Kari Peters is at Park View High School in Sterling, with 600 juniors and seniors gathered before her, to tell of the terrible mistake she made when she was about their age. It took 1,500 stitches to close her physical wounds, but the emotional ache remains, open and raw, three years later. Maybe these teenagers will sense that. Maybe they will learn from it. Then maybe they won’t do as she did: drink and drive.

With one exception. On a summer’s day in 1993, Peters went drinking with friends at the beach, got behind the wheel of her father’s Nissan 300ZX, ran it into a concrete barrier and wound up killing her best friend, the boy she thought she might marry one day.

She is barely into her prepared remarks — she hasn’t shown the videotaped news clip of the mangled red sports car and the paramedics wheeling away the bodies — and already the auditorium has gone stone silent. Six hundred students and not a sound, except for Peters’s voice breaking as she dabs at her tears with a tissue. As she continues, some in the audience fight back their own tears.

Source : pqasb.pqarchiver.com

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