One of my high school classmates died in the summer before 11th grade, in a bicycle tragedy that had made all the papers and T news. We talked then about Chuck Scarborough on NBC news mispronouncing his name. The fellow who died had dropped by my summer job a few weeks earlier talking (among many other things) about some bitterness between himself and a fellow (very popular and gifted) student, though I'm sure the death was really a total accident. When school started that fall, it was that fellow student went form classroom to classroom collecting for the memorial fund. I wondered if the popular student ever realized there was any bad feeling between them.
Or wanted to ease a guilty conscience.
I'd never thought of that possibility, but maybe.
The popular student knew very well that by his doing the money-raising task, donations from students would be much greater than if someone else had gone from class to class. He'd been a tiny bit of a brat in elementary school, but matured wonderfully as he entered his teens.. And not that this should have mattered, but it did figure into the girls swooning over him, he had the singing voice of angel. (He never pursued singing later in life, though.)
I never tried to find out the source of the conflict between them. The person who died during the summer had been the one who was in my circle.
