A boy feels bad after an ostracized classmate commits sucide.
I should have looked beyond the nerdiness, the obvious, whenever Cedric Johnson was around. I should have looked beneath the surface and tried to see him differently.
But I didn't. Like the rest of the kids, I teased Cedric, making fun of him. Cedric was a geek of the highest form. He could have given Steven Q. Urkel a run for his money. I mean, the kid looked like a total loser. He was popular, but for all the wrong reasons. We thought it was funny to pick on him, just to see how far we could push.
If I could take back some of the things I or my classmates did, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Cedric Johnson killed himself yesterday. He committed suicide; his mother was the one who found him hanging from the clothes line upon coming home from church.
We found out about it at school today. Everyone is in a state of shock, me, included. Somehow I feel responsible for his death.
If we could have known how badly Cedric Johnson felt about us picking on him, maybe we could have prevented this from happening. Now we have to say goodbye to a classmate most of us failed to even get to know and live with the horrible abuse that we inflicted on him over the years.
