0
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The biggest question mark I have about the whole year is about the driver, the driver of the car that killed Alicia that night.
0
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I can t move past it because I can t get the beats right in my head.
0
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I m a writer, I m a storyteller.
0
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And the missing part is I don t know how to name this person who was driving the car.
0
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What is he?
0
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Is he a killer?
0
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Is he a victim?
0
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Is he an innocent bystander?
0
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How would the law name him?
0
SPEAKER_02
It feels overly forgiving and falsely altruistic to call him a victim.
0
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It feels
0
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damning.
0
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It feels like a goddamn witch hunt to call him a murderer.
0
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He s not a bystander, exactly, because he too was injured.
0
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And he s not my friend.
0
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He s not even an acquaintance.
0
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Like, I ve made up who he was in my head.
0
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I tell myself he must be such a thoughtful and emotionally untouched adult because of what he went through at that time.
0
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I tell myself he must have gone to therapy and talked to someone about how he feels the whole community
0
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hated him after that and he must have become a spiritual person you know who got in touch with something
0
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immaterial to help him explain to himself why he was chosen to be the driver in a car that killed someone that everybody loved.
0
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And he must have atoned in some way for what he did.
0
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And I tell myself, be mature.
0
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Like, it s not about you.
0
SPEAKER_02
It s not your shit.
0
SPEAKER_02
You re not Alicia.
0
SPEAKER_02
You re not dead from this.
0
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You re not Alicia s parents.
0
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You re not her sister.
0
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I ve told myself a million different things to try to just rush past the only honest thing, which is that I am angry.
0
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at this person.
0
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And if you re asking yourself, why are we bleeping this person s name out?
0
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It s not really to protect him.
0
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I think on some level it s to protect me because I am still hurt.
0
SPEAKER_02
I am still sad.
0
SPEAKER_02
I am still jealous.
0
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He was the last person to be with my friend and she trusted him and then she died.
0
SPEAKER_02
Here s Hassan, who was the closest person I knew to him in high school.
0
SPEAKER_03
Oprah s a smart, funny guy.
0
SPEAKER_03
He s kind of a joker, happy-go-lucky type.
0
SPEAKER_03
Kind of similar to me.
0
SPEAKER_03
If we re sitting there listening to the teacher or listening to the loud kid who acted out in class, I didn t act out.
0
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He wasn t much of a person who acted out either.
0
SPEAKER_03
We might be the ones sitting there and they might like...
0
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say something quietly under our breath that we thought was funny and maybe a few other kids around us would laugh at or something like that.
0
SPEAKER_03
But he was a funny, smart kid.
0
SPEAKER_03
He seemed, as much as a 16-year-old can be worldly, but he knew about certain things that I had experienced and knew about because I had already lived in three or four different countries and was from somewhere else.
0
SPEAKER_03
That gave me a different perspective.
0
SPEAKER_03
There wasn t as much distance in talking about that stuff with other typical American kids.
0
SPEAKER_02
And they were from India?
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_02
India, okay.
0
SPEAKER_03
The best thing I can say about really is there s a big hearted person, but we were all 16 and the sort of kind of cruel jokes we all made towards each other and the kind of shit talking we did all the time.
0
SPEAKER_03
But there s a kind of person who would look at you and see you wince a little bit and go like, I just hurt your feelings a little bit.
0
SPEAKER_03
Let me shut up.
0
SPEAKER_03
Let me stop.
0
SPEAKER_03
We ve gone too far.
0
SPEAKER_02
He had a high emotional quotient.
0
SPEAKER_02
He was an empathetic person.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yes, yes, absolutely.
0
SPEAKER_03
He was a nice, kind person.
0
SPEAKER_03
And he had a condition with his hair and with his head.
0
SPEAKER_03
And so he always wore a fitted cap backwards.
0
SPEAKER_03
And you re not able to help feeling insecure about something like that when you re that age, right?
0
SPEAKER_03
You know, that was there.
0
SPEAKER_03
He liked the Simpsons.
0
SPEAKER_03
He liked basketball.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I was like, you re OK in my book.
0
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I think inevitably that s something that changes your life forever, being involved in something like that, that changes not just your life, changes who you are as a person to some degree forever and ever.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s almost like, you know, when people say, you know, a light has been dimmed, a sort of light in the back of someone s eyes or something like that.
