new life

My name is Carol Sanders. I live in England now, but when I was younger, I lived in Hong Kong. My father was a businessman there and my mother worked as a secretary. We lived in Hong Kong for seven years. I was happy at school, with lots of friends, and we had a good time. I liked pop music-the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Jake were my favorites. Jake was my favorite singer. He died in a car accident the year I left school, but I listened to his pop records all the time. I had hundreds of pictures and photos of him on my bedroom wall. Then one day in winter when I was seventeen, things began to go wrong for me. My father went to Australia on business. I loved him very much and didn’t like him going away. “Come home quickly,” I always said to him. He was in Australia for two weeks. Then, on the day of his journey home, an airplane from Sydney crashed into the sea just south of Hong Kong. Everybody on the plane died. I heard about the plane crash on television. At first, I did not think about my father. Then I remembered he was flying back from Sydney on that day. “Oh, no!” I cried. I telephoned the airport but they did not know the names of all the passengers then. “Perhaps my father didn’t get that plane,” I thought. “Oh, please! Please!” My mother was at work and I called her on the telephone. She came home quickly and we went to the airport and waited for news. Later, we learned my father was on the plane. “It’s not true!” I shouted. But it was true, and I began to cry. I cried for weeks and weeks. I spent many days alone in my room. I was lonely and sad and I wanted to die, too. I stopped going out with my friends. I didn’t want to see other people. I stopped listening to Jake records, and took his pictures off my bedroom wall. I didn’t listen to music or watch television. Nothing mattered any more. Then I stopped crying. I stopped feeling sad and began to feel angry. “Why did it happen to him?” I asked my mother. “Why do the best people die? Jake . My father.” “I… I don’t know, Carol,” my mother said. She was unhappy, too.

At the time of the plane crash, I was a student at college. I enjoyed the college work and life very much, but after my father’s death I stopped doing my work at the college. I began to go out with some new friends. They were different from my other friends, and my mother didn’t like them. “They’re bad people, Carol,” she told me. “They do dangerous things.

I knew she was angry but I didn’t care. But then I learned my new friends took drugs, and I began to take drugs, too. It was wrong and stupid, I know that now, but I was unhappy and angry. The police came to the college to arrest some of the students. They didn’t arrest me, but I had to leave the college. It was a bad time. My mother was very unhappy with me. “What am I going to do with you, Carol? She said. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “We’ll go back to England,” she said. “You can find a college there. Perhaps you can be happier in England.” “All right,” I said. “I want to forget what’s happened. I want to forget what I’ve done and begin a new life, be a new person.”