I wasn’t there when it happened, but here’s what I know.
On Thanksgiving Day, Soren left his home at around 10 a.m. and went to the LA Food Bank, where he passed out turkeys and canned cranberry sauce until 3 p.m. He returned to his house at 6 p.m., where he ate his last meal—a frozen bean and cheese burrito and a spinach salad—and played video games. At 8 p.m., he left his home again and went to a party at the home of an actor who’d once been on a Nick Jr. show, but had since gone into DJ’ing.
Nobody saw him drinking anything except coffee at the party, but there were a handful of accounts saying that he’d appeared to be slightly intoxicated. Whatever happened, he knew better than to drive himself home. His car was found parked in the Hollywood Hills near the actor/DJ’s house two days later.
Soren punched in his front door security code at 1 a.m. Someone wearing a gray hoodie can be seen in the security footage walking him to the door, but you can’t see his face, and in the footage, he doesn’t follow Soren inside. Whoever that person was, he was the last person to see Soren alive.
Soren’s parents were in Park City when it happened. They found him on Saturday morning when they got home. There was no drug paraphernalia around, but the toxicology report showed that Soren had ingested hydrocodone and diazepam. He had a prescription for the latter, for anxiety, but not the former. He died sometime around three or four Friday morning.
People speculated that he’d relapsed, that he’d used that three-hour window between volunteering at the food bank and returning to his house to obtain the painkillers illegally. Some people said it was an accidental overdose, while others said it was on purpose. Soren’s grades weren’t good. He’d lost a lot of his old friends since he’d gotten clean. He spent a lot of time alone. He hated being sober. His parents had left him alone at Thanksgiving.
People theorized that the person in the gray hoodie, his or her face hidden from the camera, was an unlicensed cab driver or some minor celebrity who’d decided to be a Good Samaritan and make sure Soren got home, but was afraid to stick around. Police questioned everyone at the party, but nobody admitted to going home with Soren and nobody remembered seeing anyone in a gray hoodie.
I didn’t buy any of it. Not Soren. Not accidentally. Not on purpose. It wasn’t possible.
I know that sounds naïve. My mother was raised by a family of drunks, and has spent my entire life drilling into my head the two things that addicts do: they relapse and they lie. But none of that sounds like Soren to me.
Why would he spend five hours helping other people on Thanksgiving, then leave depressed? And if he was lonely and it took him three hours to get home from the food bank, wasn’t it equally possible that he went surfing or to a coffee shop or to an AA meeting? He wasn’t upset that his old friends had fallen away. He was happy about it. He hated those people, and he’d told me as much at Homecoming when he realized that Cal didn’t have to be nice to him anymore. He was relieved.
Not an accident. Not on purpose. Not Soren.
We drove home from the airport, my parents peppering me with questions I didn’t have the answers to yet while I sat in the backseat, too shocked and numb and angry to cry. They’d met Soren, but they didn’t know him. Their concern was based on curiosity, that a thing like this had happened to a student at their daughter’s school. I didn’t have it in me to answer questions like that, so eventually, I handed the phone to my mother and told her to call Hector herself.
She and my father had him on speaker when we pulled into the driveway. I jumped out of the car and ran toward the house without waiting for them, without helping with the bags. The last thing I heard before I slammed the car door shut was Hector asking, “Is Claudia there? Is she okay?”
I was not okay. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even Hector. I wanted to run up to my room, pull the covers over my head, and stay there until someone came to tell me that none of it was true.
I unlocked the front door and dashed into the foyer, where our house sitter had stacked the mail. Behind me, I could hear my mother asking questions that no teenage boy except Hector Estrella would have known the answers to: Where were the services going to be held? Was his family asking that money be donated to a charity in lieu of flowers?
That was as far as I made it. That was when it hit me.
That Soren Bieckmann was dead.
My floppy-haired, reformed drug dealer Homecoming date. My friend. I thought about the way he’d put his arm around my shoulder at the dance, the way his eyes had gone intense when he said, “I’d rather be honest.”
Someone else is responsible for this, I thought. The person who gave him the hydrocodone. The person who drove him home without bothering to make sure he was okay. His parents, for not being home when it happened. Everyone at Imperial Day who’d turned their backs on him the second he got sober. Me, for not taking him to New York with me.
I’d rather be honest.
When the universe looked down and said, Which one of these lives should I blot out today? that’s who it picked. The guy who said things like that.
The rest of us got to live.