Lived
(behind the story)

There’s some statistic about how many deaths your average twentieth century American is exposed to by the time they’re eighteen years old. The number is in the thousands, I suspect, or maybe even the millions. We see people die on stage and on screen, we read about it happening in books and magazines, we watch it on the six o’clock news and we see it in video games. But we always know, from the first time we hear it in the form of a comforting whisper from a parent, that it’s all pretend.

The truth always catches up, though.

I was nineteen when I first knew someone--really knew someone, not a distant and unmet great aunt or uncle--who died. He was fifteen years old, and before I met him my friends and had I called him "the beautiful freshman." In the hallways after school we’d giggle about him, marveling that we didn’t remember any boys looking like that when we were ninth graders, all that distant eternity ago. He was tall and a little on the gawky side, with a long, serious face and wavy dark blond hair that ended incredibly exotically just below his chin. He wore Grateful Dead T-shirts and slouched through the halls of my high school with what I can only remember to be a good-natured air of coolness all around him.

Eventually we actually became friends, and the beautiful freshman officially entered my circle when he began dating the girl who had been my best friend since second grade. That was the year she and I graduated from high school, the year I started college, the year she realized that she didn’t know what to do with the rest of her life. It sounds weird, looking back, that an eighteen-year-old and a barely-fifteen-year-old would have anything in common, but they did. They read Shakespeare together; they became fixtures in each other’s lives. And by default, he became a fixture in my life.

Another friend and I would always laugh that some day the beautiful freshman would grow tired of my best friend and we’d be waiting right there for him, but seeing them together it was easy to understand that that would never happen. They were in love, real true, grown-up love, the first example of it I had ever seen in someone my age.

His birthday was October 31^st, and so for the two years that we knew each other our friends threw us joint birthday parties. When I think of him I always remember the way my dining room had been bathed in darkness punctured only by the flickering glow of our birthday candles, and how the light traced the curves of his face as we leaned together to make our respective wishes. We always did silly things together, our intensely devoted six-person clique, things like hanging out at the dam where I worked late into the night, watching the water and just talking. We would play cards, watch videos, carve pumpkins, and for a long time we were just generally inseparable.

Three months before he would have gotten his driver’s license, the freshman walked home from my best friend’s house on a moonless night so humid it was hard to breathe away from the comforting drone of an air conditioner. I had been out that night, and when I got home at around midnight I found a message from my best friend by the phone; she wasn’t where she could be reached, it said, but she really needed to talk to me. The next day I went to work as I always did, to sit alone in a little glass-walled room overlooking the Connecticut River--and just like Lydia, I heard for the first time on the radio.

He had been found on the side of the road the right before, and was in the hospital; no one knew what happened, and no one know what happened to this day. The beautiful freshman was just injured, hurt so badly that he was unconscious. I was so sure it was a mistake when they said his name during the three o’clock news update, telling his story, or what was known of it. I had to wait at work for two more hours before I got to go home and find out what happened.

I never went to the hospital, and I think that I’ll probably regret that for the rest of my life. I just kept thinking that he would get better, that I wouldn’t be any use to my best friend because whenever I thought of what had happened I would cry. When we talked on the phone it seemed like that was the last thing she needed, and I made excuse after excuse. When he woke up, I’d go. When the remaining five of us could go together, I’d go. But I waited too long, and two years after I met him, three days after he had set out on his way home from my best friend’s house, the beautiful freshman died.

The events following after his death are just a blur to me, but served as the inspiration for much of the structure of Lived. My best friend wrote letters to him; she was hounded by the press; she was desperate for solace and found it where she could. Originally I had thought that Lived would be far less fictionalized than it really was, and that shows in the fact that if you’ve been paying attention, the real cause of Zac’s death has never really been mentioned. In the story, it will be neat and clean once I edit. He will have been in a simple car accident, because in fiction such things can happen. In fiction you don’t spend years of your life wondering how someone you loved spent his last breaths, you don’t get left hanging without an ending. But in real life, these things happen all the time. So Lived is simplified, a clean and neat version of what really happened. Anything else would have been too complex, and too painful.

The people who were my closest friends for those two years and I have all moved on with our lives, and other than an occasional holiday card or phone call, the five of us that remain don’t speak any more. The last I heard from my former best friend, she was nine months pregnant and living several states away from where we grew up. The baby’s middle name, she told me, would be the same as the beautiful freshman’s. If she were to read Lived I think she’d laugh, or maybe be a little frustrated. One of the things we always fought about, ever since we were in elementary school, is that I was too busy trying to write life to live it.

I think when Hanson appeared in my world the summer after the freshman’s death, one of the reasons I was so attracted to them was because Isaac resembled a boy I had known once, a boy who I had known who had died. In some silly, inconsequential way, I feel honored to have had the opportunity to watch Ike grow up, grow even more beautiful, grow strong and capable. It wasn’t a chance I had when it came to the boy upon whom Lived is based, but whenever I look at the oldest Hanson, whenever I hear Yearbook, I see the freshman lurking in his eyes, in his words.

I’ve been asked before if I’m Lydia, and there’s only one possible answer: No. I’m not. I didn’t live these events as they’re told. I’m not Lydia any any more than I’m Marissa or Clio--but I guess you could say it a little differently, too. I'm not any less Lydia than I’m Marissa or Clio. I decided to write this story because even as it was happening, even as I was witnessing all of the tiny details that come with the end of a life, it was too much to keep to myself. It brought into my world a whole new awareness of an inevitable end. It made me crazy to write, to try, to do what I dreamed right now, because forever had suddenly ceased to exist.

But even now, having lived with that summer always in the back of my mind for three years, all that I really have learned for certain, through all my thinking and all my writing, is what a sadder place the world has been left without him.

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