The Boy in The Casket

We hadn't spoken in perhaps 4 years, and here I was, at his funeral. For the first time in my life (but, as it would turn out, not the last) we were burying one of our own at the age of 19.

I had been to funerals in the chapel within the cemetery premises before, it being a small town and all. Our close knit ethnic community would often invite everybody to funerals and I had been to several funerals of my friend's abuelitas, and the occasional youth in our community. But they were never close acquaintances, and our attendance had always been in support of their bereaved loves ones.

This was the first time I truly knew the person in the casket.

In primary school, we had been frenemies. We were both considered the brainy kids in the class, and, both being immigrant kids, we were often singled out as examples of integration done right - the immigrant kids, top of their class! His smarts lay with math and science, mine in languages and writing, but we were both competitive and enjoyed the attention our smarts awarded us. I remember the time when we got an assignment to work out how much water fits in a bathtub. I was dutiful, but terrible at math, and thus completed the assignment by spending hours pouring litre after litre of water with my mother's measuring cup. He had calculated the correct amount by working our how many litres of water one could fit in a cubic metre, and accompanied his findings with a sketch of a bathtub, together with his calculations.

We were 10.

He also had extremely neat and beautiful handwriting, almost like an adult, and would draw beautifully lifelike pictures.

When our class were trialled out for junior Jeopardy both him and I studied hard - we both wanted to be on national TV - but both got beaten by the sports question; we had not thought to study those!

We were also both on the receiving end of some low key bullying. I had black, long and thick hair, a product of my Hispanic heritage. Since my mane stood our amidst the other kids, your typical Scandinavians with straight, blond hair, the bullies dubbed me The Horse. The bullying was subtle, they would neigh as I walked by.

And sometimes he would neigh, too, all to avoid the attention to turn towards him. You see, us nerds were interchangeable in being on the receiving end and their nickname for him was Television Head, thanks to his parents' habit of keeping his hair neat and trimmed, making his forehead appear a bit on the square side. They used to make him cry, and rather than having his heart broken, he'd prefer to join them.

It all changed in High School. Our school district did not have a high school back then and we were due to merge with another school. During the summer, I happened to befriend one of the cool girls from the other school and - a makeover later, courtesy of my older sister (who declared I would NOT ruin her reputation), I could marginally pass off as one of the cool kids.

I remember this time as a time of anxiety, constantly afraid of committing a faux pas in the cool world, and struggling with my inner nerd who yearned to go back to being studious and good. We would cut class and I would go with them for smoke breaks and sit around "hanging out" (although I never did smoke, being terrified I would cough, like Sandy did in Grease).

Around the same time, he befriended the cool boys, becoming especially close to the boy who was everyone's dream boat, a mysterious kid who would rarely show up to classes, other than art class.

They bonded through art. The dream boat kid was a tagger, and not the type who scribble their name on bridges or train cars but the artiste type, who gets commissioned murals by stuffy local politicians who want to keep with the times. The boy from our neighbourhood learnt how to tag and pretty soon they were tagging together. His nerdy, neat clothes soon were replaced with baggy pants and oversized tshirts (hey, it was the 90s, man!) and, not being a completely bad looking kid himself he soon because a dreamboat by association and together they would go out with the prettiest girls. As for me, I found my new found coolness exhausting and impossible to keep up with, and soon I reverted back to a kind of in between: I was friendly with all the cool kids, but not a part of the inner circle. Being a scrawny kid with no fashion sense, I was never one of the pretty girls. I had cut my long hair shoulder length and was proudly sporting a weird lampshade shaped do. I faded back into the crowd and was happy and relieved to do so.

His trajectory was different. The cooler he got, the more his former smart kid personality faded into obscurity. I remember it used to bug me how he used to play dumb in physics class when asked a question (BUT YOU KNOW THIS, I wanted to yell). They would always sit in the back of the class, bums all the way at the end of the seat and sort of leaned back in a way that looked disengaged and arrogant, like they had somewhere else to be. "Huh", said the kid who worked out how many litres could fit in a bathtub using math at 10 years old. Blank stares and giggles from my former rival.

The very last time I saw him was at a party. We would have been around 16 and it was a time where you were nobody unless you had a full weekend, full of plans to party ("P-A-R-T-A-Y!!!") and drink contraband alcohol. I would occasionally go along to these parties which usually ended in the beautiful people deep throating each other whilst us wall flowers quietly wished our young society would allow us to stay home with a book.

He came in with his crew and his latest girl on his arm, soaring the type of confidence you only get as a teenager by the assertion that you are hanging out with the right crowd. In addition to being taggers they had started to break dance and, when they came in people started chanting for them to put on a performance. To the excitement of the crowd, who had formed a circle around them, the two boys threw off their coats, and effortlessly gave a synchronised impromptu break dance performance. The crowd roared and my former frenemy basked in the sunshine that is the adoration bestowed by a teenage crowd. I didn't say hello to him, nor him to me.

Yet there I was, 3 years later. At his funeral. I glanced over at his mother a few times, pale and stoic, literally being supported by two relatives. Burying her youngest child.

I remember hearing through the grapevine that his latest girlfriend had broken it off, a stunning and popular girl that every guy was pining for. He was living alone in an apartment, and that was where he was found. What went through his mind as he decided his course of action? 19 years young...

There were several former classmates there, people who hadn't spoken to him for many years. We didn't know what had become of him, who he was when he died. Was he still the prodigious child deep down inside, who had an affinity for math and would draw colourful pictures of parrots in his notebooks?

The funeral carried on, a generic catholic affair, planned by heartbroken relatives who could not face the prospect of having to plan the funeral of a seemingly perfectly well teenager.

Only at the very end, when the white casket containing the earthly remains of my former rival was solemnly lifted to be taken to it's final destination, could you glimpse a small fragment of the devastation his family was experiencing.

The only personal touch to the funeral of the brainy boy with the peculiar laugh.

As the door to the cemetery opened up to let the casket bearers and the casket out, a song by the Beatles quietly filled the chapel, the devastated wailing reaching its crescendo.

"Yesterday. All my troubles seemed so far away".