Seventeen Forever

Today has been a dreary day.
Dark, cold, and rainy.
The weather was like this two years ago.
December 8, 2007.
I worked that day, 8 to 2.
I really hated that shift because they wouldn't let us take a lunch break.
Went home to my dorm after work. 
Lazed around, played on the internet and took pictures of myself for my facebook when I should have been studying for my first semester of college finals.
A little after six-ish, my little sister called me.
Bawling.

"Amber had a wreck. 

She didn't make it."

She had been at a friend's house working on a term paper for her senior year of high school.
She told the friend she was heading home, but really wasn't.
Instead of going home she went the opposite direction to see a boy her parents didn't want her to see.
It was raining, the roads were slick.
There were no skid marks where her car left the road on that hill.
Just a black scar on the edge of the woods, where her car had burned the ground.
The trees were broke off even with the ground, bits of car parts scattered.
A few days before she'd passed out a work, they thought maybe she's passed out and wrecked that night.
She was known to be a reckless driver.
I know the feeling of going somewhere you know you shouldn't be, trying too drive fast to make up for the time that would be lost.
I don't know but I think it was probably a combination of a wet road and speeding that helped cause the wreck.
Some say the car was defective, that it had some mechanical problems.
Her funeral was three days later.
No viewing, no visitation.
No one saw her, her body was too badly burned.
She had to be identified by her teeth.
Her rings were returned to her mother, the stones had changed colors from the heat.
They played Carrie Underwood's song, "So Small."
Everyone cried.
The casket was a pale, baby pink with her picture setting on top of it.
I have never cried so much at a funeral, not even my grandma's funeral and I loved her more than anybody in the world.
I had never known tragedy like this in our family.
We used to play together when we were little but in recent years we'd been kind of distant. 
We ran in different circles, we had different friends.
She stayed in trouble and I was trying to get out.
I heard Pearl Jam's "Last Kiss" song right after six tonight and it made me think of the present weather and the weather that night.
I don't cry when I think about her or when I hear things that make me remember something about her.
Some people have had a very hard time dealing with her death but I'm ok with it.
I do wonder what she'd be doing now if she were still alive though.