The Gatekeepers

by Jen Lancaster

  I had such hopes for him after his first trip to the rehabilitation facility. His notes from that time were upbeat and I thought he was going to get back on track, right his course.

  I allowed myself to fantasize that, maybe, just maybe... I even applied to American colleges.

  After a while, the correspondence stopped. He relapsed and had to be sent away again for treatment. The guilt over what happened with Jasper proved to be too much to handle without self-medication. While it was an accident, Liam will always blame himself.

  He’s on his third stint in rehab, this time in Florida. He lost his University of Florida scholarship right quick, but he hopes to take some community college classes down there once he’s out of the facility and into the halfway house. I’m happy that he’s getting a tiny portion of what he’d wanted for his future.

  He says he still loves me, but I’m no longer naïve.

  I told him he needed a year of sobriety before I’d even consider a face-to-face meeting.

  Love is not enough.

  Oh, who am I kidding?

  I’m still naïve enough to be hopeful about someday.

  I find the cherry tree planted for Braden. I offer an apology for not understanding exactly how impactful his life and death would be when I took those awful photographs for the newspaper. Mallory still grieves for him and my heart aches for her.

  Warhol and I walk some more and we come to Stephen’s tree. The leafy magnolia brings tears to my eyes and I can barely stand to look at it. Such promise. Such loss. Warhol gives the tree a respectful sniff and lies down underneath it. He did love Stephen so. We all did. I pledge to come back in the spring to see the tree in full flower.

  After visiting each tree, I pull myself away and head back to the Center. I hate that there’s a whole damn forest out there. When Warhol and I leave the garden and return to where Mallory’s waiting for me, she simply gathers me in a hug, because there’s nothing left to say.

  * * *

  Mallory picks me up for the screening since my folks are driving separately a little later. They’re wiped out from their flight and need to nap. We’re under strict orders to save them prime seats, just in case Owen forgot to reserve them. I feel a spark of excitement as we approach the reception before the film. I wasn’t at NSHS long, but I feel an unbreakable bond with so many of the students, an undeniable closeness that can’t be tempered by distance or time.

  I hear the throbbing beat of classic rap music emanating from the room where the reception’s being held and I have to laugh.

  “Sounds like Kent’s already here,” I say.

  It’s been eight months since we’ve been in the same place together as he couldn’t make it to dinner last night. We’ve spoken scads of times and have written a million emails and texts but we keep missing each other. He came to London in April for Easter on a family trip but I was in Tokyo for my dad’s latest exhibition, a McMansion built from rolls of paper towels and gallon jugs of Windex, called Disturbia and inspired by our time in North Shore.

  At the mention of Kent’s name, Mallory shrugs noncommittally, looking away from me. I thought they were pals. They worked so hard to bring the Gatekeepers to fruition. Plus, they’ll be at Princeton together in a few weeks. I’d hoped they might hang out more.

  “By the way, Mal, when are you telling your mum you’re not majoring in finance?” I ask. “You’re opting for psychology, right?”

  “Yes, and I plan to tell her...when I receive my Princeton diploma.”

  We both laugh. I knew she’d figure out a strategy for dealing with her mother eventually.

  Owen runs up to me and practically hug-tackles me. I forgot what it’s like to be in the country of aggressive hugging. I didn’t realize how much I missed it.

  “I am so very proud of you, my friend,” I exclaim. “You found your purpose.”

  “‘Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.’ That’s a Gautama Buddha quote but I feel like I’m livin’ it.” His face is wreathed in smiles as we talk. We catch up briefly but there are so many people vying for his attention that he’s whisked away after a few minutes.

  I can’t even get near Jasper. The media covering the event have swarmed him and it’s one flashbulb going off after the other. After financing Owen’s film, he figured out what he wanted to do for a living. He (and his dad) started a production company and he’s well on his way to becoming a movie mogul. He’s recently started splitting his time between here and Hollywood. His pants are covered with tiny embroidered film reels and the ladies are lined up a mile deep to talk to him. He spots me and gives me a small salute, calling, “Hey, Simian!”

  Only Jasper can make a walking cane look sexy.

  I’m on my way over to say hello to Owen’s parents when I’m swept off my feet and spun in a circle by some random tall guy who reminds me of the gent from Grey’s Anatomy.

  Yet he’s a complete stranger, so I’m none too happy about the manhandling.

  “What in the bloody hell?” I sputter.

  Who does this person think he is?

  “I can’t believe you’re here!” he exclaims, bouncing up and down. The voice is so familiar, but it takes me a second to connect the voice to body.

  Holy shit.

  I say, “Well, I guess I know who’s getting the Most Changed award at the class reunion, Kent. Christ on a bike, did you manipulate genetics as part of your senior project?”

  “Growth spurt,” he explains. “I grew nine inches and gained sixty pounds since last summer. Mom always said I’d be a late bloomer.”

  “Yet you didn’t say anything to me? Not a word?”

  “Dude, you see me every week on FaceTime. You didn’t notice?”

  “I thought the screen was distorted.” I turn to Mallory. “Are you totally blown away, too? Or have you two even seen each other since graduation?”

