The Kids are All Right: A Memoir by Diana and Liz Welch with Dan and Amanda Welch

After Topher Burns bailed on him, Dan was homeless. The Hayes,  a local family whose son Brad was also a freshman at Fox Lane, invited Dan to live with them. Unfortunately for everyone, things didn’t work out as planned. This is Brad’s story.

“Until my parents kicked Danny out of the house, I enjoyed one of the best freshmen years a high school boy could ever have. The circumstances of Danny’s arrival were never discussed and in hindsight it makes sense that we’d want to tip-toe around the unfathomable tragedy of his life and that he would choose to just keep moving forward. Who would want to look back after losing both parents and being separated from your three sisters because of logistics? For Danny, go-go-go was the only option he had other than falling apart in front of friends and a family not his own and in the end I think that it was this inability to slow down that forced my parents’ hand.”
“But before it came to an end, there was six months of us sharing the master bedroom. It started over Christmas vacation, 1985, when my mother approached my father about Danny moving in. Most people thought it was my idea, but to tell you the truth, it never even crossed my mind. Danny and I weren’t best friends, just a couple of guys who liked to get into a little bit of trouble together: illegal fireworks purchased in the cafeteria, hanging out here when parents had been told we’d be there, drinking at parties in the woods, in half-built houses, or in any of the variety of places suburban kids have to choose from. The other reason the thought hadn’t occurred to me was that my parents were overwhelmed; why would they say yes to another kid in the house? They both had full-time jobs and spent all of their free time working on the fixer-upper in which we lived. The master bedroom was to be one of the last rooms they redid and so when Danny moved in they took my old bedroom. And the fun began.
Mom and Dad left behind a long dresser and, above it, an equally long mirror and it is through this mirror that I see my time with Danny. Two back-to-back bookcases separated his bed and mine, giving us a little bit of privacy, but by sitting up in bed, we could see each other’s reflection. The TV and stereo were in front of the mirror, so it was where all the action was anyway. When we had girls over, it was like a John Hughes movie come to life: posters and scavenger hunt detritus everywhere, an Echo and the Bunnymen cassette in the stereo (Danny also exposed me to Roxy Music and The Doors), a red-headed kid smiling at me from his side of the room while a girl leaned a sympathetic head on his shoulder and me smiling right back as I held my girlfriend close.
I was relatively well known around school, but Danny was an all-out rock star. Although he accomplished this with a little bit of the rebel aura, his personality was so much more dynamic than that. He was extremely nice to everyone and had one of those contagious smiles that even teachers like. He was an appreciative kid and having an older sister who was a popular senior didn’t hurt, either. My parents welcomed anyone and everyone into the house—what’s to keep clean when living in a fixer-upper?—and kids came over to visit us all the time. And when the time came for the junior prom, not only did I go with my girlfriend, Antonella, Danny was asked to go by a pretty, athletic girl named Cee Cee. There we were, two freshmen dressed up in tuxes and Billy Taylors, living the kind of life Hughes gave Wyatt and Gary in “Weird Science.” Antonella? Cee Cee? Two buddies getting picked up because they couldn’t yet drive? By junior girls? It was downright blinding. Go-go-go.
During those six months, our calmest, most quiet moments came at night, when we were getting ready to fall to sleep and talking about the same kinds of things kids have always talked about, be it on the phone or via text message. Trivial stuff, but somehow, some way never a momentary slip into the serious stuff. Danny showered at night, which struck me as odd since I always showered in the morning, and the only thing I could figure is that we’d been given different advice at an earlier age. Whoever had given him that advice, though, I did not know. I also don’t recall what Danny did after school every day. I was doing the all-American boy thing, playing football, basketball, and baseball, serving as class president, and trying to pass Algebra by getting afterschool help. Danny did whatever it was he did.
