It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the last day of college before we went on our little break for the holiday.  It was a day full of anxiety because we were all anxious and excited to get out of school and drive home to see our families whom we had not seen since they dropped us off at the beginning of the semester.  It had been 3 months since I saw my 3 little brothers: Johnny, Ryan, and David along with my 2 puppy dogs: Buddy and Zeus. They’re all very special to me and they really motivated me to do my best each and everyday when I was back home and I really miss them when I’m away at college.

As of right now I’m attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study business and business management because I want to start my own business at some point in the next 10 years.  Wisconsin has been a really great atmosphere for my first year of college and I’m really enjoying it. The people are nice and very helpful when I don’t know how to get somewhere, the facilities are incredible, and of course the football games are insane and very fun to watch. Currently, I am staying in a dorm at college with one of my buddies from high school, he goes by the name of Noah Henski.  Noah and I have been friends since grade school, and went to Ferguson Public Schools our whole lives. We played football and basketball together both starting on varsity all four years, helping the school win a state championship for each sport in the same year. That year Noah and I got several recruitment letters for both sports from schools

around the entire country.  Our junior year we didn’t get much attention because we were both tall, blue-eyed, blonde haired guys who were very slim and not very athletic.  After both seasons were over during that year we started putting in work getting out bodies in shape for a successful senior year of sports. By the end of March during my senior year of high school, when the deadline was near to commit to a school for both sports, I had received over 100 letters from schools who wanted me to play for them.  At the top of each it read my name Zach Goff which gave me such a rush every time I read it because I knew I had put in all of this work for me to receive these offers to play Division 1 college football. Noah was in the same exact boat and we both had no idea where we wanted to go, but what we did know was that we wanted to go to the same college.  We both selected 5 schools that really were interested in us playing for them and at least 3 had to be the same school for both of us. My top 5 were for basketball and the schools were Michigan, Villanova, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Texas. Noah’s top 5 schools for football were Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Clemson, and Auburn. The two schools it really came down to for us were Michigan and Wisconsin, both great schools with great sports programs and education systems.  They were both BIG Ten powerhouses in both sports so either one would’ve been a great choice, but that isn’t the only thing we were worried about. Noah and I wanted to go somewhere where we would succeed and fit in the most. For Noah it really came down to the play style of the team and how well the game was called by the coaching staff, but for me it really only came down to who the coach was an how he interacted and got along with the players. Michigan was the right choice at first and then we sat on it for a while and decided to commit to the University of Wisconsin.  Wisconsin had it all, a beautiful campus, a great education system, and the basketball coach was a hard head but he was a really great guy and I knew he would be able to advance my basketball skills. The coach also said that there was a chance I could become the starting point guard my first year if I worked hard enough at my game. Starting my first year would be a dream come true.

The morning of our first day of Thanksgiving break had finally arrived and I woke up with a very painful feeling in my stomach like someone had stabbed me right in the lower abdomen, but once I started getting up and moving around it finally went away.  Although the pain went away I still felt that something wasn’t right about this day I kept worrying about something or someone it was just very odd, it was something I had never experienced before in my life. Noah and I left at about 9 o’clock that morning and it was about a 5 hour drive from Madison to Ferguson so we arrived at Noah’s house around 3:30 in the afternoon.  I dropped him off at his house to let him visit with his parents a little while before we met up later to go visit our good buddy Logan Tweaker who was another one of our good friends from high school that played both football and basketball with us and he also looked very similar to Noah and I except for the fact that he was about half a foot shorter than us standing around 5’7 and 5’8 on a good day.  Logan got offers from a lot of Division 1 colleges, but he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack so many of the bigger colleges didn’t want him since he wasn’t the best student and he had some disputes on the field that led to him getting ejected multiple times, which most coaches do not like. Due to these actions, he ended up committing to Western Michigan in hope that he would become a star there and end up transferring from a MAC school to a Big Ten or Power 5 conference school.  Logan was off for Thanksgiving break as well and we wanted to meet up with him to see how everything was going with school and football, but mainly to brag to him about our 11-0 record and our 2nd place ranking in the FBS.

