So instead, I searched.
I went through all the possibilities for the bee girl thing, but none of my searches got me to it. Went through Cassandra’s MySpace and found links to a whole underground world of goth/emo sites, but there was nothing in any of the sites there that would gave me a clue. So when I stumbled on a site that promised bee girls and the best in goth porn, I couldn’t believe my luck. Because, there, on the first web page, was a picture of Roxanne smiling and seemingly inviting me to join her—if I was over eighteen.
To enter, click on the right. To exit, click on the left.
I clicked on the right.
And took a tour. The first page had images of goth girls, all looking a little like Roxanne, all with heavy-duty tattoos and multiple piercings. Then, next page of the tour, the sample video, which wasn’t Roxanne. Then the offer to join for twenty-nine bucks a month and you get all of these blocks of photos of other girls and then, there was an image of Roxanne, in the center square, highlighted with a bright red border and the words “In Memoriam” underneath her image. And the promise that if you joined, you would learn all about the girl in the center square, to whom the site was dedicated.
I snuck my mom’s credit card out of her wallet that night and joined (sorry, Mom, you probably wondered what the charge was). And what I saw there will stay with me for life.
Because it made absolutely no sense at all.
It started as a typical internet video, the kind you can see all over the usual free porn sites.
Just as the redheaded twins promised, Roxanne was telling these superpale white guys that she was their instructor, putting on this bogus French accent, and promising to show the guys her bee.
OK, she wasn’t much of an actress.
And then, after like thirty seconds, there it was, all sex, just like any other porn site. Except, after several positions, there’s Roxanne, her face thrust into the camera, practically hitting it, and while the guys behind her are going about their business, she starts to sing, losing her French accent, looking extremely fucked-up high, and she seems far away, cut off from the things going on behind her.
And as she leans forward, she starts singing the Dave Matthews song, only to me, it’s not Dave Matthews, because what she is singing is:
“Crash into me.”
Over and over again, faster and faster. “Crash into me, crash into me, crashintome. Crashintomecrashintome.” And since the first word was so much louder than the others, what she was really doing is calling my name out. Over and over again.
“Crashcrashcrashcrashcrashcrash.”
Well, this freaked me out. Beyond measure.
So much so that I played it over and over again, watching her facial expressions. Was she just into the song, or was she somehow trying to give me a message, because that was exactly what it felt like, a message from beyond the grave.
I’m definitely not a good enough writer to even attempt to tell you what it felt like to watch this video of a girl you were with, one who was your first and only real love, your soul mate, singing to you from another dimension. OK, I’ll admit that I watched it high on herb, but stoned or sober, she was still calling out to me, and I’ll admit that when I was high, I started to believe that I was chosen by some special power to receive a message from another plane of existence.
The only thing was, I wasn’t smart enough to figure out what she was trying to communicate. Was she still trying to teach me something? I tried, in my mind, to connect, like she taught me and like I sometimes did with her brother, but I couldn’t sort it out because my mind was twisting with revulsion at what I was watching and anger at what she was doing to herself. And frustration at not being able to tell her to stop, just STOP and come home, just COME HOME, which was, I realized, what I would have told her to do if she was still alive, and it seemed to me that that was what she wanted. More than anything, maybe that’s what she was telling me.
Which only had me obsessed with understanding her message.
So I went to the oracle, the only person I knew who could absolutely predict the future and answer questions from the beyond:
Caitlin Lewis, the girl who turned her father’s now-ancient iPod into a Magic Eight Ball. The way it worked was you had to press shuffle and then listen to the first song that came up, and whatever came up had some special meaning, and all you had to do was figure it out.
And so the day after I saw the video, I cornered Caitlin and asked if I could try her iPod. She said of course I could, so I put on her headphones and turned the device on and hit shuffle music and got a song.
Get this, I know you’re not going to believe it, but the song was called “Did She Mention My Name?” by a guy named Gordon Lightfoot. Who ever even heard of that guy, much less the song? Seriously, check it out on the internet; it’s there, on Wikipedia, it’s also the name of an entire album by this guy.
Freaky shit, right? Twelve thousand songs. What are the chances?
It had to mean something, but I had no clue what. I asked Caitlin but she said that she wasn’t responsible for the content, that it was up to whoever used it to figure stuff out on their own.
So I tried again and couldn’t find anything else that made any sense at all, which left me with this one song which definitely meant something, but who could say what?
In the end, my mom got her credit card bill and that was the last I saw of Roxanne.
Since then, I have heard this song more than once, so I still want to know. What were the odds?
Chapter Twenty-Four
How I Saved Meadows High
For starters, we should’ve seen it coming.
That was the common thread that ran through all of the newspaper articles and television reports in the days following the siege. A bunch of reporters and commentators made it a big issue about the obvious warning signs and how the staff should have been properly trained to detect behavioral changes in students and take precautionary measures. There was even an article in the Times or some other paper headlined “Who Was Watching David Burnett?”