0
SPEAKER_03
Like I said, **** was always happy-go-lucky, goofy, wanna-joke-all-the-time kind of kid.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I almost felt like he lost a little bit of that after, if I m right, totally understandably.
0
SPEAKER_02
I heard Hasan.
0
SPEAKER_02
He s a nice guy.
0
SPEAKER_02
Smart guy.
0
SPEAKER_02
Happy-go-lucky.
0
SPEAKER_02
Indian dude with alopecia.
0
SPEAKER_02
A brown guy at our high school.
0
SPEAKER_02
Two years after 9-11.
0
SPEAKER_02
I could feel then and I even feel now.
0
SPEAKER_02
That s not an easy way to live as a high schooler.
0
SPEAKER_02
It seemed like he was someone with a good enough heart who because of circumstances that were not his fault had a hard time in our very American high school and he stuck out like a sore thumb.
0
SPEAKER_02
I remember looking at him before any of this shit happened because he did stand out and
0
SPEAKER_02
Hasan says that his light might have dimmed after Alicia died, but if I m being real, I remember there was a dim light over him already.
0
SPEAKER_02
It was like the dim light of awareness.
0
SPEAKER_02
You know those kids that you went to high school or middle school with who like, it felt like they had been through something.
0
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Now that I think about them as an adult, I always wonder, was there a weird parent?
0
SPEAKER_02
Did they lose somebody?
0
SPEAKER_02
There s a light on behind the eyes, but it s at 50%.
0
SPEAKER_02
And that s how I remember her.
0
SPEAKER_02
And I hear Hassan.
0
SPEAKER_02
I trust Hassan as a judge of character, but it just...
0
SPEAKER_02
It s not sitting.
0
SPEAKER_02
It s not sitting and it s not settling.
0
SPEAKER_02
Why did she want to date the guy that smoked cigarettes outside the school?
0
SPEAKER_02
He certainly stood out, but he didn t seem vulnerable.
0
SPEAKER_02
In a way, he felt more like an adult than the rest of us, as I remember him.
0
SPEAKER_02
And even now, as I think about seeing him as a kid and feeling that sort of lived in presence that he had before, but especially after Alicia was gone, I can t sort out how much am I projecting onto him that is really just anger.
0
SPEAKER_02
How much am I using the one tool that I have, which is storytelling, to make a story about this guy who I just don t want to like?
0
SPEAKER_02
And I m sitting in the anger now.
0
SPEAKER_02
I m sitting in the feelings, the resentment.
0
SPEAKER_02
But it was 20 years ago.
0
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And I can t possibly compare the feeling that I feel now to what I was processing and what I was watching all these other 16-year-old babies processing at my high school.
0
SPEAKER_01
If you ll remember, they had the banner for Alicia in the cafeteria, and there were several people that wrote angry messages to the driver of the car.
0
SPEAKER_01
Tell me about that.
0
SPEAKER_01
On her banner.
0
SPEAKER_02
I forgot that.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
Oh, man.
0
SPEAKER_01
I pray I wasn t one of them, to be honest.
0
SPEAKER_01
There was somebody that wrote, fuck, and then his first name.
0
SPEAKER_00
It was one of those situations where it s like,
0
SPEAKER_00
Man, like why her?
0
SPEAKER_00
She seems like the model person, the model friend.
0
SPEAKER_00
She was smart.
0
SPEAKER_00
I remember her being a really good artist.
0
SPEAKER_00
There was so much potential there.
0
SPEAKER_00
She was just getting started.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s not to say that her life should have been valued more than anybody else s, but if it
0
SPEAKER_00
It had to happen.
0
SPEAKER_00
Why to her?
0
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, the story with her, she passed in the car accident.
0
SPEAKER_00
She was in the car with someone else.
0
SPEAKER_00
He was driving.
0
SPEAKER_00
I remember, because of how affected you were by her passing, I remember being angry at the other kid.
0
SPEAKER_00
he was someone that I knew, didn t know him like super well, but I mean, everyone knew who he was.
0
SPEAKER_00
I remember being upset with him, thinking you killed my friend s friend, that kind of thing.
0
SPEAKER_00
Which is wrong.
0
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it wasn t something that obviously he didn t do on purpose.