I had finally arrived home to the house I grew up in just outside of the great city of Ferguson.  I walked into the house only to be greeted by my best two pals Buddy and Zeus as well as my three little brothers Johnny, Ryan, and David.  My mom soon came to my sight and ran up to me and gave me a great big hug. She then began to question:

“Zachary Goff it has been nearly 6 hours now where in the world have you been?”

“Mom, it takes 5 hours just to get all the way down here from Madison and you expect me to go all that way without stopping to use the bathroom or to pick up food and also I don’t go 90 miles per hour on the highway like you do asking to get pulled over.” I exclaimed.

“You know what sweetie you’re right, I’m sorry it was your first time traveling such a far distance I began to get nervous and worry about where you were.” my mother explained.

“It’s alright I understand.  If i were in your shoes I would probably worry a little bit too.” I said.

“I appreciate your understanding my dear son, now where are you headed off to next?” she wondered.

“Well I figured I would visit with you guys for a little while then I would head off to pick up Noah again so that we could go over to Mr. Malloy’s Sneaker Shop and pick up a pair of Jordan’s for Logan because we missed his 18th birthday last month.” I told her.

“Well alright then.” she answered.

I visited with my family for a while and during that time we played board games, card games, video games, and we even had a little tug of war game with the pups.  It was around 7 o’clock in the evening now and I decided it was about time for me to pick up Noah and right after I grabbed my keys from the kitchen and headed out the door, Noah shot me a text and told me to come pick him up.  Everything was going as planned from the time I left the house and picked up Noah from his house until we arrived downtown in the beautiful city of Ferguson and in the parking lot of Mr. Malloy’s Sneaker Shop. We got out of the car and entered the shop only to be greeted by the man himself Mr. Malloy.  Mr. Malloy asked us what we were looking for and I told him a special pair of Jordans for our old teammate Logan Tweaker, he pointed to the poster of Logan on the wall and I told him that was the guy we were getting the shoes for. Mr. Malloy showed us to the back room where he had the unreleased and brand new pairs of Jordan 11 Space Jams.  I looked at the shoes and looked at Noah, I couldn’t even think or move I was in utter shock. Those shoes were incredible they were the nicest shoes I had seen in a minute. I told Mr. Malloy that those were the ones and he brought them to the counter where he rang us up for the shoes. Two hundred and twenty dollars is what it came out to, Henski and I both threw in about a hundred and twenty dollars for a twenty dollar tip to go along with the price of the sneakers.  We walked out and said thank you do the best plug in town. We decided to go out the back exit so we could walk by all the posters of the best players to come out of Ferguson High School which included 14 NFL players and 8 NBA players. We walked out the back exit in great happiness and relief as we had finally go the sneakers and were on our way to surprise Logan with them. The feeling was soon interrupted with great suspense as on our way back to the car we saw something that nobody would ever want to see in their entire life.  A body laying on the cold wet pavement still as can be with red liquid oozing from it.

I immediately called the cops and told them to come as quick as they could because it had looked as if it had recently happened as the body was still warm.  It was around eight o’clock so it was dark out and we couldn’t see all that well since the light behind the sneaker shop wasn’t very bright. Noah took how his phone to examine the body while I was talking to the police and right as he turned his flashlight on and turned over the head, he fainted.  My first instinct was to drop the phone and help my buddy so that was what I did, I grabbed Noah and shook him a bit until he woke up. He then shoved me and grabbed his phone once again and shined the light on the face of the body, I could not believe what my eyes had seen, it couldn’t be but it was, Logan.

The police had arrived along with the ambulance and fire department.  The police came straight to us and the ambulance to the body, the officers asked us a few questions that we answered in all honesty, but they still wanted more so they took Noah and I along with Mr. Malloy down to the police station in cuffs.  

