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WellRed
BY WEB EDITOR KARSEN PRICE
 A Belated Goodbye
For nearly 15 years, finding Shelli has been on my to-do list.
This week, I found out I can mark it off my list forever. Not because I have completed the task, but because I can never complete it.
Shelli was killed in a jet-ski accident the day after my daughter’s first birthday. That was four years ago. And I never knew. Until this week.
A mutual friend — we were the Three Musketeers of Harding High in the late ‘80s — emailed me this week to let me know she, too, had only recently discovered Shelli’s death. Like me, Lisa felt robbed. Stunned. Incredulous that no one had found us before the funeral to let us know Shelli was gone at 33 years old.
Shelli was my best friend in high school. The top of the list. But somehow, after graduation, we lost touch like we swore we never would. While I was finishing up college, she moved, and got married. Without her new last name, I never knew how to contact her. I never dreamed that her parents still lived in the home where I danced to Madonna videos as Shelli watched in horror (she was into Depeche Mode and The Cure, and I’m sure she questioned our friendship that long-ago day when I mimed Material Girl word for word). Her parents still live in the same house where I ripped my anterior cruciate ligament to shreds on Shelli’s trampoline out back. The house I ran to for refuge after one particularly bad date. The house where we vegged out and watched movies and listened to a cassette tape of the Beastie Boys for the first time — and laughed about everything.
Once, Shelli, Lisa and I snuck off to the beach in my eggplant of a Toyota Corolla, which happened to be running on fumes. We slept all night in my car and watched the sun rise over the ocean. Somehow, we made it back in one piece.
There were attempts over the years to make contact with one another. But life, marriage, children, and work kept us both moving forward, with little time for looking back.
And now, my heart breaks to think of missing Shelli’s funeral. It’s an awful feeling to realize that, for four years, someone who was instrumental in my life was gone without my knowledge.
Shelli was the funny one, the sweet one. She was the girl whose hair changed color on a weekly basis. She had big, sparkly hazel eyes, a prominent but pretty nose, a neck like a model, and a sneaky sense of humor.
We watched The Breakfast Club until we knew it by heart. We learned to make jokes in French. We wanted to marry Holden Caulfield. We hoped to be popular but settled for having each other.
She got her nursing degree after high school, and was happy to care for others day in and day out.
The day I found out I would never talk to Shelli again — the one person I would attempt the horror of my high-school reunion in order to see — I went back to my yearbook and read what she had written to me. And 20 years later, she still had me in stitches.
“Don’t worry,” she wrote, “I think you are wrapped just fine.”
It took me a second. And then I remembered. Our favorite teacher — Coach Jon — would always tell me in class, “You aren’t wrapped right.”
I laughed at her words — and then skipped the line right into tears.
I’ll miss you, Shelli.
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