The Boys in Red

Author's Note: This tragedy is real. I wish it was fictional. If you want to learn more about the Boys in Red, you're welcome to read more here.

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Nick Quinn is walking me home again,

Singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight off-key,

wiggling his hips and shoulders like a cartoon animal.

I wipe the tears from my eyes,

and I laugh, even though he's done this a hundred times.

It's how he makes space for me,

even when the bus turns cruel.

-

The Bathurst High boy's basketball team,

The Phantoms,

are just jerseys in a gym to me then,

red and bright under the lights,

a name you could cheer for without thinking

about what it means to vanish.

---

January 12, 2008:

Mom calls from work, the hospital,

her voice tight like she's holding something in.

Do I know anyone who was on the school sports teams?

She doesn't say which sport.

She doesn't say which gender.

Just that "She came to work and the morgue was full."

-

The radio plays songs I don't remember.

Between them, the anchors speak like they're tiptoeing

around glass smashed on the floor.

I think of Brittany all morning.

I think of volleyball jerseys and bus rides back from Moncton.

The air tastes like wet pennies,

while freezing rain needles the windows.

---

Hours later, the words shift.

Basketball.

Boys.

Bathurst High.

-

Then the names.

Then his.

Our Phantoms.

---

At home, the KC Irving Center is

just a shape on the TV screen.

Our whole town packed into its ribs,

draped in red.

I am on the couch

watching my own community from the outside,

the camera panning over photos of faces

that I've known since kindergarten.

-

Nick's birthday in the captions,

a birthday call with his parents moments before the crash.

I hear his voice in the static,

singing a-weema-weh, a-weema-weh

while the camera follows the casket.

-

The Phantoms are in the headlines now,

no longer just jerseys,

but boys who will never step back out on the court.

-

The Lion sleeps tonight.

The road stays wet forever.

We are all still here,

and the air is anything but ordinary.