The Academy

Whoever thought the name Donavan was a good one should be put away and have the key tossed down a drain. That name haunts me and never leaves me the hell alone. It teases, taunts, and insults me. It humiliates my entire being and suffocates my thoughts with hopelessness. Donavan was the name of my best friend. I emphasize “was.” Donavan is a liar. He would lie and point fingers to avoid everything; major or minor. He weaseled his way out of pretty much every detention, avoided authorities every time he was stopped in traffic, and never had issues with his stepdad. I guess it was simple to say he had some pretty good damn luck, if you ask me. He was the luckiest S.O.B. alive or he had to have some pretty gracious guardians looking out for him. To say the least, Donavan was no saint.

In church almost every Sunday, my parents took me with Donavan and his stepdad. My parents were always reading scripture and tossing the bound book of Jesus in my lap every chance they got. They weren’t shoving the scripture down my throat or whatever, but they sure didn’t expect me to go to bed without thanking somebody upstairs. Of course, because it was all a waste of time to me, I never did. They shoved off every remark I threw in an attempt to keep a happy attitude. God forbid if they lost themselves for a second; all hell would break free on our household and all of us, and our poor neighbors, would feel the wrath of an angry Christian couple. If things were tense between my parents and me, they’d shout and blame me for their troubles. So what if I crashed my old car? It wasn’t my damn fault! That driver was speeding and yet I took the downfall for all that commotion. What a crock. Before the wreck, I only got into trouble when it was late at night. Skipping school was easy, and pretty much anything I did was easy to hide. Not anymore. Not ever again.

I was at a party late. It was Sunday night and I didn’t give a hoot if school was the next morning. I would’ve called in sick, anyway. Pretending to be sick was a common go-to when I hated the day as I woke up. Sometimes I already know the day is going to be full of disappointments and issues. Why bother? So the party played out. We were all drinking some strong stuff from a brown paper bag. It was a luxury we rarely got to do, because Evan’s parents were rarely out of town. Evan always supplied the location and booze. He was a scrawny kid with deep brown eyes that looked like deer eyes in the headlights when he was high out of his mind. There were obviously some girls there; it wouldn’t be a party without them. Shay was this girl with green hair. She dyed it a lot, and it turned into hay when it was blow-dried and straitened. Her hair was usually a mess, anyway, so fixing it didn’t really matter. She supplied the security. Her dad was some hot-shot cop with deputies stopping by for poker all the time. She could’ve easily picked up on some of their protective instincts.

Kev was a riot. When he and Evan got drunk and high, it was an all-around good time. We could sit in the living room for hours laughing about the stupidest of things, and nobody would care about a thing anybody else was saying. We talked about everything and anything, but when it came to rules in our own little party palace, school was one subject we were banned from mentioning. It’s just wrong to bring that pointless crap up at a party! Anxiety-ridden geeks would cling to that crap, but not us. We partied late into the night and felt exhilarated by midnight. No rest and no stopping, we had guzzled down maybe four or five bottles of that strong stuff. It was always the best time of our short-lived years. Kev was the youngest of us at sixteen. Shay and Evan were seventeen, and I was the oldest at eighteen. It was a damn miracle I was a senior. I didn’t think I would make it at all, but I had. With every single teacher calling me an idiot and my principal giving me weeks of detention at a time, it was a definite shock to my old man and my mom.

I thought that was enough to congratulate myself with some of that liquor. My parents should be more proud of kids like us! We do nothing wrong. We’re not hurting anybody or being destructive, so what was the big deal? There wasn’t a deal. At least, there shouldn’t have been. I’d made out with girls and drank and smoked some weird things, even got into some trouble in school. Had I ever killed anyone? No. Never in my life had I ever killed someone or got anybody into serious danger. That was until later on in the morning hours. I’d snuck in through my bedroom window, my eyes watering and red from the smoke and liquor, and fumbled into my bed. I shoved off my shoes and felt dizzy. I figured it was useless to take off my clothes until my alarm went off and I’d shower that next chance I got. Unfortunately, my night had just begun. I was laying there with my face embedded into my pillow, feeling the cool sheets against my bare feet, and dozing off lightly.

I felt bright lights shine in my face from outside my open window. A breeze shook the drapes and chilled me. I wanted to cover up with the covers, but my body was a lump of heaviness that wouldn’t budge. My head hadn’t cleared and my body ached with sleep. I longed to sleep, but there was someone outside my window when I opened my eyes. A car door had opened before and a rock fell in my window, crackling to the wooden floor. Eyes wide and my heart starting to race, I sat up from my bed and yawned. Who the hell..? No. Donavan stood in the grass below my window and hollered up to me in a whisper, loud enough to hear each word. He gestured down to him with the wave of his hand, but I didn’t register the motion in my head until moments later. I shook my head, persisting to stay inside.