But consider this: Burn was not the only one at Meadows capable of going Columbine. The truth is, there were probably at least a dozen kids at Meadows who were potentially dangerous. If you asked any of us in the senior class, we could name them all, off the top of our heads, not even straining our minds to come up with the list. Guaranteed. You ask fifty kids, and ten out of the twelve names would be identical. Sure, everyone would have named Burn, that’s easy. Plus Franklin, no one ever trusted him. Then the others, I could spit the names out without thinking.
Not only Meadows, but virtually every high school in the country; you go to any school and poll the kids, and they’ll come up with a list of kids who are about to boil over.
Point is, even though they blamed the administration at Meadows and even though Principal Singh was basically forced to retire, none of what happened was his fault at all. We all knew that; we all told him so at graduation.
Remember: The first time they thought something was wrong, they pulled Burn out of middle school and sent him somewhere more “appropriate” for him. So they knew about him. But what do you do when a kid loses a dad to terrorism, is forced to live with his aunt in a house that smells like urine, then is forced to go to a school for crazies, then breast cancer takes his mom, and then his sister kills herself in the same house he was living in, in the same house his mother died in?
Shit. If it was me, I would have been out of my frickin’ mind (well, not so much Jacob dying, tell you the truth, but that’s neither here nor there).
Plus, don’t forget, the kid in question was a confirmed genius who, even if he never showed up in classes, completely aced like every single test he took, plus was normal, actually better than normal, most of the time. Well, at least half the time.
So that being the case, what do you look for? Who would even want that job?
Back to Burn. My only contact with him during the first part of senior year was a while
after Roxanne died. Apparently he had taken off the first few weeks of school on doctor’s orders. So no one knew where he was, or even if he was coming back to Meadows.
In the meantime, a letter was sent home to every kid in every grade (probably including Burn) disclosing the unfortunate event involving one of the graduates of the school. It started with “As you may have heard . . .”
It didn’t disclose who the person was, it just mentioned suicide and the suggestion that if any student had feelings of hopelessness or depression, he or she should contact their guidance counselor or the school psychologist. (Really, who was about to do that? Like what are the chances of a kid walking into his guidance counselor and saying, “I’m fucked up, help me.” No kid is actually that fucked up.)
It was probably for the best, him not being around during that time, when rumors were rampant about what Roxanne was into. No one had apparently seen the video, but it seemed like everyone knew she had made one, so there was constant talk about it. It was partially because of all the talk that I avoided after-school activities during those weeks and started taking drives. Then, just when the rumors started to circulate that Burn had dropped out or was going to another school, he showed up, looking very, very normal.
I was in the cafeteria with a few of the Club Crew when he walked over.
I immediately got to my feet and assumed a defensive position, prepared for an altercation. After all, this was the first time I saw him since his sister died, and we hadn’t talked in almost a year. Plus I hated him for what he did to me and still hadn’t made peace with it on any level.
So imagine my surprise when he hugged me like a brother and told me:
“Thanks for being such a good friend to my sister.”
What do you say to that? Even to a guy who once pointed a gun at your head?
OK, I previously made no secret of the fact that I would have nothing to do with him and avoided him like the plague ever since that night in Massachusetts. But, at that moment at least, all I could do was hug him back, not because I felt anything for him, but out of respect, and also love for Roxanne. And because I knew that we were probably the only two people in the world who would never forget her.
Leave it to Pete to interrupt, with a typical Pete line, spoken in a mock coughing fit: “Has anyone seen Brokeback Mountain?”
Give some credit to Burn. He laughed. And then everyone was saying, “Sorry about your sister, man. Yeah, sorry about your sister.”
And that was it. He walked away, and I watched him go, thinking maybe I should have said more to him.
As he disappeared, I realized that I couldn’t, not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t have been sure how he would have reacted.
A few weeks later, just as I predicted, virtually everyone forgot about Roxanne entirely. After all, she didn’t even go to Meadows anymore, and truth was, maybe once every other year or so, some student at Meadows decides to end their life. She was not the first, and will not be the last. Sad but true.
I saw Burn in the halls on other occasions, and he seemed regular enough at the time. And of course, I was busy with the Club Crew doing whatever we did so well. He was not invited and never showed at any of our parties. No surprise there.
My mom told me that she invited him for Thanksgiving, and of course I went apeshit, but there was no reason to, because no way was he going to show.
So you could say I pretty much lost track of him before the morning of 4/21. We all pretty much did.
From what I heard, Burn apparently got into music and was all about learning to play the guitar in the winter of 2008. I heard that he got to be pretty good, spent some of his trust money, when he finally got some, on a collection of Les Paul guitars and other collectible instruments, electric and acoustic. Bobby saw his collection and was beyond envious. After all, Bobby played like Hendrix, so he knew a perfect instrument when he saw one, and he claimed that Burn had somehow acquired several perfect guitars. No surprise there, as Burn was not about to buy anything that was less than perfect, no matter how much online research it took and no matter how much of the settlement cash he spent.
