The voice you are about to hear belongs to my dad, recounting the day I learned of my best friend Alicia's tragic death in a car accident. I often reflect on my junior year of high school as the moment when life became real, because that was the year death became a reality. I understand that people experience loss regularly, and that children often face such experiences, but this was my first encounter with the departure of someone I depended on, cared for, and spoke with almost daily. The shock was overwhelming and caught me completely off guard.
My high school was located in what seemed like a perfect suburban town, Montgomery County, just north of Washington, D. C. At first glance, it appeared to be the ideal suburb, with a diverse, middle-class, and educated population. Some homes even had white picket fences. It was close enough to a major city to feel its urban energy, yet far enough to see stars at night, enjoy large backyards, bonfires, crickets, and dogs barking.
However, with the wisdom of hindsight, I would have noticed that tragedy was creeping closer to our pleasant American suburb each year.
Montgomery County, Maryland
Early Tragedies and a Sense of Unreality
In 1999, the Columbine High School shooting claimed 15 lives in Columbine, Colorado. However, it felt distant, over 1600 miles away, and barely registered for me as I was still in elementary school. Then, in 2001, the attacks on the Pentagon occurred just 30 miles away. While the September 11 attacks also targeted the Twin Towers, the Pentagon was the local point of impact for me. It was a place I had been, yet I still didn't fully grasp the concept of death.
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In 2002, tragedy struck even closer to home with the DC sniper attacks. The closest killing was only 5 miles from my childhood house. I remember the fear, running from room to room to avoid the windows. The discovery that the sniper used hollow-tip bullets, which exploded on impact, offered a strange sense of safety in front of those windows.
I recall seeing people jump out of their cars to quickly pump gas, then duck and crawl back to the driver's seat. Yet, as a kid, it felt like a bizarre role-playing video game, an exciting event in our otherwise quiet town. It didn't feel real until it was real, until my best friend was gone.
A Year of Profound Change
The year that followed was bookended by a stabbing murder right in front of our high school. I was there. I saw it. That year, my 16th year of life, from 2004 to 2005, felt like it contained a lifetime of experiences. I lost a friend, witnessed a murder, experienced the thrill of being part of a state finalist basketball team, felt like a local celebrity, and finally became one of the cool kids. I also felt the pain of never being quite good enough, quite masculine enough, the fear of being an outcast, the pressure to have sex, and the confusion of trying to act like an adult while still in a small body.
That year changed my life. I tell myself that it defined me, that it made me who I am. I think about that year almost every single day. Twenty years later, I still live in that year. Now, I'm trying to figure out why it meant so much to me, why I think it shaped me, and why I can't let it go. I share these stories so often that I'm no longer certain what actually happened that year. To find out, I'm going back to talk to some of the people who were there, who lived it as I lived it, to try to understand them and to try to understand what happened to us that year, to understand why I was caught so flat footed when tragedy struck.
To understand the high school I attended, you have to know that it seemed perfect from the outside, much like the school in "Friday Night Lights." To understand what it was like before I got there, I need to introduce Dr. Carol Goodman, our principal, who built it.
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Friday Night Lights
День открытых дверей Школы искусств и гуманитарных наук ДВФУ – 2022
The Early Days of Blake High School
Montgomery County is a very diverse community. What was unique about Blake, though, was that we were part of the Northeast Consortium, a new concept where students could choose between three schools. It was supposed to be four, but one school opted out due to racial concerns. They didn't want their kids to go to school with "those kids."
We opened with a signature program in Fine Arts and Humanities. I had a planning year to work on hiring, working with the community, and choosing the school name. I'm still very proud that Blake is the only high school in Montgomery County named after an African American.
Blake was a humanities and arts school, producing numerous writers, journalists, musicians, and dancers.
However, a large percentage of kids who chose Blake in the early years had no interest in the arts. They were kids who were pulled in by someone at their previous school and said, "choose another school". That first year, I had over 50 kids with ankle bracelets.
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That first year was horrible. We had a 19.5% suspension rate with 725 kids. By the time you got to Blake, our suspension rate was probably 2.5, maybe. So those early years, we were really warriors to change the tone, to set the climate, to set expectations, and to just tame these kids.
Transformation and a Sense of Safety
The Blake Dr. Goodman describes is one I don't even recognize. By the time I got there, she had transformed our school into the model public school in our county. I transferred to Blake after a year at a Catholic school in DC where we had to wear uniforms. Alicia convinced me and my family to make the move to Blake.
When I arrived, everything she said about the school was true. The newspaper was the best in the country, the art programs were excellent, the dance program was always featured in The Washington Post, and the sports programs were on the rise. It felt safe and warm. People seemed to like each other, and even those who didn't hang out together had a rapport. However, there was still a delineation between the popular kids and the unpopular kids, the cool kids and the weirdos. It still had that tension you're going to get at any high school. That feeling, that interruption was a moment away, but you didn't know what the moment was going to be.
Alicia: An Unforgettable Talent
In a school full of talented artists and dancers, Alicia stood out. At 15, she could create magic in any medium. Sometimes, she would simply take my hand in class and doodle a long, twisted rose bush while listening and taking notes with her other hand. It would be so elaborate and soulful that I'd avoid washing my hand for the rest of the day. I could go on and on about Alicia, but I'm biased. I loved Alicia. I love Alicia.
