Diary of a Severely Mentally Unstable Kid 2: Erika tries to process life altering trauma.

[Yonagoda]

If she were to write some sort of novel, ten, twenty years down the line, some sensationalist paperback with somber portraits and sharp-edged lettering, she would probably dedicate a page or two about how she was lucky enough to miss that doomed trip. The truth is, she didn't really know. On that day, Erika woke up, brushed her teeth, ate her breakfast, and decided not to go. It was one of the first truly impulsive things she's done in her life, and for a moment back then she savored it. She was busy, and her knees hurt from walking too much like some old lady, and she didn't know how to ski well. There was a 16x24 inch canvas with wide messy strokes of acrylic still waiting for her on the dining table for AP 2D art that she was particularly enamored with completing at the moment. She got up too late and didn't want to rush her breakfast. The thought of taking public transport with classmates the way she used to ride school buses years ago was a claustrophobic nightmare for her and the snow equipment would feel like hell to wear.

Whatever the reason was, Erika woke up and told herself that today was going to be lazy, chillaxed kind of day, and inadvertently prevented her early death by terroristic game show.

She got the news several hours later, and the suspicion was already ripe in her mind the moment she heard about another school bus (or several) full of high schoolers were gone. The paranoia had rooted deeply into her mind within hours. She wondered about how to explain why she didn't go, and about how she might just seem suspicious, as if she had some foreknowledge about this and not just an indecipherable impulse. By the end of the day, she's endured multiple panicked, hyperventilting calls from various family members, texted dozens of people about her own safety, and tore through the yearbook from 10th grade to find every classmate that she might have to mourn. Somehow, Erika felt more connected than she ever had been. And she had, perhaps a little selfishly, basked in the attention a little, giddy at the thought that she was still loved, or at least cared for, enough to have her continued existence be something that people cry for assurances of. And then she felt total, absolute disgust at herself, and took a bus to her dad's workplace, and hugged him in front of everyone just to prove to him that she was alive.

If Erika were to write the book, she wouldn't talk about what she had for dinner that night. Or, she might, and it would be a footnote in the greater story, some inevitable pretentious moral dissection of the tragedy that took her classmates' lives on that one fateful event, yadda yadda. But she did remember it, more than she remembered the names of some of her classmates, more than the order of the phone calls she recieved, and more than what she was doing when she first heard the confirmation that, yes, the child-abducting terrorists are the ones who abducted our children. It was steak, semi-rare the way that her dad liked it, and potato salad from a squarish container in the lowest row of the fridge. Her dad opened up a beer and said, a little jokingly, "to your continued survival." He had put asparagus on her plate, but she didn't eat any of it. The root beer was kind of flat. She wasn't exactly sure why her mind focused on that. She might never be truly sure.

And then she went to bed and scrolled through her phone for three hours. She talked about her school. Somebody told her she should stop exploiting people's pain and pretending to be a student at JEM, so she sent them a photo of her yearbook and tried not to think about telling him that maybe he would be more sympathetic if somebody took his kids, how'd you like that, huh?

A mod of r/SOTFtragedy, one of at least half a dozen subreddits dedicated to this particular topic, apparently, reached out to her on gmail. She told them it would be a few days until she could gather herself to talk about it again.