0
SPEAKER_00
And I remember not being the only person that felt that way.
0
SPEAKER_00
I remember a lot of people just being
0
SPEAKER_00
blaming him and things like that.
0
SPEAKER_00
And as I sort of reflect on it, honestly, he s pretty strong for getting through that because especially nowadays, mental health is a huge thing and you just never know.
0
SPEAKER_00
I m just trying to think if that happened nowadays, I feel like the way that people treated him, I could see how one day he could wake up and be like, you know what, fuck it.
0
SPEAKER_00
I shouldn t be here.
0
SPEAKER_00
I shouldn t be here.
0
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, take his own life or that kind of thing.
0
SPEAKER_00
I vividly remember instead of, okay, you have a two-person car crash, one person dies.
0
SPEAKER_00
Instead of taking him in and embracing him and trying to get him through what happened, instead, I felt like we pointed the finger at him.
0
SPEAKER_03
It was feeling bad for
0
SPEAKER_03
Alicia and her family and everyone and people like you who were friends with her and feeling bad for my friend too, you know, and feeling bad for her as well.
0
SPEAKER_03
That s really what it was.
0
SPEAKER_03
I did see some of that sort of negative energy, not like in person, face to face, someone talking to her or anything, but I did hear a couple of people express negatives.
0
SPEAKER_03
feelings towards him personally.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I remember feeling bad about that.
0
SPEAKER_03
I never understood the incident, the accident, to be something, to even say the word, fault.
0
SPEAKER_03
You know what I mean?
0
SPEAKER_03
So it just felt bad.
0
SPEAKER_03
I could totally understand your loved one, your friend, something happening to that person.
1
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and feeling like it was unnecessary.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s not like she had some condition or something, and this person was involved in it, and just feeling something towards that person.
1
SPEAKER_00
I could totally understand it, but I don t think it was ever lost on me.
1
SPEAKER_00
This is just a tragic, terrible mistake, and this is a thing for him too, you know?
1
SPEAKER_02
I remember as a kid, there was this distinction between the feelings I actually had, the feelings I thought I was supposed to have, and then there were communal feelings.
1
SPEAKER_02
You walk into the cafeteria, you walk into this room full of some sobbing, some seething teenagers, and it s like, you gotta sort of choose out of a bag which affect you re gonna take on.
1
SPEAKER_02
So much of it felt like performance.
1
SPEAKER_02
It was like we collectively were deciding what we were going to do with death as kids.
1
SPEAKER_02
But like everything in high school, the kids that actually have the information aren t the ones that took the lead.
1
SPEAKER_02
It was the most performative who took the lead.
1
SPEAKER_02
It was the most popular.
1
SPEAKER_02
It was whoever was closest to her at that time, and I was one of them, got to have their moment on the stage to like show everybody else
1
SPEAKER_02
This is how sad we are.
1
SPEAKER_02
This is how angry we are.
1
SPEAKER_02
Let s show them.
1
SPEAKER_02
But there was another death that year that I m still trying to wrap my head around.
1
SPEAKER_02
And that was the fight between two teenage girls that broke out outside of my high school after a Friday night football game.
1
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Dr. Goodman, my old principal at Blake, she remembers the details that night crystal clearly.
1
SPEAKER_02
So I had to go back to her to get the info.
1
SPEAKER_02
As I remember it, the game was beyond standing room only, just hordes and hordes of students from all over the county.
1
SPEAKER_02
Sherwood is a rival of ours, and the game is basically over.
1
SPEAKER_02
It s a blowout, but not totally over.
1
SPEAKER_02
We re walking up the hill from the football stadium, and there s tons of kids and families and just people walking up that same hill.
1
SPEAKER_02
And when I get into the parking lot, what I really remember is seeing there were some girls in a mix-up.
1
SPEAKER_02
But this part is such a blur of both memory and also, I think, other people s stories of what happened that I m not exactly sure what happened.
1
SPEAKER_02
But I do know that a van speeds off.
1
SPEAKER_02
I remember looking at a couple bodies on the floor, but one of them is in really bad shape.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I ve never really seen in-person violence before.
1
SPEAKER_02
There s chaos happening.
1
SPEAKER_02
One of my close friends gets into a fight a couple feet away from me.
