“You guys killed her,” she said.
“What are you talking about,” Sol said quietly.
“You had the party, you knew he was playing with guns.”
Our accuser was my father’s age, and a friend of his. She had silver-blond hair and a pleasantly trim figure; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled and her smile and the warm humor that accompanied it gave her the appearance of youth. But on this day she did not smile and wasn’t warm, and suddenly and permanently to me she was as old and cold as a cackling, bony-nosed witch. For the first time I noticed the wart on her neck, and it would stand out every time after that. I noticed the way her dishwater gray hair was never combed. Her humor, I began to realize, was full of secret sarcasm and based largely on hate.
It was two days after my friend Adam accidentally killed my friend Roxanne. Adam was messing around with a shotgun at a party. He had forgotten to check the chamber, and when he playfully grabbed Roxanne and put the gun to her temple, when he jokingly pulled the trigger, ready to say “bang” in verbal mime, the noise was suddenly real and there was real, red blood, and she really collapsed to the ground in a slow motion you never see in the movies.
We were all there to see it, and for a long time it was a very traumatic memory.
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