I don’t like telling this story too much. In fact, my brain doesn’t even like to wander into those memories too much, so whenever I tell it, it feels like I’m telling something I heard somewhere rather than something that actually happened to me. Here it goes.

Back when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, I was allowed to walk home all by myself. It was a looong walk; school ended at 3pm and if I walked at a normal pace, I’d be home in maybe 40 minutes to an hour. You see, the way home from school involved walking past a huge empty field that had previously been farming land, which was then sold to developers who were busy building ‘insta-suburbs’. My home was in one of the newer developments at the far end and my parents decided I’d go to school on the other end of town because they knew the teachers there. And back then, all a child needed to know was that cars kill people and not to talk to strangers — so it was OK to walk by ourselves.

At first, I never really walked by myself. My older brother used to walk with me every day. Then, when he turned 11, he didn’t like walking with his younger brother too much (I cramped his style and got in the way of his clique sharing dirty stories). So when I turned 9, I was often left behind and had to walk home by myself. But that was OK — I had a nice group of friends and we hung out together after school since we couldn’t hang out during the summer breaks. They lived in the same urban development where I lived, so we used to walk together past the creepy newly-built development areas and fields of former farm land. Because we wanted to save time, we used to take an illegal shortcut through the building sites, but we had to be careful not to be seen by any of the builders or we’d be kicked out. Back then they were in a hurry to finish, so over the summer break about 50-100 houses were in the initial stages of construction. These were not stamp-made, cheap copies, but special homes, with pools and basements (we could see their gradual development as we walked home day after day).

So anyways, one day walking back, we 3 see one particularly large estate where they had removed the fences and finished one big-ass pool. One of my friends had the bright idea to stay back and take a dip on the shallow end (it also happens that the building corporation was on strike at the time and all construction had halted, but we didn’t know that; all we knew is that there were no builders anywhere to be seen). My other buddy thought it was a great idea and wanted to go to. I want to say I was sensible, but in reality I was too scared of being late and having my brother and mom yell at me. So I kept on going. I remember they made fun of me and called me chicken-shit and a lot of other names. And I got mad at them so I walked off.

The next day, they didn’t show up at school. Nor the next day. Then the policeman come over to talk to the school the following day… and then they called me into the principal’s office to talk to me. My friends were ‘missing’ and they wanted to know if I knew anything. I was terrified because we’d been going where we weren’t supposed to and I knew I’d get into trouble. But when the time came, I broke down (I was nine, remember?) and I told them what I knew. The school called my parents as the police took me over to the last place I saw them. I remember nearly pissing myself as they drove me in the back seat of the police car. I was made to wait there while they went in to see. Then one of the officers came back and called over the radio. I asked if they found them, thinking that maybe they had been playing hooky for 3 days, swimming around. The officer told me very quietly that my friends weren’t OK. Then I cried and then my parents came to pick me up. Turns out the boys had drowned as the pool wasn’t finished. To this day, I believe they filled it up with water to test for leaks as they had not bothered to finish off the edges or to put stairs, so my buddies probably drowned as they got tired and tired of trying to get out. Christ, I still cry whenever I think of them.

I still remember being so tempted to go along, especially after they teased me. I think if they had tried a little bit harder before they got tired and called me names, I would have gone. And I would have drowned too.

…

Fuck, I just spent the last 10 minutes crying. I miss them so much. Even after 2 decades and only knowing them for 6 months, I still mourn them.

Credit: Anonymous

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