staring
hard at my form as I ran closer, �I need to do this.� |