"We were shopping at Park Royal yesterday," said Pammie, "all Karen could notice were weird little things like the color of mandarin oranges. We tried Christmas shopping, but instead she just rubbed her hands over fabrics. At the bus stop at Taco Don's, she ate one of Wendy's Mexi-Fries. I think that was all she had to eat before skiing. Poor thing. I'd have passed out, too, if I'd been her."Wendy said, "We should have forced her to eat."

"Don't rake yourself over the coals," I said. "There's something else going on here. We all know it."

"I agree. She was acting sort of spaz/ed yesterday," said Pam. "Tiny stuff. Preoccupied—and not just by that diet, either."

"I think we should show her parents the letter," Hamilton said. We agreed to do so later that day. Our table went silent.

That same evening, after feeble naps, we returned to Lions Gate Hospital, but Karen was unchanged. Not a limb, not a hair, not an eyelash. A chill fell upon us: Karen was not transforming the way she ought to. Leaving her room, I placed pink and blue carnations in a bud vase at her bedside; outside by our cars, we agreed that we would assemble at the school's smokehole the next morning so we could enter the building together, providing a casually united front.

At home, my parents, being neither heavy moralizers nor stringent disciplinarians, continued life as usual. Meatloaf, green beans, baked potatoes, and an episode of M*A*S*H. Years ago my cousin Eileen had been out cold for two days after smacking her head in a swimming pool's shallow end; her successful later career as a med school student made Mom and Dad less worried about comas than they might have been otherwise.

But none of us slept that Sunday night. Instead, we made an electronic cat's cradle of phone calls between each other's houses, all of us wearing house robes, hunched over kitchen chairs with only stove lights burning, whispering, unknowingly mimicking the purgatorial hiss of Karen's respirator.

The next morning, as agreed, we sluggishly convened down in the parking lot beside the smokehole five minutes before first bell, our eyes reddened, hair already stinking of smoke, our then-stylish corduroy wide-leg pants flapping in a wet, chilly Pacific wind.

Our entrance into English class—Wendy and Linus and me caused a not unsurprising teen zing as Karen's seat in front of me was pregnantly empty. Yet the three of us kept our down jackets on, chinsburied within their waffled nylon quilting, not as an act of defiance but as one of insulation, to shield us from the stares, the passed notes and hungry sideways glances. Philip Eng and Scott Litman gave us goggled incredulity; Andrea Porter offered kittenish gossip-hungry leers. Unspoken voices surrounded us: Look: it's the Karen killers. I hear they wrecked the Carters' house. Drugs, too: prescription drugs. Pissed to the gills! We all saw it coming, what with Jared kicking it last year. They're jinxed—they bring death to those around them. Look at their faces: I've never seen their badness before—I… I can't ivait to talk to them. Stars! Killers right here in our own English class!

When the session bell rang, the three of us skittered down the booming north hallway to reconvene outside by the Datsun. Hamilton and Pammie were already there, smoking and looking prickly. Their experiences had been similar to our own.

"Well, that was a real lulu, kids," Hamilton said, saying what we all felt. "No shitting way am I going back into that freak show." The five of us had already realized we were never going to finish school in a normal way. Pam said, "Canyon," then we hopped into our cars.

We had a few cigarettes and Linus had bargain-basement dime-bag skunkweed pot, which was all we needed for that moment. So we zoomed off to the canyon forest below Rabbit Lane. There, we parked the cars, walked down into the canyon's windless soggy greens where the tall trees above shielded us from the wet harsh weather, and we were calmed.

5 NO SEX NO MONEY

Again, personalities.

I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups—how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: Susan likes to eat at Wendy's; Donald was on the basketball team; Norman is vain about bis varsity sweater; Gillian broke her arm on Spring Retreat; Brian is a car nut; Sue wants to live in Hawaii; Don wants to make a million and be a ski bum; Noreen wants to live in Europe; Gordon wants to be a radio deejay in Australia. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities—to clarify just who it is we really are?

What have I said about myself so far? Not much, as is obvious. Until Jared vanished, I had thought my life average. You might look at me and ask me to baby-sit your children or coach them in baseball. I believed my mind was clean. My ambitions were undefined, but I assumed I would make my way in the world. I tried to be pleasant and likable. I don't think that's bad, but I was left every day with the sensation that I wasn't doing a good job at being … me. Not fraudulent, merely … not doing a good job at being me.

I remembered people from back in my early twenties, friends who would adopt a persona—the chic Euro-person; the embittered Grunge Thing; Stevie Nicks—and after years of practicing, they suddenly became those personas. What had I become? I don't remember even trying to fake a persona.

And after Karen left, I felt permanently jinxed; I was pulling away from the center. I darkened. My life had the beginnings of a story. I was no longer just like everybody else; the sensation felt wobbly, like jittering across a creek on slippery rocks with wet shoes, the current running ever faster.

The high school yearbook for the class of 1980 bore a special page honoring Karen. It showed Karen's grad photo, taken the month before her coma, inset above a foggy picture of trees with the following words below: Memories .

KAREN ANN MCNEIL

To Karen Ann, who left us on December I5th, still dreaming of larger worlds than ours. Hey, Karen—we miss you and we're always thinking of you.

David Bowie freak / Future legal secretary living in Hawaii / "Bumhead" / chatterbox / Smiles for all / "Ferrrrr-get it!" / Oh, those Mondays! / Let us ask ourselves, girls, do we have enough sweaters? / Lost a shoe at the Elton John concert / duh, , . . I walking to the portable in the rain /Eggie (right!) / Greatest love in life? The Fonz: Heyyyy! (Sorry, Richard!)

Senior volleyball, senior grass hockey, yearbook committee, Photography Club, Ski Team

Eggie was the nickname of Karen's white egg-shaped Honda Civic, speedily renamed by Hamilton as "the Ovary"—one of those nicknames that clings like a burr. Students most likely remembered Karen as the girl who was always gallivanting through the student parking lot, shuttling a load of laughing girls off to McDonald's for lunches of tea, saccharine, and half a small bag of fries.

The yearbook of the previous year had the following:

IN MEMORIUM:

JARED ANDERSON HANSEN

"Jare" was 1978's best sportsman, a good student and a fine friend to all. He left us in his prime, but we can maybe find peace in knowing that when we knock on heaven's door, Jared will be there to answer. Good-bye, Jared; we think you made the team.

"Ladies Man" (… ahem!) / senior football / senior basketball / brewskies / thin ice at Elveden Lake / fix your muffler! / Jethro Tull / Elvis Costello / Santana / That night at Burnside park / first to wear puka shells / tipping the canoe with Julie Rasmussen

… Hey, old man, take a look at my life … I'm a lot like you were

My own yearbook caption, as well as those of my immediate friends, was perhaps more interesting than most, as Wendy was on the yearbook staff—as was Hamilton's archenemy Scott Phelps, who adored Pam from afar: