I was 18 and she was blond, a Southern girl from northern Virginia who happened to be spending senior week at Ocean City, Md., just like me.
I fell so hard so fast I didn't know what hit me. I'd never experienced anything like that before. And when the week ended, I watched her drive away and felt crestfallen. I couldn't let her get away like that. I wouldn't.
But northern Virginia is a long way from Manheim Township, especially when you're 18 and your primary mode of transportation is your father's aging Ford sedan. No matter. I simply had to see the girl. And with no other way to get there, the sedan would do.
There was the little problem of my parents. They weren't exactly going to authorize a lovesick sojourn in a vehicle they feared wouldn't make it to the end of the street, let alone the Capital Beltway. So I came up with the perfect plan: I'd lie. I'd tell them I was spending the day at my best friend's house. Reluctantly, he was dragooned into playing along. I saddled up and headed south, and it all went off without a hitch. I was proud of myself, proud of the deception. It was a ridiculously irresponsible decision. But it seemed the right choice at the right time, the only choice I could make.
That was the first trip; there were others. Once I was caught; the best friend was cornered and finally admitted that, no, he's not here. Yes, he's in Virginia. My suburban posterior was in a sling for a while after that one. But still I went back, all told about a half-dozen times that summer before I went off to college, where the girl, and northern Virginia, faded into the rear-view mirror.
We still tell the story at family dinners, as an example of the stupid things kids do. What if the car had broken down, my mother asks. Well, it didn't. It could have. But I didn't think about that. Who does? What kid considers the consequences?
I thought of this last weekend, writing about Alec Kreider. I looked at his image on the front page of this newspaper. A killer, say police. A murderer. But I saw a kid.
A kid who made a terrible decision, a depraved decision. A kid who is going to have to live with the consequences of that decision the rest of his life, and must.
And not only him; the remnants of the family he destroyed. The daughter he missed — for I'm sure he merely missed her, had Maggie Haines not gotten out he might have killed her, too. Something went off inside this boy and we don't know what it is. Maybe there are psychological issues. How could there not be? Maybe we'll find other things — the stress of growing up in Manheim Township, for it can be stressful; his parents' divorce. The video games and online world that seduces so many kids.
But I look at that photo and I see something simpler, a kid who made a horrific choice. Who thought, maybe, it was the only choice he
could make. Who, like all impulsive teens, believed that whatever drove him over the edge was the end of the world — when it all ultimately fades away into the rearview mirror anyway. You can't know that when you're a kid. You don't know that. And you act, too often, on that lack of knowledge.
When he's older, I hope to talk to my own son about these things. He's me, as your children are you; I can tell, he's got it in him to swipe my car to visit some girl two states away. I hope that's all it is.
For the Haines and Kreider families, I'm sorry that wasn't all it was.
Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817. 
