“Jeremy and Kevin will no longer be my friends by the time any of us have driver’s licenses, but I won’t have any hard feelings about it. Can’t blame anyone from running away from a train on fire, but they themselves might not be able to stay friends. Towards the end of high school, Jeremy is going to suspect Kevin of fooling around with his girlfriend and they are going to drift apart until Kevin swears he didn’t. They will patch things up pretty quickly before college, but Kevin’s assurances won’t be true. He will never tell Jeremy the truth, that he betrayed him and then lied to him about it.”
My face burned. What Daniel predicted was exactly the truth. I had lied to Jeremy’s face all those years before about a girl who he miraculously ended up marrying and staying with for almost a decade. I could feel awkward anger radiating from Jeremy’s body next to mine as we kept reading the prediction written in sloppy ink.
The rest of Daniel’s prediction about himself was as accurate as could be for as far as what I knew about his life after age 16 when he left high school. He drifted in and out of a few cheap rehabs and jail until he got to his early 20s, cleaned up for a short while and tried to join the military, but never followed through with it. He instead drifted back away from society, fell back into drugs and petty crime until his mid-20s when he supposedly fled a minor warrant in our hometown and moved to Las Vegas.
This is where we officially lost track of even the heard it through a friend of a friend of a friend grapevine in regards to information about Daniel. He disappeared into the dusty, glittery ether of Vegas and I think everyone was okay with that.
But, Daniel’s prediction did not wrap itself up in a tight little coda the way our minds had with him those years ago.
