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Keep Your Friends Close

I remember it vaguely as if it were yesterday. It was June, 3, 2000. I just turned 17 3 days prior. It was a calm summer night on the Westside of Grand Rapids. My friends Kelly and Kim were staying over for a late birthday get together. They were both redheads, they were always up to no good. Kelly and I became friends when we were in middle school. We were inseparable like two peas in a pod. We hung out after school everyday and on weekends. We could tell each other anything. Kelly was such a dependable friend and she was laid back. Kim was a friend but she wasn’t close to me like Kelly was, she was more of Kelly’s friend. I’d say they were pretty devious when they were together. They were good to me. That’s what I thought at least until that night came to an end.
It was about dusk, and we were looking for something to do like many teenagers often do. We decided we would go on a walk since it was nice out and we wanted to smoke a cigarette. We could only smoke if our parents weren’t home and if we took a walk since were minors. So we had to keep it secret. As we made our way through the run down Westside smoking our Doral cigarettes that Kelly stole from her parents. We finally made it to the night life of downtown. We were having a pretty good time I would say. Gossiping, talking about boys and acting freely as if we were in a world of ourselves.
We were probably walking around downtown for a good two hours when we thought it was a good idea to make it back to my parent’s house that was located on the Northwest side. It was pretty close to midnight. We didn’t go back the way we took there for some reason. Instead we walked sown Bridge Street over to Stocking.
As we approached the intersection of Stocking and Alpine Avenue, right next to the Holiday Bar. We heard screams of females; this wasn’t any kind of scream for help or for excitement. As the screams got louder we realized it was from a white Ford Taurus. The car drove slowly by us as if it was...