“Cal, get your lazy ass down here! We’re going out.”

My eyes were fluttery and I could feel my body trying to adjust to standing as I followed to the window. “Don, I was just at Evan’s! Go home, man, and go to sleep!”

Scoffing, he threw a pebble into my room again. “The next one goes through your glass windows if you don’t get your ass down here, man! You gotta come with me. There’s a babe over at Cameron’s waiting to meet you. Hey, if you don’t claim her I will.”

“Cameron’s having a party..?”

I remembered once when Donavan took me to a large mansion in the suburbs. It was bigger than three of my two-story house. I had never seen such a rich kid house in my life. Donavon introduced me to some of the greatest people ever. One was a girl named Elaine. She was a cutie with long brown hair that went all the way past her hips. Besides her, there were pretty much a dozen pipe smoking grass dealers seated in Cameron’s lounge. It was the only place to get the best stuff. Not to mention, there was a ton of liquor to go around. His parents were some big-wig friendlies with the Senator’s secretary. Somehow they got rich off doing favors for them. I smelled bad news all over them, but the smell of that fine grass lingered in my nostrils too much to dismiss it. How could I resist? I was still reeling from side to side when I’d sat up, the lingering high I had still wearing itself off out of my head. I was dizzy at first, then stumbling, then solid again. I was coherent enough to move around normally.

Donavan winked at me from below. “You coming or what, man? Get your sneaks and lets go!”

Before I could protest, I was already on the bed scrambling for my socks and shoes. My hair was damp with sweat in the summer air, and the hot breeze flooded into my room. Donavan had moved quickly from the lawn and back into his car. He shut his driver side door quietly and waited for me. When I tightened up my laces, I crept over to the window and hopped onto the ledge. Landing on the grass on my hands and knees, I felt the wind sweep over my face like freedom. I scrambled to my feet and got in on the passenger side of his car. The night was warm and the windows rolled down didn’t help the heat at all. He started up the engine and we backed out into the dark street. No one in sight, we started speeding down the road with the wind blasting in our faces. With the roar of the engine and tires under our feet, we yelled and screamed happily like two coyotes in the wilderness. We might as well have been animals; we lingered along the dark road like prowlers for prey. The prey, in this case, was trouble; severe and deadly trouble. At the time, however, we didn’t know that was what we were in for.

I looked around the car for a smoke but didn’t find anything but empty cans of alcohol on the floors and dashboard. Speeding in itself was gutsy, but driving with a ton of cans out in the open was twice as gutsy. The nerve he had was crazy. “Don, dude, have you been drinking?” I held up one of the cans and smelt it. It was very fresh and still had some saliva and beer on the edge of the can where his lips were. There were many like that one; too many to count. He chuckles and nods with a hysterical look on his face. He whoops and howls out the window and stares at me with one hand on the wheel.

“Dude, slow it down,” I tried to reason. “We’re going too fast and you’re totally annihilated! Man, let me drive.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “You, drive? This car is my baby, Cal! I’d rather die.”

He’d spoken maybe way too soon, because when he looked back at the road there was a girl standing in the center. Two blocks away from Cameron’s party, Donavan’s car hit a brown-haired girl with the longest hair I could remember. She looked so familiar. For a moment, everything was quiet and the car halted almost instantly as we hit her. She landed hard against the road with a thud. That was it. That was all I could remember about the girl. It turns out, coincidentally, that girl with the long brown hair was Elaine, Elaine Winston. She was nineteen. She planned to go to Yale. Her favorite color was green and she was hit by a red and black Jeep Wrangler with a drunk and high teenage boy in the driver seat. She died in a confirmed “hit-and-run,” and I was the teenage boy in the driver seat. It turns out, Donavan wasn’t lucky of a guy after all. His lucky had finally run out, and still, somehow, he got away with it like he always had those millions of times before.

When smoke started coming from the hood, and blood was smothered over the windshield, Donavan had realized exactly what had just happened to us. He was scared. I was scared. We didn’t know where she came from, or how it all happened so fast, but, when Don got out of the driver seat, he ran into the woods beside the road and never looked back. He’d gone home. Wiped the steering wheel clean of his handprints, and fled the hit-and-run scene. I got out of the passenger side seat and closed the door, hollering after him to come back, but he never replied. Then there was silence. The Jeep’s blinking headlights beamed the darkness and admitted a thick layer of light into the distance. Ten feet ahead of the car, and Elaine’s body, was a cop car’s red and blue beaming lights atop the black cruiser coming right towards me. Donavan’s door was wide open, and everything he had left behind was now my problem. I was standing in front of the body, kneeling down with fear and shock in my eyes. The police told me to back up. “Stand back.” I was expecting “freeze,” but that wasn’t what happened. The police officer and his partner cuffed me and sat me down on the curb of the road. Then there was a ton of commotion.