Here's someone who looked at Alicia more like competition back then: Lale Mazani, another crazy talent who came out of our school. Now an Emmy-nominated costume designer in New York, working on movies like "Hustlers" and TV shows like "The Blacklist," even Lale, as a bit of a prodigy herself, was intimidated by Alicia's talent.
I really got to know Alicia more the next year when both of our focuses, we thought at the time, were fine art. We both had Mrs. Michaels as an art teacher, so Alicia was the one in class that was really good, embarrassingly good. You didn't want to draw or paint or do anything next to her. And it was a weird experience for me because I always knew I was advanced in that area, and people always complimented my art and everything, but it was hard for me not being the best in the class anymore. There was a bit of jealousy. It was like, Why can't I be as good as her? And it wasn't even about the quality of the work. So it wasn't just like, oh, why can't I draw it like that. She was so creative. Why didn't I think to draw what she's drawing? At a certain point, she would come to me to ask my opinion on things, and that's when I felt very accepted. Not like she wasn't accepting, but you know what I mean? It's like, oh, the girl that I'm jealous of is coming to me asking my opinion.
The Night of the Accident
Alicia wasn't just an artist; she was a performer. She was one of the lead dancers on our Palms team, and we were the art school. Anything that had to do with dance was a big deal. Fall Friday nights were football nights at Blake, but halftime was the Palms show. The night of Alicia's accident was a Friday. Thinking back, I'm confused why Alicia wasn't dancing that night. I asked Dr. Goodman what she remembers.
That was a Friday night that normally would have been a football Friday night, but it was Yom Kippur. So the game was played on Thursday night, and Friday night, kids were off. Alicia would have been at the football game as a Palm. So she and this young man, they went to a movie, and were going out for ice cream, and she had a curfew.
I was at synagogue on Friday night, and then Saturday my family goes, and the phone rang, and I thought, who is calling me on how you know, disrespectful. And first, it was from one of the secretaries at Blake who called me to tell me what she had just heard. And then my phone was ringing nonstop and just trying to piece together what next steps would be and everything else. I said to my husband, I want to go by the site. And I went. And Mike Kelly, who was the deputy fire chief for the Sandy Spring Fire Department, and he was a Blake parent. Mike was there, and the car had been towed by then, but Mike, God bless him, he was there with a trash can picking up debris.
He picked up Alicia's flip flop. He said, I don't want a child to see that his daughter was a Palm as well. There was a rusted beer can that he took because he said this had nothing to do with this accident. And he went through to make sure because he said, I know kids are going to come to this spot, and we've got to prevent them from coming to the spot because it's so dangerous. Which is why we set up a place on Blake's campus where kids could god, I'm getting teary. Where kids could come and gather and mourn. And I didn't know know. She was a sweet face in the hall. She wasn't a kid who I really had the opportunity to know, which always bothered me. But you have 1802,000 kids. You know so many, but you don't always know. I feel like I know her so much better after she died than I.
She was an introvert, but through her art, her art was just so amazing. But the other piece was the driver was in critical condition in Baltimore in the shock trauma, and my husband and I went to Baltimore, and I saw him there. He remembered nothing of it.
Part of the difficulty, too, I had to wear a couple different hats because his privacy and kids were angry at him. And I talked to his parents about would it make more sense for him to go to another school? He was a distinctive looking kid. Everybody knew who he was. You know why? And no, they wanted him to return, and he didn't return for a long time. He was in bad shape from the accident on many levels. We made sure he had friends around him, and we had all kinds of safety nets that just for his own. It wasn't as simple as everyone mourning the horrible loss of a student. We had the pain and suffering of another student to deal with, so it was a lot more complicated.
I'd never been through anything like that before, and I was an assistant principal at McGruder, and we lost an inordinate number of kids. It was, I guess, those back roads, and a lot of them were drinking and driving, and the school community was very focused on that. So, yeah, I had dealt with it before, but often said that a principal's worst nightmare is that phone call in the middle of the night that you've lost a student.
Visiting Alicia's Family
The only thing I loved more than calling Alicia's house phone back to back to back to back at dinner time was popping up on the betting courts. In real life, I had known Lulu and Arturo, Alicia's parents, basically since I was born, and they treated me like family. Lulu is an author and illustrator of children's books and an extremely prolific one. And back then, I thought it was so cool to see her and Alicia's art all over the walls in their own house. And then there was the Puerto Rican food Lulu would make. There was a pet bunny in the home studio. They felt like the Latin version of our family. And those feelings, they all just rush back in when I stepped foot in their house again.
For this interview, it has been the home of many joyful moments and many difficult moments of love and grief and healing. It has been the home where the birth of new wisdom began.
Chad Sanders: Author, Podcast Host, and Creator
Chad Sanders is the author of Black Magic: What Black Leaders Learned from Trauma and Triumph. He is the host of the Yearbook podcast on the Armchair Expert network and the Audible Originals podcast, Direct Deposit. Chad’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Time, Fortune, Forbes, Deadline, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. Chad has also written for TV series on Max and Freeform.
Yearbook is an anthology podcast series in which our respective subject revisits the year that made them ...THEM. Season 1 centers on Chad Sanders and his journey back to Maryland to re-discover his junior year of high school; a year he believes solidified his identity. This particular year was anchored by two harrowing events- the death of a best friend and a murder at his school. All with a basketball championship in between.
In his latest book, How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer, Chad brings deep vulnerability, honesty, and humor to a collection of essays that reflect on personal experiences from his career.
How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer
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