After Hannah leaves the room where
Jessica is raped, she gets a ride from Sherri Holland. Sherri is the captain of the cheerleading
team, the sweet girl, the girl I never expected to be on the tapes. What does she do? She does the wrong thing. She makes a mistake, and then she ignores it,
or tries to. Sherri takes Hannah home,
but as she looks for her cell phone while driving, Sherri hits a stop
sign. Hannah tries to get Sherri to call
the police, but Sherri insists that she can’t do that because her father will
be angry. When Hannah fights back,
Sherri leaves Hannah on the side of the road.
While Hannah looks for a phone to inform the police that the stop sign
is down, there is an accident and someone dies.
This brings up a couple of
issues. First, Sherri had been drinking,
but assumed that since she could do a cartwheel she could drive. Second, she was more concerned with her cell
phone than she was the road. Even I have
almost wrecked when my phone went off while I was driving. Once, my boys were in the car with me. Sherri wasn’t as lucky as I was, if you
believe in luck. Sherri spends many
afternoons with the couple that hit Jeff in that accident. She tried to make up for it, but she still
held on to her secret. She claimed that
it was her own, but the truth belonged to so many others.
Jeff was a good friend to
Clay. After Clay tutored him and helped
him pass a class, Jeff decided he wanted to help Clay with girls. He continuously encouraged Clay to work on
his relationship with Hannah. Jeff
seemed like a good guy. His car was full
of empty beer bottles so everyone assumed he was drunk. Even if Jeff wasn’t drunk, he had been
drinking that night. I don’t know how
many kids died in car crashes when I went to high school. Each year, at least four kids died. We had fender benders constantly from Patrick
Henry High School to the middle of Ashland, VA.
That stretch would be packed with cars after school every day. Many of us were already getting high as we
left the parking lot. This story is so
typical, a kid leaving a party insisting they are sober, but they die anyway.
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