The first thing they asked me was, “Is this your car?”

“No.”

They tested my breath and asked me to let them sniff my breath. When all was over with and they left me alone for a little while, it was concluded I was driving the vehicle, under the influence of both alcohol and weed, and the person who killed Elaine Winston. Only one of those things were true, and I resisted to be arrested, outraged that this situation had fallen into my lap. It was Donavan’s car, and I tried to tell them. I tried to tell them what really went down, but nobody could understand me through the slurred, frantic speech in my voice. When they pushed my head down and placed me into the back of their cruiser, I realized entirely what had happened to me and what this entailed. The only thing I heard the police say over the scanner was “Class D Felony” and “possible hit-and-run.” I think out of everything that went down, the “possible” part was the thing that really made me angry. There was no possibility. It was all on Donavan. It was all his fault. I wasn’t driving, but when nobody saw Don run to the woods or me calling anybody, they assumed that I was the only one in the entire world to hit that girl.

Donavan didn’t show up in my presence until the court date. I was sitting at this table with a strange man in a suit, my mom crying buckets behind me. I didn’t turn around to meet their gaze, but I knew how fully disappointed my parents both were. The day after the incident, my assigned lawyer had told me specifically that this did not look good for me.

“All they have to do to pin this on you is prove that you were intoxicated and under the influence of drugs and that you were the one driving the car.”

I looked at him with the look I had never had in my entire life; fear. “So I’m screwed… I’m going to jail.”

“We don’t know that right now. But what I do know is that it isn’t looking too good, Cal. You were pinned with a DWI, DUI, Vehicular Manslaughter, and negligence. That’s just the surface… You failed to call the police, and attempted to flea the scene of the crime, resisting arrest. Cal…” He pauses. “What in the name of God were you thinking?”

“I did not do it,” I barked. “It’s not my car.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“It wasn’t me driving!”

“We have no proof of anybody else in the vehicle.”

“I know he was there! He was driving drunk and he hit her! He got out, wiped his prints, and fled! I watched him. I watched him run.”

He gives me this look and I automatically know what he’s going to say. When he tries to open his mouth to say those words, I stop him. “Cal, we have no”-

“Then find it. I didn’t do it.”

He raises an eyebrow and I hear the door of the interrogation room open. I see my mom’s reddened face, her hair messy with distress and my father with his hands in his pockets, a pained expression in his face. He holds Mom. She holds him. They sit across the table from me and say nothing at first. They can barely bring their eyes to meet mine. My lawyer sits up and fixes his tie. He gives them a look of reassurance and hushes my mom to keep her from whining and crying.

“Mr. and Mrs. Knight,” he says softly. “Your son has been charged with multiple things. We’re… doing all we can to stop them from sending him away. Unfortunately, we do not have any proof that Cal was with Donavan Baxter when the incident occurred. We’ve questioned him in the other room. He’s telling an entirely different story.”

My voice erupted. “Of course he is! He’s a dirty liar! Of course he’s telling a different story!”

“Cal,” my mom says weakly. “Please…”

I quiet down. I watch her eyes meet mine and then fall back to her hands that are folded in her lap. My father eyes me and does the same. He looks directly into the lawyer’s face and takes a moment to absorb what is being told to them.

“We think it’s going to be a very difficult trial for us all. Cal may be placed in prison for anywhere from ten to twenty years. I wish I had more to tell you, but… this is all I have been given so far.”

That was the last time I saw my mom smile at me. She gave me a kiss before her and my father left, and she smiled reassuringly at me, wishing me a good night’s sleep in the holding cell and sweet dreams. It felt forced, but maybe it was, and she left me with a feeling of hollowness in my chest, and fear that, one day, I may never see her again. My father didn’t look at me. He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. My lawyer stopped by every couple hours to my cell to see me, knowing I wouldn’t fall asleep at all. He’d kneel down in front of the bars and lean in close. He wouldn’t say much, but he stayed because of pity. I couldn’t imagine being a lawyer or a prosecutor. I’d lose my mind. I wouldn’t know how to cope with failing a client; the way he feels he failed me. I’ll never forget the last thing he said to me before my trial. Those words he said were echoes in my dreams the days to follow.

“There’s always another way,” he says with a forced smile.