1
SPEAKER_02
He ends up in a police car.
1
SPEAKER_02
Everybody goes running off all these different directions.
1
SPEAKER_02
To get to the end of the story, a girl was stabbed and killed.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s about as much as I know.
1
SPEAKER_02
Do you remember?
1
SPEAKER_02
You don t know what happened.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_03
I do.
1
SPEAKER_03
I do.
1
SPEAKER_03
What happened was there was a girl who attended Sherwood.
1
SPEAKER_03
She did not go to the game.
1
SPEAKER_03
Her little brother was playing in a baseball league down on the far field.
1
SPEAKER_03
And there were stories about her with a baseball bat.
1
SPEAKER_03
It was because her little brother was carrying his baseball bat coming from the game.
1
SPEAKER_03
He was a little guy, maybe eight or nine.
1
SPEAKER_03
Okay, she was picking him up.
1
SPEAKER_03
The other girl attended Rockville High School.
1
SPEAKER_03
She had a sister who showed up at the game.
1
SPEAKER_03
The girl who attended Rockville, who was the sister, was coming to avenge her sister, who she perceived as having been wronged.
1
SPEAKER_03
So she came looking for the girl from Sherwood.
1
SPEAKER_02
Now... Sorry, I m trying to make sure I m following.
1
SPEAKER_02
So the girl who came to pick up her little brother... Right.
1
SPEAKER_02
Her sister called... No, no.
1
SPEAKER_03
The sister of the other girl.
1
SPEAKER_03
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_02
Her sister comes.
1
SPEAKER_03
Who s 15, comes to the game looking for the girl from Sherwood, not knowing that she didn t go to the game.
1
SPEAKER_03
So what happened was, and I had to show the superintendent these surveillance tapes later because of what happened.
1
SPEAKER_03
The girl who came up from the field
1
SPEAKER_03
had a pocket knife on her.
1
SPEAKER_03
She was confronted by the girl from Rockville and it was off camera.
1
SPEAKER_03
It was in front of the building.
1
SPEAKER_03
The girl from Sherwood pulled out this knife and literally had the world s most unlucky thing imaginable happen.
1
SPEAKER_03
She just
1
SPEAKER_03
staff once.
1
SPEAKER_03
The paramedic, who was a Blake parent, he told me she bled out internally before she hit the ground.
1
SPEAKER_02
What?
1
SPEAKER_03
People thought she had a seizure.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s what I thought.
1
SPEAKER_03
Yes, because that s what it looked like.
1
SPEAKER_03
When the girl from Sherwood thrust and then she ran off, she left.
1
SPEAKER_03
That was the van or whatever the car was.
1
SPEAKER_03
The girl from Rockville and the dad, who was the paramedic, they tore her shirt to do CPR.
1
SPEAKER_03
And in like four-inch letters, she had sexy bitch tattooed across her chest.
1
SPEAKER_03
So this is...
1
SPEAKER_03
At 15.
1
SPEAKER_02
Teenager.
1
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, at 15.
1
SPEAKER_03
Nobody in the crowd knew she was dead at that time because you couldn t tell.
1
SPEAKER_03
There was no blood.
1
SPEAKER_03
None.
1
SPEAKER_03
The girl from Sherwood served 18 months.
1
SPEAKER_03
She went to jail.
1
SPEAKER_02
18 months?
1
SPEAKER_03
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_02
Oh, man.
1
SPEAKER_02
I thought she was still awake.
1
SPEAKER_03
No, no, it was, but that was as a juvenile and considering the circumstances, they were pretty shocked that she got that.
1
SPEAKER_03
I mean, she was like an honors kid.
1
SPEAKER_03
She had never been in trouble before.
1
SPEAKER_03
It was an unbelievable nightmare.
1
SPEAKER_02
I think I have to say here without even the slightest bit of irony or disbelief, that could have been me.
1
SPEAKER_02
I could have been the stabber, and I could have been the deceased.
1
SPEAKER_02
I was a black honors kid.
1
SPEAKER_02
I went to school in this county.
1
SPEAKER_02
I also got mad when my ex dated other people.
1
SPEAKER_02
When people say, that could have been me, sometimes I think they re being facetious.
1
SPEAKER_02
Sometimes I think they re stretching.