  “You didn’t tell her yet,” Kent says. When he grins, I detect traces of the boy I met a year ago. I’m gob-smacked looking up at him now, instead of looking down, seeing a man instead of a child.

  “I wanted that to be a surprise,” she replies all coquettishly, taking his hand.

  The slowest horse to cross the finish line is...me.

  “Whoa. Kent. Oh, my God! This is the guy you’ve been all squidgy and secretive about for the past few months.”

  “Didn’t want to jinx it,” she says. “Was waiting to see if it was the real deal.”

  “And?” I prod.

  Kent shrugs. “Eh, we’ll see what happens in college.”

  Mallory smacks him. “You tell her it’s the real deal.”

  Kent says, “No,” while nodding his head yes.

  We all circulate and catch up, yet I’m drawn to the interaction between Kent and Mallory. In so many ways, this pairing makes perfect sense. I wonder if they’ll make it after they leave North Shore?

  And then I wonder what making it would even look like.

  Because they’re together and happy in the present; the future really doesn’t matter; right now is enough.

  A bit later, we’re called into the theater and we sit. Mallory’s in the middle between Kent and me. Theo’s on my left and Owen’s to Kent’s right. Mum blows me a kiss from the seats Owen reserved for them and my dad puts his arm around her. Returning to England was the right call and we’ve sorted ourselves out again as a family, which is such a relief.

  I’m not meant to be a rebel.

  The lights dim and the curtain rises. I take Theo’s hand as Mallory reaches for mine. Glancing back and forth, I see our whole row is connected, all of us holding on to each other, grasping hands or linking arms, not because we have to, but because we can.

  The film begins with a long shot of the school, with white text scrolling over th
e green of the lawn and ivy-covered walls. I laugh when I realize that of course Owen would go for a Star Wars IV crawl-opening.

  Of course he would.

  The print on the screen reads:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  When you grow up in North Shore, there’s a sentiment that you’re not allowed to have problems, that you can’t be sad. That nothing can go wrong.

  From the outside, you’d swear we lived charmed lives.

  But just because we look like we have it all doesn’t mean that we feel like it. There’s a degree of pressure on us in North Shore that outsiders would never suspect.

  Our parents grew up watching John Hughes’s movie The Breakfast Club. When our folks were young, it was enough just to be Brian the brain or Claire the homecoming queen or Andy the jock, but now they expect us to embody all those traits concurrently.

  That’s a lot to ask.

  And for some of us? Sometimes?

  It’s just too much.

  Sincerely yours,

  The scrolling text ends with the movie’s title coming up on screen:

  THE

  GATEKEEPERS

  * * * * *

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 2012, three promising Lake Forest High School students ended their lives by stepping in front of commuter trains. The losses came in rapid succession, first in January, then February, then April. My hometown of Lake Forest, Illinois, became the focus of national news as the media attempted to make sense of the story.

  But how could anyone make sense of the senseless, especially as my town was a microcosm of the rest of the country?

  How could anyone find a way to explain the more than five thousand daily teen suicide attempts in this nation?

  And how could anyone rationalize that which takes more young adult lives than cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, influenza, and chronic lung disease, collectively?

  To be honest, I avoided much of the 2012 coverage. I didn’t seek out answers. I wasn’t looking for clarity. I didn’t need to learn everything to protect my own teens because I don’t have children.

  All I wanted was to bury my head in the sand and pretend none of this had happened. The events were simply too sad to contemplate.

  By trade, I’m a humor writer so I tend to eschew that which isn’t uplifting or funny or lends itself to a punch line. I perpetually aim for the Hollywood happy ending, impossible given the circumstances. And, selfishly, I didn’t want to think of my pretty little town as anything less than perfect. In my head, Lake Forest was the bucolic gem I’d fallen in love with watching all those John Hughes movies so many years ago. I didn’t want to imagine something unseemly roiling under the surface of its pristine exterior.

  Unlike the fictional town of North Shore, the city of Lake Forest has been incredibly proactive in attempting to prevent teen suicide and the community wholeheartedly supports these efforts. After thirty-three teen suicides in an eighteen-month period back in the early 1980s, the city established a youth center called CROYA (Committee Representing Our Young Adults) to safeguard our most precious commodities. The Gates Community Center in this book is based on the real-life good work done by CROYA.

  And yet we’ve still lost some of our best and brightest here in Lake Forest.

  Senseless.

  That’s why for me, denial was the easiest way to deal with every heartbreaking article, each tear-jerking story. There are those who run toward the burning building of raw emotion, but I’m not that person. In that respect, Mallory is a part of me, as we both trend toward action over sentiment.

  Because I’m not good with processing sorrow, I knew that if I dwelled in the stories, if I really dug in and tried to understand them, my sadness would morph to anger. I didn’t want to be the jerk speculating about people I’d never met and situations that didn’t involve me, so I detached, opting not to use my platform to inform or educate or enlighten.

