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Because of my situation, I was in an only child situation. And he was an only child. We pretty much became brothers. We did fucking everything together. We worked as a team in FBLA and made it to Nationals two years in a row. We'd just fucking chill all the time, go into deep conversations with this kind of level you don't think you could ever go into with someone else. Hard to go into entirely, but just keep your absolute best friend in mind as you read.
Anyways, we shared 3/4 classes and at this point we became pretty close. I was fucking amazed by him. He was a genius, really. His mother was incredibly intelligent as well. Here was this badass guy, and he wants to learn. I'm cool with that. He had a plan for his life at 14-15.
During our sophomore year, we took an elective together in which we were the only non-seniors. One particularly beautiful girl, who my friend was pretty into started hanging out with us. She was prescribed adderall, but never took them. I missed school one day, and she had given him some and he took them. He was into it, raving about how quickly he had just rocked our AP European History homework on it. He was smart, but he had never done any research on drugs. Unfortunately, he was the kind of guy that got the taste of drugs and after that always wanted to try more. Naturally, I tagged along out of interest. While I pretty intrigued with my first drug experience, I didn't have the real drive to pursue more like he did. I didn't know how badly he'd continue to pursue them. He was incredibly persuasive and knew how to manipulate and take advantage of people. I didn't mention this before, but we were in a small Kentucky high school. The overwhelming majority of people in this particular school -did not give a fuck-. They were just dumb and had no interest in even trying to change that. A lot couldn't read, etc. I'll save Kentucky's education system for another blog. Anyways, finally he found a guy that would listen and managed to get around 450 Xanax footballs for free, who had stolen from their dad.
He was taking them daily at this point, as was I - although not as many per day. One night he came over on a Monday and it began snowing so hard, he was invited to just go ahead and stay the night. We stayed up late playing Xbox, non-chalantly drinking stolen beer and taking Xanax. We assumed school was going to be cancelled. Unfortunately, it was not. We woke up in a daze and rode to school. For whatever reason, I took more than him that morning. I have no idea how many in total. I was running with no inhibitions. I remember sitting with him in Chemistry, and the next thing I remember is waking up in 40 degree rain on a railroad bridge as a train blew by. I had walked out of school. They were performing a full-out search for me. I'm not going to go into all the details but I was expelled and sent to a 30 day rehab center before going to an alternative school and my contact with my friend would be severely limited until my Senior year.
Geez, I didn't mention i was in foster care from 8th grade until I was 18. Which is why i was in this new town when i went to high school and back to the story, why I was moved another county down and into a new HS my senior year. In my new foster home I was finally allowed to make regular phone calls again, so one of my first was to him.
My senior year I was eligible to go back to my old HS, but as I told him, it didn't matter because i was going to a different high school. Turns out that this school I switched to had a dual-credit program through a private college nearby and he transferred to take advantage of it. So by some fucking insane chance, we were going to be re-united our senior year. We went into the counselor's office day 1 and matched up our schedules for both semesters. Badass.
We became closer than ever, and it was a fun problem and drug free year. For the sake of progressing through this story in a timely manner i won't go into too much detail here. My girlfriend became pregnant towards the end of my senior year and I left my foster home the day I graduated, a few months before I was 18. I moved in with her, and we had a nice apartment. We lived there from June until October and had to move because i was two and a half months through my Freshman year at university and it was a bitch getting there every day from where I was. Our neighbors were two recent immigrants and the gangster-esque guy of the two dealt drugs. Didn't deal with him at all until I moved. I told my friend about them, and my neighbor was slightly more hardcore than I thought. I thought he was just some other idiot trying to sell pot, but nope. That was the first night we tried Cocaine. I always wanted to try it, and although I loved the high, that was it for me. I couldn't afford the time/money/etc to continue. I had just had my son, I was in school. I didn't have the money or time to hang out with him all the time and just get high.
I went with him one more time, and promised a third on a Friday night. Friday afternoon came, and my son had been a little fussy all day. I didn't want to go out and pick up drugs with him to help him feel safe that night. I figured if he wouldn't go without me. He wasn't familiar with the area at all, didn't really know the guy - I just figured he'd give it up for the night.
Unfortunately, he did go that night. Met them in the very back of a Wal-Mart parking lot and was robbed at gunpoint after being pistol-whipped in the forehead. My friend had a brief stint selling drugs in HS, on top of his stipend from school and brought a little over 2k cash, all of which was stolen. I was nerding out playing WoW. Turned the phone off and was done with it. 2am, he comes knocking on my door. My gf was pissed and i chose to just not answer it. I checked out my voicemail the next morning and listened to the flurry of panicked voicemails and for some reason, he thought i was in on it. According to my friend, I had talked to the guy before and cancelled intentionally so that he'd be alone to be robbed.
I was pretty devastated by this claim. My friend had offered to give me as much cash as he could if i ever needed it after i had my son. I brought this up to him - why would I rob you, ruin our friendship of x years just for money when you told me you'd just give me whatever I needed anyways? We didn't talk for about 3 months before he called me again. He rolled up, and explained how he had passed out in class and been searched by the campus police and been charged and expelled, with no refunding of tuition.
I was happy to see him again, but he kept asking me to make sure i wasn't involved. I suppose if we traded places I could maybe be suspicious. We promised it was over that day, but that ended up being the last time we'd speak. It's now been almost 2 years since that day. He called my old cellphone and left me a message he was joining the Marines. He has always been pretty out of shape and he has asthma so i want to believe that he didn't actually join. I don't have his phone number or email, he refuses to use social networking sites so the only way to contact him would be to drive out there. I have no idea what to expect. Ideally, I'd get my friend back and make him play StarCraft 2 with me, haha. But really, is he still addicted to drugs? None of our mutual friends have heard from him.
What do I do? Even though I want this friendship back, how do I go about it if he's always going to think I was involved in the back of his mind?
Final addendum: I skipped massive chunks of our history here, but i was trying to only include what was essential for the background, and maybe a little extra. I also tried to keep as much personal information out. I know this is a massive wall of text, but I'd really prefer responses from someone who didn't just read the first and last paragraphs.
