Learning to Live

My last name had become something I hid every time it was possible. The name that had formerly been a source of pride to me - announced loudly on the upper back of my volleyball and basketball uniforms, and written on the blue helmet I used while batting during softball – was now something that would either get me either looks of horror or full bodied pity. Neither made me feel very good about myself and did nothing more than make his face appear vividly in my mind.

We would later be questioned by police, our neighbors, our community, and most of all – the media. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t gone through it could ever understand what those news networks and those tabloids did to us by constantly projecting his school picture at us. The friends and neighbors who used to come over to our house for barbeques or potlucks stopped even coming near our house. They acted as if even looking at the two-story house my parents had bought years ago would somehow make the tragedy even more real to them.

But the truth was that that seemingly normal Wednesday afternoon had changed my family’s life forever. On April 3rd, the night before it all happened, my brother had come into my room with a look of complete seriousness on his face. He told me that going to school the next day would be a bad plan - that I should fake sick. Mom and dad would believe me because the last time I had contracted an illness had been in the 8th grade while on a class camping trip. I had agreed suspiciously, knowing full well that two years of completely perfect health would indeed make my parents believe that I wasn’t lying. And in the back of my head, I thought that maybe it had something to do with a senior prank.

My parents would go under tons of scrutiny after it all happened. Questions were constantly thrown at them like, “What made him go wrong?” or “How did you not know this was happening?” The truth was that there wasn’t anything my parents did or didn’t do to make my older brother the way he was. While I was good at sports and making friends, Ben was good at things like chemistry and figuring out impossibly complicated calculus equations. At lunch I sat at a table with a group of friends I knew would be constantly stable, while Ben sat in the math classroom working on extra credit or an experiment in the science lab. But at home, we were equals.

The one thing my parents always managed to enforce was the fact that we were siblings – we were basically the same person, no matter what our skills and talents said about us. And truthfully, I didn’t know any pair of siblings closer than my brother and I. So the fact that he would go and do something as terrifying and sinister as what he did completely baffled me.

We didn’t hold a funeral for him. There was too much shame attached to his death. We quietly buried him in the cemetery amongst weary glances from the cemetery staff. We didn’t attend the funerals of any of the victims, because they all knew who we were. If they didn’t before, they did now.

You want to know the irony in all of this? Benjamin Taylor Hylard had to go on a shooting rampage at South Valley High School to even be noticed by his peers and the people in his community.

My brother wasn’t a monster. He tucked me in every night until I was 10, humored me by playing every game I ever wanted until I was 11, and drove me to and from school every day. I was closer to him than any of the girls I called my best friends, but he hid the biggest, and last, secret of his life from me.