  Not long after the tragedies, I was invited to Purdue, my alma mater, to lecture freshmen classes for a day. After spending ten minutes with the students, I realized the speech I’d prepared was absolutely irrelevant. My message had been drawn from my checkered academic career, titled Cs Get Degrees. I’d gone down there with the intention of making students feel better about slacking in college, as my life/career were living proof that how you start the race is irrelevant; what matters is how you finish.

  Instead, I learned that no one was having fun on campus, no one dared slack, not even for a minute. Cs might get degrees but they sure as hell wouldn’t get a job come graduation.

  I met students from all over the country that day (even some from my sleepy Indiana hometown) and every one of them had the same story—that campus was a pressure cooker and the competition they’d all faced in high school had simply intensified in college.

  I returned home with two thoughts: (a) that I’d never be admitted to Purdue today, and (b) that it’s so much less fun to be eighteen than it was in 1985.

  The visit entirely changed my perspective on what it’s like to grow up now, particularly on Chicago’s North Shore. Here I’d been envious of the kids who’d been raised with so much opportunity, only to discover that the opportunity came at a cost.

  A couple of years later, while working on a deadline for another light memoir with a happy ending, I learned that a college friend’s son had committed suicide.

  Her boy was smart and handsome and athletic, the star player on his football team. He had tons of friends and came from a loving, supportive family, with a pack of younger brothers who thought he hung the moon.

  Yet even with everything going for him, even with his family’s support, even with what he’d achieved and a limitless future stretching before him, he couldn’t outrun the depression that lied to him, that told him the only way through was out.

  More than seven hundred people showed up for his funeral.

  Despite being surrounded by all that love in his life, my friend’s son still felt alone.

  Even though I’d never met her son, his life and death left an indelible impression on me. I couldn’t remain in denial about the pressures his peers are facing.

  I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.

  I couldn’t remain detached.

  I had to do something. To say something.

  I chose to live in Lake Forest because this was John Hughes’s hometown. His movies were a love letter to my generation. Through his films, he told us that he understood what we were going through, that our feelings were real and valid and important. He didn’t always have solutions, but that didn’t matter; what mattered is that he listened.

  He made sure we knew that we were not alone.

  Because of his inspiration, this book is my love letter to your generation.

  What you’re going through is real.

  What you’re feeling is important.

  You are heard.

  And you deserve your Hollywood happy ending.

  RESOURCES

  Suicide Prevention Lifeline:

  (800) 273-8255

  https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

  Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide:

  http://www.sptsusa.org/you-are-not-alone/

  American Association for Suicidology:

  http://www.suicidology.org

  American Foundation for Suicide Prevention:

  https://afsp.org

  Grant Halliburton Foundation:

  http://www.granthalliburton.org

  The Jason Foundation:

  http://jasonfoundation.com

  The Dave Nee Foundation:

  http://www.daveneefoundation.org

  Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance:

  http://www.dbsallianc
e.org

  Teen Mental Health:

  http://teenmentalhealth.org

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Who gets top billing here? Which person do I praise first? Do I express my undying gratitude to my agent Jess Regel of Foundry Literary + Media for persuading me to give voice to Kent, Owen, and Stephen? Or, do I offer my boundless thanks to editor Natashya Wilson of Harlequin Teen—my very own Rick Rubin—and the person who pushed me so far beyond my boundaries as a writer? The Gatekeepers exists in this form, thanks to the ministrations of these two brilliant women, and the words “thank you” can’t properly express my level of appreciation. I wish I could send both of you miniature ponies or baby goats or whatever is the most cute and awesome thing one could ship via UPS.

  I want to send out big love to the entire team at Harlequin Teen, from sales to marketing to art to copyediting. You all made publishing a pleasure again, every one of you, first winning me over with a PowerPoint and then impressing me every step of the way. Your systems, your attitudes, your dedication, and your attention to detail are second to none. Your support has been invaluable and I feel so lucky to be working with each one of you. Particular thanks go to Siena Koncsol in publicity—your enthusiasm is contagious!

  I’m so grateful to for the feedback from my first readers, Quinn and Anneke. Spot-freaking-on. And a million thanks for beta testers Joanna Schiferl, Alyson Ray, Laurie Dolan, Tracey Stone, Rebecca Goodman, and Lisa and Becca Lappi. You are the best! For Gina Barge, thanks in perpetuity, especially for allowing me the surreal opportunity to bring cupcakes to Chuck D and to make him laugh. (If you don’t know, now you know...kitten.)

  I’ve been blessed by the support of other authors, in particular Amy Hatvany, Stephanie Elliott, Lisa Steinke, and Liz Fenton. You all make “girl power” a thing and I’m so lucky to know you. (And even luckier to read you!)

  Over the course of this book, I’ve had the honor of spending time with a number of Lake Forest police officers. Tremendous credit goes to Chief Waldorf for assembling such a dream team and to Sgt. Brett Marquette for his outstanding community outreach. Great thanks to everything the LFPD does to keep this town safe. You’ve been there on the front lines when life has gone awry for our most vulnerable and I’m perpetually impressed by your care and compassion. I can only hope that what I’ve learned from you in the course of writing this book will in some small way make your jobs easier.