He was smitten with Kristal. Her long, straight black hair was perfectly braided in the back, revealing her splendid hazel eyes and perfectly puckered pink lips. She looked just like Pocahontas.
Once the bags were packed in the car, he hopped inside and it pulled away as the four friends chatted in unison. They drove along the 101 and the Golden Gate Bridge came into view. Selena pulled out her camera to snap a picture of the orange towers, which seemed endlessly high. Ross could see the bright blue sky, as vast and open as the ocean he had seen in Dominica. To the right he could see Alcatraz again, that looming prison in the distance.
They continued along the curvy roadways through Sausalito and into Mill Valley as they made the hour-long drive to the entrance of the hiking trail.
The beginning of the trail was a well-worn gravel path that soon turned into a sinuous bridle walkway. Before long the group found themselves in the thick of nature. Ross and René were perfect gentlemen, offering to carry the ladies’ backpacks. Each man slipped one on his back, one on his front. They high-fived with delight.
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On the other side of the world, in Perth, Australia, sixteen-year-old Preston Bridges and his mates had been planning their own festivities for a while now. Preston had already picked out his outfit for the Year 12 Ball and had been in constant discussion with the other kids at Churchlands Senior High School about the after parties they would attend.
Preston was a handsome kid, with thick, fluffy eyebrows and flopped-over blond hair that hung to one side of his face. He had chosen to spend the hours before the festivities on the beach with his mates, jostling in the fleecy, warm water and talking about the evening ahead.
“You look like you went for a spray tan,” his father, Rodney, joked with him at around 4:00 p.m. when he got home. Preston smirked and bounded off down the hall to change into his tuxedo for the dance.
A little more than an hour later, at around 5:30 p.m., Preston walked out of his bedroom for what would be the last time in his life.
He looked smart in that black tuxedo, his matching bow tie strung perfectly around his neck. When his mother, Vicky, arrived to pick him up, she noted how handsome her boy looked. His dad snapped a few pictures of them together. In one, Preston turned to his mother, pulled her close to him, and kissed her squarely on the cheek as she beamed. He soon set off for the ball.
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Ross and his trio of friends finally found camp and set up their blue-and-white tents on the flat grass of the hillside that overlooked an endless green ocean of Northern California Douglas fir trees. It smelled like pines, and a feeling of calm came over them all—especially Ross. René commented that it was like paradise as the group sat down on the slope and watched the world do nothing. Ross snacked on oranges, pistachios, and rice cakes. Soon they built a bonfire. As night fell, Ross and Kristal talked and gazed up at the stars, the smell of smoke disappearing toward heaven.
The rest of the weekend for Ross was like a dream. He swam in Kent Lake at the head of Peter’s Dam—even though the water was freezing. He rolled down a bright green hill and giggled like a child. He played cards; they hiked, joked, threw Frisbees, and skipped, literally, as they explored the wilderness.
But most important, Ross and Kristal fell for each other like two teenagers at a high school dance.
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The Sunmoon Resort hotel in Perth, Australia, was the perfect place for an after party for the dozen young teenagers who had just left the Year 12 Ball. The hotel had inexpensive rooms with balconies that overlooked the esplanade and the green, jagged ocean along Scarborough Beach. The smell of chlorine wafted gently up from the pool below as Preston and his friends made their way to the top floor of the resort and into the suite they had rented together.
As the night drew on, friends and acquaintances came and went. Yet at around 4:30 a.m., as the boys contemplated calling it a night, one young teenager showed up at the hotel with a surprise. He wasn’t one of Preston’s close friends, but he wanted to be, and he had brought a gift.
“What is this?”
“It’s N-bomb,” the kid explained to Preston. “It’s like LSD.” They make it in China, he said. It was synthetic, a drug made in an unregulated lab, and while it was sixty times stronger than acid, it was perfectly safe. The boy said he had purchased a “party pack”—buy ten, get one free. He had gotten it from a Web site he had learned about called the Silk Road. The drugs had simply arrived in the mail.
Of the eight boys who were in the hotel room that night, five decided to take a hit of N-bomb. The boy who had brought the drugs offered Preston two blotters. Of those five boys who took the drug, only one had an almost immediate adverse reaction to it: Preston Bridges.
He immediately began acting erratically. The world around him started to become surreal. He panicked. What the fuck was going on? The hallucinations were taking over and there was nothing he could do about it. Make it stop! He didn’t know where he was, what he was doing. His friends tried to calm him, but to no avail. Everyone was in a panic, most of all Preston.
The room seemed to spin on its axis. Help! Help! Around and around. Preston started to run. He was still in the hotel room. Still on the second floor. But he ran anyway. He ran off the balcony and into the air, falling thirty feet, headfirst, into the parking lot below.
Sirens began wailing in the distance.
The heart monitor made a slow, repetitive beeping noise as Preston lay on the gurney in the hospital. His thick, fluffy eyebrows and flopped-over blond hair sat motionless as tubes snaked around him. His tuxedo was gone; now he was shirtless, with sensors glued to his chest to monitor his vitals. His black bow tie had been replaced by a neck brace. And that classic Preston Bridges smile was no longer there; instead a plastic hose had been placed in his throat to ensure that he could breathe.
His mother, Vicky, collapsed on the floor when she saw him. His father wept into Preston’s sister’s arms. As the day drew on, hundreds of kids from school arrived, streaming in groups of eight into the hospital room as they wept for their friend who lay there in front of them, the soccer-playing, beachgoing teen now motionless.
On Monday afternoon the doctor ushered Preston’s family into a small room in the hospital. Then, as tears and shock covered the faces of his mother, father, and sister, the doctor informed the family that at 3:48 p.m. sixteen-year-old Preston Bridges had died.
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And then, just like that, the weekend was over. Ross, René, Selena, and Kristal packed their bags and drove back through the orange towers of the bridge. Back to San Francisco. Back toward the Silk Road.
Ross returned home with a broad smile. He felt renewed as he opened his laptop and logged on to his world.
“So everything smooth while I’m gone?” he asked Inigo.
“Yep. nothing exciting happened.”