Sarah

It was a beautiful warm day, with deep blue skies I have always believed can only be found in a state named Carolina. I sat outside the dorm I had moved into the day before, along with other freshmen who were anxious to make new friends. We discovered that Brandon, a sophomore, knew all the details of the murder of a girl on our floor the year before, and we listened with perked ears as he filled us in. We were all spooked by the room that we could see through a locked glass door; however, the girl was someone we didn’t know, and her friends, except for Brandon, were people who banded together and didn’t socialize. So we listened intently, but the story was just a story about a girl we didn’t know.

Three months later, we had all become accustomed to the glass door and were satisfied with the details we had gathered. One night I excitedly got ready for a keg party at Carolina Beach. Grateful that my roommate had gone to visit her boyfriend for the weekend, I threw clothes on and off till I finally decided what to wear, grabbed my bag and locked my room.

I piled into a car with my three new best friends and we made the twenty-minute drive down to Carolina Beach. The North End was packed with familiar faces, as almost my entire dorm had decided to make an appearance. Boys in jeeps and trucks ferried people a mile down the beach to the bonfire. A girl handed me a red plastic cup of warm beer, and I obediently drank while she chatted. “Oh, did you hear about that girl from Honor’s dorm that died? I think her name was Sarah,” she chirped. I knew only one girl in that dorm, and her name happened to be Sarah, but nonchalantly I asked, “Not Sarah Wing, right?” “Yeah, that was her name!” She said it almost like we had discovered a mutual friend.

My beer felt like cement in my stomach, but I still wasn’t sure she could be right. I had just seen Sarah the night before, remembering how she had yelled my name and waved vigorously with a big smile on her face when she spotted me walking to class. A pretty girl with waist length, curly hair, she treated me as a best friend even though we hadn’t been acquainted that long. She had been a refreshing change for me when I was discovering a cattiness among girls that I wasn’t used too.

People who didn’t know her already had the details: she had crossed lanes and driven head on into an eighteen wheeler going home an hour after I had seen her. A girl I knew spotted me crying and began crying herself, hysterically. She was comforted by a few cute boys after drawing their attention with her sobs. “So you were friends with her, too?” I asked. “Nooo, but it’s so sad…” she drunkenly replied. I was insulted for Sarah; I felt it was a degrading to her memory to have her death become a bit of cheap drama at a cheap party.

Blue lights appeared, and people scattered. I tossed my cup into the dark, feeling guilty for partying when Sarah had lost her life. The girl pulled me into the dunes, insisting she was doing me a favor. We walked around for half an hour, until we worked up the nerve to see if the police were issuing underage drinking tickets. Returning to what was left of the party, I ran around trying to find my friends. A girl eventually told me that a boy dubbed Tango, our current student body president, was already practicing his leadership skills and yelled that our dorm was officially leaving. No wonder he was elected, as everybody had followed him. Even my girlfriends.

Gloomily, I hitched a ride back off the beach and discovered that no one was willing to give a stranger a ride back to campus. I sat on a curb until a boy I knew walked up and asked me if I needed a ride. I jumped in his shiny SUV, only to discover that he had also offered rides back to nine other girls. One girl was piled on another, and legs were dangling out the back window. I was silent as we left the beach.

For the second time that night, blue lights appeared and my heart dropped, wondering how much trouble we were in. A cop shone his light around the car, but finally after giving a stern warning to our driver to get us home safe, he let us go, to a chorus of female voices yelling “Thank you so much, officer. You have a good night too!” Everyone was intoxicated and happy, and I was numb. The drunk girls around me were giggly after our “scary” brush with the law.

I trudged up to my dorm, and realized I had left my key and my cell phone in my friend's car. I began to cry, wishing I was in my bed and could really let the sobs take over. I banged on my friend's door; her roommate opened it to inform me that she had chewed the girls out for leaving me, and they were heading back to Carolina Beach to look for me.

Everyone was in bed, sleeping off the beer and liquor, and leaving me feeling helpless and alone. I sat outside the dorm on a cold, dewy bench and chain smoked until Brandon and the freshmen recruits for his band left their demo CD and came outside. “So how was the party?” Brandon asked, with a superior tone of voice. He was too good for our parties. “Sarah Wing died.” I replied. “Who’s that? At the party? What happened?” He asked, as if waiting expectantly for a juicy story. It reminded me of myself three months earlier, asking him about the murder.

It took an hour for my friends to show up with my dorm key, and they were full of stories about how some guy took them four wheeling around the beach and it was so sketchy and cold and blah blah blah. I mumbled my thanks, took my key and stumbled into bed. I slept, wanting to avoid the devastated mood Sarah’s death had left me with.

A week later, I was saddened again, this time after noticing a sign taped to the dorm’s front door. It was the only mark of Sarah’s death. Handwritten, it announced a meeting to talk about Sarah’s life in the living room of the Honor’s dorm. After spending the last three months of her life at UNCW, this was the best our school gave her. She was simply a story people gabbed about, saying how sad it was. She was 15 seconds on Channel 7.

Walking towards my dorm one afternoon, I stumbled on Sarah’s friend from her hometown, crying in a tiny white gazebo hidden among trees. She had just returned from the funeral, and was devastated. Nothing in my 18 years had qualified me to help her grieve, but I sat with her. We took drags on our cigarettes while she showed me pictures of Sarah in the hometown parade; pictures of a beaming Sarah at prom. Eventually, we had talked, smoked, and cried ourselves dry, and we both left. I was sad, but at the same time comforted. Sarah was more than a story to those who mattered; our little memorial service was more heartfelt than a hundred of her peers gathering in her memory.