1
SPEAKER_02
Sometimes I think they re trying to be overly empathetic.
1
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no.
1
SPEAKER_02
That was me.
1
SPEAKER_02
I was the kid.
1
SPEAKER_02
Seething.
1
SPEAKER_02
I was the kid with repressed emotions who felt free and combative in a circle full of people when I was outside the school because my parents weren t watching me.
1
SPEAKER_02
My teachers weren t there.
1
SPEAKER_02
Couldn t fail the test in that moment.
1
SPEAKER_02
I could just get it, you know?
1
SPEAKER_02
And thank God it never came to that for me.
1
SPEAKER_02
But God also knows there were some times that it almost did.
1
SPEAKER_02
My friend Isaac, who I have been close to since I was six years old, he knows my temper.
1
SPEAKER_02
He also knows I have a smart-ass mouth, and he s also seen me get jealous and almost fuck up my life.
1
SPEAKER_01
I would gladly love to paint this picture for your audience.
1
SPEAKER_01
Please.
1
SPEAKER_01
Ladies and gentlemen, for a long time, I was notoriously known throwing house parties.
1
SPEAKER_01
My mom was very gracious enough to allow me to kind of have a loose leash, in a sense.
1
SPEAKER_01
I threw one of my best parties, and I invited all my friends.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, that was the thing to do, was to drink.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Smirnoff was the drink of choice at the time, and Bacardi.
1
SPEAKER_01
But nonetheless, the party got so turned up, I had to start kicking people out.
1
SPEAKER_01
And as we re exiting the party, man, this gentleman with this... I want to say with this girl was walking out.
1
SPEAKER_01
Nah, he was... The girl was my ex-girlfriend.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yes!
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so that s the difference.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Chad wasn t liking that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Chad was not feeling that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because as I was walking out, I was trying to say goodbye to you, and I was hearing the exchange of words.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the last exchange of words was from him and then you.
1
SPEAKER_01
He said something along the lines of,
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, blah, blah, blah, that s why you hate him.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ain t feeling you or whatever, you chump ass, bitch ass nigga, whatever.
1
SPEAKER_01
Typical Chad-like fashion.
1
SPEAKER_01
Even though he is not physically capable of winning a fight, he can slash your fucking feelings with a thousand swords of his tongue.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve never seen someone s throat just
1
SPEAKER_01
cleanly slit with the words that you decided to choose.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was like, motherfucker, I m this shit.
1
SPEAKER_01
You ain t nothing.
1
SPEAKER_01
You will never be nothing.
1
SPEAKER_01
No one will ever remember he was nothing.
1
SPEAKER_01
You just completely reduced him into a microscopic peasant of the universe just by just throwing these words at him.
1
SPEAKER_01
Who the fuck do you know at this party?
1
SPEAKER_01
Who are you?
1
SPEAKER_01
And I was kind of astonished.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s funny, but it s not funny.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was kind of astonished.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s funny because he was bigger.
1
SPEAKER_02
He was tougher.
1
SPEAKER_02
He was from the other side.
1
SPEAKER_02
He was from Baltimore.
1
SPEAKER_02
I m told that he had a weapon in the car.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_02
And so it ties into a couple things that I want to talk about.
1
SPEAKER_02
One is, as you said, I am not a large man in stature.
1
SPEAKER_02
I was even at that point in time, I was probably five, six, 115 pounds, something like that as a junior, senior in high school.
1
SPEAKER_02
But I ve always, you
2
SPEAKER_02
I always had a bark, and I always had the thing right there waiting in case somebody was going to try something with me, which is what I m talking about, which I think came from, particularly in that year,
2
SPEAKER_02
Feeling like you re on the basketball team, but you re the little guy.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re the guy who doesn t play that much.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re riding coattails to the success of this team.
2
SPEAKER_02
Or yeah, you date this girl and she s smart and she s pretty, but you re this little nerdy light-skinned nigga.
2
SPEAKER_02
At the end of the day, I could take your girl or I could beat you up or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_02
And then being at home, it never really felt like enough was enough.
2
SPEAKER_02
I never felt like I could get enough A s on a test or I could do enough to make somebody be like, damn, you re good enough.
2
SPEAKER_02
I wasn t a one-dimensional person at that age.