One time, during the fall of 8th grade, I’d lied to my parents about where I was and took the bus to Bedford with Danny and Carlos. Mt. Kisco didn’t have football practice that day, but Bedford did and a lot of our friends were there, so we’d decided to go bother them since we had nothing better to do. We didn’t belong there and knew we should probably get lost long before a coach approached and told us so. We had to hitch a ride back to Mt. Kisco and as we waited for someone willing to pick up three teenage boys, a long wait for sure, I remember feeling that the bloom had come off the rose. There is no dumber animal on the planet than an 8th grade boy and even I understood that this wasn’t really fun. Sure I liked to be where I wasn’t supposed to be, acting like my own man, but as we farted and made fun of the guys on that disorganized Bedford team, I was thinking about how I couldn’t wait to get home. It had grown cold and there was nothing left for us to do, if there’d ever been anything for us to do in the first place. As we waited, Danny never mentioned his father’s death or his mother’s illness. I knew the same rumor everyone else did about the car accident and that was it.
Danny may have broached some serious topics with my younger brother, Billy, and my parents, but things couldn’t stay serious with Danny for very long. I learned this one night when Dad and Danny picked me up after a baseball practice.  They told me that Billy was dating the girl I’d gone to the 8th grade dance with. This was one of the best looking girls in the school, and they were so convincing, so good, so thorough, so cool about it, that after the hundredth “No way!” I finally switched gears and started to ask for details. Oh, the laugh they had at my expense!
Before spring and that Hughesian prom, there was a trip to Disney World. Just about every photo I have of Danny’s time with us is taken in our house, and most in our bedroom. There are quite a few taken from one side of the room to the other, via that mirror. There are some pictures, though, of our family vacation to Florida. Everyone looks pretty happy and knowing what I know now, being a parent and a high school teacher, for the life of me I don’t know how we could all believe that everything would be all right. Danny didn’t stand a chance. But go-go-go, we’d keep on trying. One night, while we were down there, Danny and I went looking for fun and we found it, a whole gaggle of college girls willing to buy whatever we were selling. We’re down here on spring break, does anyone want to go for a walk on the beach?, so on and so forth, when all of a sudden, Billy and my father came walking around the side of the hotel looking for us. Busted on both fronts! We lost the girls, but had another story to tell when we got back to school on Monday.
I don’t remember exactly when our time with Danny came to an end, but it had to be sometime between the prom and the end of the school year because by summer, he was gone. While I was out playing baseball or trying to keep Antonella interested in me, my mother was sitting Danny down at the kitchen table for the talk. Apparently, she’d given him several warnings. There’d been too, too many nights when he was out past curfew and they didn’t know where he was. I slept out plenty of nights at friends’ houses, so I really wasn’t aware of what was going on. Danny’s sister, Liz, had a ton of friends and they were looking out for him. They’d take him to parties and my mother, who’d lost a good friend in a car accident her senior year—the same year her father died of a heart attack—just couldn’t deal with the worrying. I suspect she wasn’t too concerned about Danny being a bad influence on me. It was just that, in her mind, the only way this could work was if he followed her rules.
The night after that talk took place, Danny and I stayed home. He took his shower and after, we didn’t call anyone or watch TV. We just turned off the lights. After a minute or so, I could hear Danny crying softly to himself from the other side of the bookshelves. There was a family tree that he’d hung above his bed, but I couldn’t see it or him, but I do remember being relieved. I knew it had to be embarrassing for him and I wasn’t feeling too proud myself. They were my parents, after all. They’d given him a gift and then taken it away and, to a lesser degree, they’d done the same to me. Time has put it all into perspective, but I think that even back then I’d known that it was all too good to be true. In a normal world, you don’t get to have your buddy come live with you, instantly improving your social life and your family vacations. Then again, in a normal world, parents live in the master bedroom and, of course, parents don’t die.
I asked Danny if he was OK.
Rather than a yes or no he asked, “Is it me?” in a voice so much smaller and less sure than I was used to. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No…” I said it one more time and that was all. The next day, as quickly as Danny had entered our home, he was gone.”