RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Forty-First Fragment

* This is a fictionalized account of some shit that actually happened. All the names, locations, etc. have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. – JG *

These are the actual facts of the matter:

At some point late in my freshman year, another Freshman named Rand Myers (14 years old) killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. At some point after Katie Hoehner, Will Haynes and the Janks family were all murdered at the beginning of my sophomore year two juniors named Tim Danvers (17 years old) and Carolyn Brewster (17 years old) committed suicide prior to the Christmas break at the end of 1985, Tim with an overdose of pills and Carolyn also with a gun. Sometime after the beginning of 1986 and springtime of that year another sophomore named Chris Coloiacovo (16 years old) hung himself. Essentially the end of our sophomore year was also the end of the series of deaths that haunted Kenton during the mid-1980s.

As there is no official record of the suicides, I have had to assign them random reasons in my mind out of the usual ones – was it Rand who was an unmedicated major depressive or was it Chris? Was Tim the one who killed himself because he was gay, or was it Carolyn? Was Chris bullied to death, or was he one of those autoerotic accidents that happen by the thousands every year? Did Rand shoot himself because he couldn’t get it up for Janey Larson? Did Tim? There is always so much secrecy around suicides, especially young ones – I always think that the reasons we speculatively assign end up being much, much worse than whatever the truth might be. Sincerely, how much worse can it get than a teenage suicide?

Except, of course, for a teenage suicide birthed in Snakeland.