2
SPEAKER_02
I don t think anybody is.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, there were times where I was carefree, joyful, the excitement of my parents telling me my friend gets to sleep over.
2
SPEAKER_02
I remember the moments when I d be so excited, I would start dancing.
2
SPEAKER_02
I remember when I got an N64 for Christmas and I literally did a version of the song from, fuck, you know, Saturday Night Live, Fever, and I was like,
2
SPEAKER_02
Ha!
2
SPEAKER_02
Ha!
2
SPEAKER_02
N64!
2
SPEAKER_02
I did that as a kid.
2
SPEAKER_02
I did a little dance with it.
2
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But sometimes I d be walking around like a little clenched fist.
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My friends in college used to call it my cool face, which was basically, you know, I d be a kid walking into a new place with a couple of my friends, a school, a parking lot, a basketball game, a teen club, whatever.
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And I would have my face clenched like a little bald fist.
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I was little, I was skinny, I had a big ass head.
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I was frail in body, but not in spirit.
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You know, I wanted people to look at me and think I could defend myself.
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As I walked around like a little clenched fist, there was a tension I was creating on purpose with the world around me in some ways.
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And when you walk around like a clenched fist sometimes, as my mom reminds me, when I found out that Alicia had died, I behaved like a clenched fist.
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I found out that that had happened, that Alicia had been in that accident, and so I just rushed home.
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So you went in and told your dad, because I wasn t home, and you punched a hole in the wall.
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Do you remember that?
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No, I have no memory of that at all.
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Where?
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In what wall?
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I think in your room.
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Really?
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You punched into the wall, your dad told me, and you were obviously very, very, very, very, very upset, and rightly so.
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I do remember I was at home that day, and I heard you on the phone, but I could tell that something was wrong.
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How could you tell?
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Just what you said.
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I think you said, you know, I could kill him or something like that.
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You were really upset with the guy that was driving the car.
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And I heard it, and I said, oh, let me go up and see how things are going.
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And when I got up there, you were laying on the bed, prone, face down.
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And you said, so-and-so killed Alicia.
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And I said, what?
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I said, what do you mean?
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He said he was driving the car, and he ran into a pole.
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And you said, I could kill him.
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You sort of sat up.
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And he just punched the wall and punched a big hole in the wall.
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And I knew at that point you were really upset.
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So I stayed up there with you, and we just talked.
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And then you said you need to go out and just get some fresh air.
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So I let you go, and you walked around and came back.
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So yeah, that was that day.
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My dad is a thinker.
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He shows love with action.
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He fixed the hole that I put in that wall while I was out on the walk.
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But I think he wanted in some way to hide from me what I was capable of when angry.
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And it worked.
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I forgot.
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And I think he wanted me to not feel guilt or shame for expressing that anger because anger is not really allowed, especially for us.
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You know what I mean?
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I remember my dad not making any of this about him.
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He never took the moment to preach to me.
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He didn t take that moment to force a message down my throat, which I think
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is the inclination for a lot of people in moments of tragedy.
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I think he was in shock, like I was.
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He just fixed the wall.
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And then, naturally, Alicia s dad had a different experience, Arturo.
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I remember very clearly watching Arturo deal with Alicia s death.
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I knew a bit about his life.
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I knew he had immigrated to the US.
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I knew he had started a business and was a doctor and I had been in his house many times and it felt good there.
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He was a father of two young ladies and married to a very special woman.
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And I just thought like, how cool this guy who is so understated and confident and
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He gives such a gentle and kind and supportive presence to these people in his life, and it never undermines his toughness in any way.
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Artur, I remember you at that wake.
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I hugged you and you were crying.
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And it was my first time experiencing an adult man crying.
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I mean, I ll never forget it.
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I hold onto it now.
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It was selfishly, I ll speak on it, it was very freeing for me.
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It was a way for me to see a different form of strength than what I had seen on television and even in my own house.
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It was just human.
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It was so human.
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You know, I remember you felt like a leader back then.
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Now as an adult, I remember thinking back on, I am witnessing leadership.
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And we just saw my friend Ashil.
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I don t know if you guys remember Ashil.
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He played on the basketball team with me.
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He just lost his two-month-old daughter a few months ago.
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Yeah.
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And we all came home to be with him.
