4 am.

So Cooper. It has been over six months now, but it seems to me as if it happened just yesterday.

I haven't talked about it to anyone.

But here I sit at 4 am, and I know I won't get any sleep tonight, so I may as well just get it over with and at least write about it.

Cooper and I had always been extremely close. He used to be my personal hero, handsome, super smart, popular and the head of the highschool Lacrosse team.

Then, just after he had turned eighteen, all hell broke loose.

He had always liked to cause trouble. Even as a kid, he was usually the one to come up with the strangest ideas, and I remember mom and dad going crazy over him all the time. The things he did were harmless, like talking me into dyeing my hair red when I was seven or hiding dad's car keys to make him stay at home or borrowing the car although he didn't have a license to take his drunken friends home after a highschool party. He usually apologized, got grounded for a week, and that was that.

But one day, mom got a call from the principal of his highschool. He said they had done a random drug screening on all students and he had been tested positive for cocaine. The police had been called, they had searched him and it turned out that they found 200 g of cocaine, a bunch of pills that looked like ecstasy and another powdry substance that had yet to be tested. The officers were pretty sure that he was not only using drugs himself, but that he was also dealing, and had taken him into custody right away.

I still remember the look on mom's face. She was terrified. She called dad immediately, I was sent to my friend Mark's house, and she took off to the police department.

He was in prison for 3 days until dad managed to talk the judge into releasing him on bail.

The day he came home, dad called a family meeting and we all sat down in the living room. I hadn't spoken to Cooper since before the incident, and I seriously had no idea what to say. He seemed so far away suddenly, so different from the person that I knew and loved.

So I just sat there and waited for what was about to happen.

Dad was surprisingly calm considering the circumstances. I always knew that Cooper was his favorite, the way he showed him off in front of the entire family and talking about him becoming a famous lawyer and joining his firm one day. He pretty much had Cooper's whole life planned since the day he was born.

Dad just asked one question that day: "Why?"

And Cooper lost it. I had never seen him like this. He jumped up from the sofa and started screaming at dad about how he had struggled to meet the standards dad had set up for him his whole life and how he had never managed to live up to them and that we all didn't care about what he really wanted to do.

Mom tried to calm him down, but he pushed her away, while dad and I just sat there, unable to do or say anything for a couple of minutes.

Then dad got up.

I remember looking at him and seeing the shift in his eyes.

He told me to leave, and I didn't dare to say no, so I went upstairs into my room. I didn't close the door, though.

It was horrible. Dad screamed at Cooper, Cooper screamed back, mom tried to make them stop screaming, which didn't work of course. Dad and Cooper were just too much alike, loud and rude and stubborn as hell. A couple of minutes later, I heard mom running up the stairs and slamming the bedroom door and I somehow knew that that was that.

Cooper left the same night. I helped him pack.

The last thing he said to me when he stood there in the doorway at 1 am with nothing but a suitcase in his hands was: "Never let him talk you into becoming someone you don't want to be."

I still don't know where he went that night, but mom told me that he checked into prison a couple of days later. He had been sentenced to 9 months.

I haven't heard from him ever since.