As we arrived at the police station we were taken to a cell where they removed our cuffs and locked the door.  One by one we were taken into a room with a table and three chairs where one of the officers from the scene sat and another man next to him who was assumed by all of us to be a detective.  They questioned Mr. Malloy first for approximately 5 minutes and then they let him go him. Next, they questioned Noah for about 20 minutes, but he was taken and placed back in the cell I was in.  The officer then took me in for questioning and sat me down in the chair. The detective asked me to explain to him in chronological order what happened. And to the best of my knowledge I did. I told him I called the police station and told the dispatcher that we had found a body with wounds behind Mr. Malloy’s Sneaker Shop and that they should send police and an ambulance as soon as possible because the person could still be alive.  The detective told me that I was free to go and so was Noah. I was relieved but was also very worried about Logan.

As we left the police station, which was only a few blocks from the sneaker shop, we bolted out the door and ran all the way back to my car where we got in and drove as fast as we could to the hospital to see Logan.  We ran into the Emergency Room and asked the person at the desk where our friend was and she said that we would have to wait until the doctor was finished. An hour later the desk lady called for us and brought us to where Logan was at, we entered the room and saw a pale and cold looking teenager who looked about as dead as a doornail.  He had flatlined and wasn’t breathing anymore. Noah asked how could this have happened as I started shedding some tears for our beloved friend, the doctor then told us that Logan had a severe case of the H1N1 Flu. The doctor continued and informed us that he had been suffering from the virus for a while now and it just kept getting worse and worse that they finally sent him home to see if the doctor who he had been seeing since he was a young child could help him rid of the sickness.  Ken Calloway was Logan’s primary care doctor, he had known him since he was a young boy and trusted him as he would trust his own father. Noah felt uneasy when Doctor Calloway walked into the room as he had been on ambulance duty that night and was returning from washing up as he had been touching Logan who had been diagnosed with this contagious virus. Something about the way Calloway looked and acted was very suspicious to Noah and he told me he was going to get to the bottom of this.

The next day Noah and I drove back to the scene, the whole parking lot and behind the back of the building had been marked off with yellow tape.  The only thing that had been left at the scene was the outline of Logan’s body and a puddle of blood which Noah questioned because Logan at the time had not been bleeding nearly enough to form a puddle of blood that we were seeing at this very moment.  Something else must of happened, somebody else was trying to kill Logan. Someone was trying to frame one of us to get away with murder. 3 hours later, Noah, Mr. Malloy and I were called back down to the police station. This time we all went into the room at once for questioning.  The detective pulled out a bag of things that were taken from the crime scene. There was a knife, a Costco membership card, and Noah’s cell phone. The card had been tracked back to my name somehow which didn’t make any sense because nobody in my family nor did I sign up for a Costco membership.  Noah’s cell phone was also irrelevant because he had been using it when we found the body. The only relevant piece of evidence they had found was a knife with Logan’s blood on it. The knife had been found underneath the passenger seat of Mr. Malloy’s car. The only thing that didn’t make sense was that the wounds Noah had seen on Logan didn’t match the size of the knife the police had found, but it did match the wound they saw on Logan at the hospital before they bandaged it up.  The missing piece of evidence is the first murder weapon. Noah asked me about Doctor Calloway and I told him that he lived in the neighborhood across from my house. That was the only information he needed in order for him to grab me and throw me in the car to rush over to Calloway’s house. We parked on the side of the road and walked in the front door as it was for some odd reason unlocked. The knife we were looking for was sitting right on the kitchen table and there was a note right next to it that read, “Better luck next time kids, but there won’t be a next time because you’ll never see me again.”  That night was the last we ever saw of Doctor Ken Calloway. We brought the knife into the police station and they scanned it for fingerprints, the prints matched Calloway’s and they came to the conclusion that Calloway killed Logan while he was in the ambulance alone with him because when the drivers opened the doors Calloway had blood all over his hands and coat. They believe Doctor Calloway killed Logan because he wanted to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus and prevent an epidemic from happening in our town, but Noah and I believe Logan spread the virus to Calloway, and he wanted revenge on Logan for giving it to him.  Killing a person isn’t an acceptable excuse nor is any excuse a good one to take somebody’s life away especially at such a young age. If you want to prevent the spread of a virus such as the one Logan had, you cure him.