Sorry that I can’t shed more light on what he was doing in those months, but I just wasn’t paying much attention to him, and neither was anyone else (and I talked to more than a few people, like half the senior class, so I know this to be true), because let’s face it, none of us had any way of knowing at the time that he was going to totally lose it before senior year was over.
The only thing that I was able to figure out was, no one knew a fucking thing.
No one remembered seeing him in classes or not seeing him in classes, or hearing him make any kind of comment that sounded suspicious, or doing anything that drew attention to himself, or anything else that anyone would think would lead up to him showing up that morning in combat gear.
There was nothing that anyone could have pointed out at the time. So I wasn’t thinking at the time, What is Burn up to and how’s his state of mind?
Burn was, to all of us, plain and simple, back to being Burn.
I don’t want to mislead you when I say that Burn showed up in his combat gear. What he showed up with at school that day was what seemed to me to be two guitar cases, plus his laptop bag strung over his shoulder. Plus he was wearing one of those hunting-fishing jackets, you know, the camouflage kind you get in sporting goods stores.
When I saw him that morning, I was on my way out of school actually.
I wasn’t even planning to go to school that day.
My mom woke me from a dead sleep that morning to tell me that I had to drive Jamie in. I couldn’t explain to her that it was the unofficial Senior Skip Day. Unofficial because Senior Skip Day, for those who call it that (we don’t, we simply call it 420, either you get it or you don’t. BTW, if you don’t, just Google 420 and you’ll understand) only happens on April 20.
But this year April 20 was a Sunday.
So we couldn’t exactly leave school and get high all day on Sunday, which left us, the Club Crew, the Prime Timers, and even the drama group and the science nerds and the musicians, all of the separate but equal groups of seniors at Meadows, with a predicament. Either forget about Senior Skip Day entirely and lose out totally on the day we had all waited for for four years . . . Or:
(1) Celebrate 420 on 4/20; or,
(2) celebrate 420 on 4/21; or,
(3) celebrate 420 on 4/20 and again on 4/21.
Some of the groups, like drama and music and the science nerds, chose to celebrate on Sunday, then go in on Monday, being as they had some drama thing or music thing or science thing to do.
By now, you probably know enough about the Club Crew to guess exactly which option we chose (option 3, in case you, like me, have a tendency to sometimes miss things).
Which is why I was so wasted the morning of 4/21, and when my mom came in to wake me, she had to practically scream me into consciousness.
“Did you forget, Steven? You’re driving Jamie today.”
As you may have heard, you don’t cross Caroline and expect there not to be a consequence. So that got me up and out quickly in torn basketball shorts and an even more torn heavy metal T-shirt, not bothering to shave, comb my hair, or even brush my teeth or go to the bathroom. After all, school was ten freakin’ minutes away and I would be coming back. That gave me twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes before I would be able to go back to sleep and wake up in time to celebrate round two with my boys and the Herd Girls and anyone else who wanted to join us in the nature preserve to lift our redcups and pass around the blunts in honor of Senior Skip Day.
So I pulled up to school, radio blasting. I nodded for Jamie to get out, and Jamie reached into the back of the car to take her backpack.
“Steven, you have to open the trunk. My science project is in there.”
Grunting a perfect big-brother grunt, I popped the trunk with the remote on the key.
“Steven, you have to get out to help me.”
&
nbsp; And grunting another big-brother grunt, I reluctantly got out to help her.
There were rolls of oaktag posters. I handed them to her, and then there was this cardboard box, and she said, “Steven, you have to help me bring my project into class.”
I gave her a perfect Lindsey eye roll.
“Jamieeeee,” I protested, “I can’t go in there. I’m not supposed to be here at all.”
“Mom said,” she answered, invoking the name of Caroline Prescott to persuade me.
“Fine. I’ll go as far as the front doors. Meet me there. I’m not going in.”
“Fine. You better be there.”
I handed her whatever she could carry and went to park in the student lot. Minutes later, I was carrying the cardboard box filled with who knows what, looking all around to make sure that none of my teachers saw me. I was still high enough, with residual grogginess from the night before, to believe I could operate in stealth mode, like you do in video games.
I made it to the front doors of the school. And waited.
And waited.
No Jamie. Where the fuck was Jamie?
And finally, like ten minutes later, she emerged. There was a boy with her, all pimpled up, one I didn’t recognize, she had managed to talk into helping her.
Seemed like she was doing better with her socialization issues, I remember thinking that. I also remember thinking that hopefully she had better taste in boys.
Then I was on my way back to my car, fast as I could, to get off school grounds as quickly as possible, when I ran into Burn, who was, like I said before, carrying his guitar cases and his laptop bag, his hair rock-star long, under a Thin Lizzy cap, whoever they were. My first thought was that it figured he would be showing up to school on a day everyone else was cutting out.
“Hey, Dave.” I nodded, always cautious around him.
“Crash.” He nodded back.
Crash and Burn Page 44