Remembering the Rachels

Ten years and a few months ago, Rachel Smith, a student in my eleventh grade English class at Thomas Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, took her midterm exam and then, almost immediately afterward, got into a car with her friend, Rachel Crites. The two girls were reported missing about twenty-four hours later. Within a week, they were found dead, lying side by side in a station wagon in a rural area of Loudon County, Virginia.

Smith (left) and Crites (right)

The subsequent investigation suggested that the two girls were romantically involved and that their deaths had been part of a suicide pact. A key piece of evidence was an excerpt from Crites' journal: "Wherever I end up laying, whether buried or cremated, I want to stay with my true love, buried next to her. This is my choice. I'm sorry." Needless to say, the media was all over this disturbing story. In the weeks to come, fingers would be pointed in the direction of Wootton. Should Rachel Crites, an alumna who had graduated the previous year, been allowed to routinely visit her friend Rachel Smith at school? Should she have been allowed, in some cases, to join her for the entire duration of her classes?

I'm not an amateur sleuth, and I'm not interested in reopening the investigation today. Instead, I want to take a moment to think about Rachel and about the community and my reaction to her death. I was stunned when I heard the news. How could you not be? I was a first-year teacher at Wootton High School at the time, and I was trying my best just to tread water. Before I started teaching, I used to watch a show called Boston Public, which chronicled the lives of (mostly unrealistically attractive) teachers at an inner-city school. Like most shows, Boston Public made life in a school seem much more exciting than it really is. Every week, a teacher would sleep with a student, or a kid would die in a gang fight. It was tv, though, and it was pretty entertaining, and I was willing to accept that this was an exaggerated version of reality. The Rachel Incident would have been too melodramatic even for Boston Public standards - except this was real life. In some ways, it took away my innocence as a teacher: teenagers, even the healthy ones, are messy and fragile, and what they present to the world is only a fraction of what's really going on. Crazy things happen at high schools.

I can't pretend to have known Rachel well, but I did interact with her for an hour a day during what turned out to be the last months of her life. She sat in the front of a class of thirty-two students. From my admittedly limited perspective, she didn't seem interested in any of her classmates, and the"cool" boys in class would sometimes antagonize her. Mostly, though, they left her alone and vice-versa. Rachel participated in class regularly. She was bright and creative, and she had plenty to say. She made no apologies for her sometimes brusque manner: she was, it seemed to me, in school to do a job. She wasn't actively unfriendly to her peers, but she also wasn't there to make friends. (I learned later, at her funeral, that she had actually had plenty of friends - many of them from her summer camp, I believe.) I saw Rachel smile only infrequently, as on the two or three occasions that she would linger outside the classroom, talking to a friend right up until the bell rang. After the news broke, I realized that her friend - who always grinned politely when I shooed her away at the beginning of class - was the other Rachel. I had had no reason not to assume that she was a current student.

The detail that haunted me after Rachel's death was her performance on her English midterm: she wrote an outstanding essay on The Great Gatsby and earned an A, the highest grade in her class. I will never understand how a person can spend hours preparing to take a test, and then spend a full two hours actually taking it, knowing all the while that it is the last test she will ever take. At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychologist, I believe it couldn't have been the work of someone bent on taking her own life.

I wish I had known Rachel a little better, and I regret that I didn't make more of an effort to know her. Ten years later, Rachel's death continues to stick with me, along with a sense of guilt - misguided or not - that I failed to notice warning signs in a young person who was drowning in plain sight. It reminds me how little I truly know about the kids I see every day. And on my good days, it reminds me to be a little bit nicer to them, because who knows what else is really going on in there?

Opening Week!

I first started following baseball midway through the 1991 season - a good year to pick up the sport, since it ended in one of the best World Series of all time. (Twins over Braves in 7 Game, Jack Morris, Kirby Puckett, etc.) By the time the 1992 season rolled around, I had drunk the Kool-aid. After more than nine years, my dad had basically resigned himself to the fact that I would never be a baseball fan, and was thrilled when my interest finally developed, better late than never. When he saw that his Red Sox were at Yankee Stadium for opening day, he immediately picked up two tickets, even though it was a weekday afternoon game. Fourth grade be damned.

The game was great: Mo Vaughn, in his first full season, hit a huge home run. Roger Clemens pitched a complete game (in defeat, but still). Sadly, the Red Sox lost. And even more sadly, the loss would turn out to be a harbinger of a decade of futility by the Red Sox and, soon enough, dominance by the Yankees. But no matter: I got to watch batting practice, I kept score (using a kind of primitive score-keeping invented by my dad to cater to a nine-year-old), I had a hot dog.

Me - every year.

The next day, as I got off the school bus, I was welcomed by the school principal, a very friendly man with an unpronounceable last name: we called him "Dr. A." He smiled down at me and, with no trace of bitterness or sarcasm, asked, "How was the game, Alex?" I wasn't exactly sure how he knew where I had been. Possibly, he knew that yesterday had been opening day and just put two and two together. Or maybe he had overheard me tell my plans to anyone who would listen. At nine years old, it may not have even occurred to me that there was any reason to keep them secret. Looking back, I have to applaud Dr. A's sense of perspective. I'm sure he took his job seriously, but I think he also knew that my memories of that game would outlast my memories of that particular day of fourth grade.

There's no way I could have realized how lucky I was to attend opening day. I've been to a ton of baseball games since then, but I've only been to one other opener: the Braves' first game at Turner Field in 2009, against the Nationals. And that one was just a dumb luck, right place right time kind of deal.

I can't just drop work and assorted other responsibilities to go to opening day - especially now that I have children. But the thought still crosses my mind every year. The next best thing to actually attending opening day is coming home from work at 3:00, turning on the tv and cracking a beer. On a Monday afternoon, this is decadent enough to make me feel that I'm at least doing something to mark the beginning of the season. I kept the tradition going this past Monday.

My wife says she can relate to that old song from Damn Yankees, "Six Month Out of Every Year," in whichbaseball widows bemoan the loss of their husbands to the baseball season. That's me alright: from April through October, baseball is a big part of my life. The games are always on the radio when I drive, and on tv in the background while I grade papers. The ESPN scoreboard updates are always open on my computer while I do anything else. In fact, I've checked them no less than twenty-seven times since starting this entry. The men in the Damn Yankees song complain about their crappy Washington Senators. My teams - the Nationals and the Red Sox - have both been pretty competitive lately, but the equivalent for me has to be my fantasy baseball team, which continues to stink, year in and year out, no matter who I draft.

It pains me to admit it, but football has obviously surpassed baseball in the estimation of most sports fans in this country. Not for me. Baseball is at the center of many of my most meaningful friendships. It's the central focus of some of my best memories. It gives me a little jolt every morning when I realize that, even though I have to wake up, I at least get to check the box scores. With apologies to Christmas, this is the most wonderful time of the year.