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I saw him do the same thing and we talked about it recently in the car and we talked about seeing you do that back then.
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Could you share with me just a little bit, what was guiding you at that point in time?
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How were you choosing who to be every day and how were you making decisions?
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Actually is a very good question because when I look back at that evening and everything that transpired,
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in the first 24, 48 hours and thereafter.
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I wonder if I could do the same today, because the events, of course, go, Alicia leaves, we can t reach her, and at that point, panic sets in.
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But what are we going to do?
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So what s the name of the boy?
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Family.
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Let s try and find out an address.
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Let s try and find out a number.
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Let s try and get in touch with them.
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Still no word of her.
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Ultimately, after calling hospitals, et cetera, I finally said, let me go to the boy s home.
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In the middle of the night, right?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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This is, uh, yeah.
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Alicia passed at 11 23.
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Yeah.
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So this is all taking place after midnight.
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So I go there and, and at that point the officers come in, I say, you know, what happened?
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And they say there was an accident and I, can I go to the crash?
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No, you may not.
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And they asked for a picture of her and,
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The family had the yearbook, so they gave her the yearbook, and it was four o clock in the morning when we had the call saying, yes, there was a positive ID.
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So four o clock in the morning is when we finally find out, yes, Alicia has passed.
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What are we going to do?
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Where are they going to take her?
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So that morning, I called a pathologist, and I said, you know, whatever donations, tissue-wise, can be made, I would like them to take place.
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So they went ahead and did that.
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And so Alicia was a donor.
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And as much as she could, we also said, what are we going to do about Veronica?
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Veronica is in Siena, Italy.
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We have to get her back.
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But before we get her back, we have to tell her.
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And that was probably, between the two of us, the hardest thing we were going to have to do that day.
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Veronica was spending a semester abroad.
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She had just started.
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Yeah.
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Shortly after that, Lulu said, you know, we should probably open a scholarship in her name.
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So, okay, let s do that.
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I ll go ahead and fund it.
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Not a problem.
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So we re trying to get Veronica back.
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So we have to make all the travel arrangements.
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We re going to open this scholarship.
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Both of us were trying to, OK, this happens.
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What are we going to do to make something good?
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That was my thought.
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Let s do something good out of this.
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And that was the scholarship.
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We re having to notify friends and family.
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And the palms.
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And the palms.
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I recall someone called here.
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So it was a Saturday.
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There was going to be a practice.
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And we were in a carpool.
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So whoever called is that we re going to go in there and pick Alicia out of ten.
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I said, no, I don t think Alicia will be going to any more practices.
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Lulu and Arturo are like family to me.
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As much as I feel angry at the driver because it feels like he didn t protect our friend, their daughter, by some associative property, they should be within their rights to feel angry at me because I didn t.
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Thinking about how
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learning death at that age was formative.
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One of the things was it immediately created this catalog of my last few interactions with Alicia.
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One of those was her telling me she was going to go on a date with this dude.
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And I remember
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thinking to myself to ask questions about that or something, to kind of examine it a little bit.
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And then in a light way, after she passed, I did start running back the tape on, man, what if I had asked this question?
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Or what if I had thrown a little shade on the dude to make him less appealing?
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Or like, what if she was dating me instead of him?
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Maybe all of this would be prevented.
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As I was making this show, I had to put together a list of names of people for our team to reach out to.
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Classmates, principals, family members.
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And I wrote down the driver s name and I put a big red circle around it so that the whole production team knew not to reach out to him.
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If we were going to reach out to him, it needed to be done so thoughtfully.
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And it had to come from me.
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As we got closer and closer and closer to reaching out, it started getting more and more real.
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And I started to literally stay up at night thinking, what if he says yes?
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What if I have to sit across from him for an hour or two or more?
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And what if I have to ask him, did she scream?
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What if I have to ask him, do you have dreams about this?
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Do you remember it?
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Do you remember me?
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But the truth is, I don t feel ready to ask him yet.
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And as I think about reaching out to him, I realize the insecurity that I feel here touches on a bunch of insecurities that I ve been carrying for what feels like my whole life.
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In the next episode, I m gonna go back to high school to try to figure out why I ve always felt like I m straddling a hundred different worlds and a hundred different personalities.
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How living under the expectations of so many different people made me lose sight of exactly who I am.