Every thursday during lunch we would watch them from the library windows as they went to smoke pot in the trees down by the lake. Even on the day of the arrest.

It was on one of those thursdays when they had arrested Laura, whom we had all seen out smoking cigarettes in the morning. We had all read the headlines of the day before, the mystery of her mothers death and how her boyfriend was arrested. They took her into custody just after history.

The local paper made it clear that no one really knew about anything that was going on. The state bureau of investigation had gotten involved, and clips of their interviews with the neighbors had been leaked, saying that neither Mrs. Roberts or Mr. Sawer had seen the mother for weeks, and the cigarette butts kept gathering on the front lawn. The paper made Laura and her steady boyfriend of five months out to be rowdy and disconcerted youth.

Laura never particularly interested us, we just talked to her in a futile attempt to understand why her friends were so determined to distract themselves. We knew and had experienced their desperate attempts to escape suburban reality, but the excess of their apathy for one another always made us wonder if we were the same way but didn't know it yet.

We watched them, jaded and emotionally detached, like a televsion show. Our friends were not our friends, and the ups and downs of their reality tv never really affected us. We only realized our lack of empathy after the murder. As the news articles became smaller and moved from the front page slowly to the back, and then disappeared completely, so did our interest in the girl who laughed heavily at Mr. Lawson, the English teachers, bad jokes.