The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Nick says, “What the hell are you doing?”

  She looks at him with a start. It was Nick all along.

  He pulls her away by the hand. “Didn’t you hear me? I’ve been calling you. Let’s get out of here.”

  They run away, out the barn, and don’t look back.

  * * *

  @EPortisClaymore It’s called battered women syndrome. Read up.

  @EPortisClaymore id hit that

  @EPortisClaymore a woman chooses to put up with abuse or not

  @EPortisClaymore Hey girl wishing you peace and love and Christ’s light

  @EPortisClaymore close ur legs

  @EPortisClaymore Hugs to you

  @EPortisClaymore kill yourself oh wait did i hurt u show me ur tits

  * * *

  Down below the mountain, the town is dark and quiet. A flock of bats whips southward, blacker than the sky.

  Their mothers are disappeared for all intents and purposes. Their fathers are virtually dead. They aren’t interested in the past, they have no stake in the histories of their families or town. They have few people to rely on, none to care for, no one really whose obligations they must meet. Haven’t they erred by seeking to please others? A shared weakness, an edge too thin, giving to others before attending to their own needs.

  They have cash. They need to move. Hours of passion will stretch into love-filled years, but only if they’re brave.

  To yield at this point is to be pulled in two different directions.

  Yielding even a little will crack them in half.

  In the dark of her family’s old house, across the endless wasteland of the internet, they read stories about themselves, watch videos of people who discuss their crimes, people who share opinions as though they’re fact. Not a single account gets their story close to right. They can’t stand much of it for long. No one mentions that they’re in love. They are in love. Love of the kind that proves true love is real.

  And the consequences of such love dying, they decide, are the worst possible consequences. They decide this late that evening, early the next morning, in the luminous darkness, when the simple truth is that he wants to be hers, and she wants to be his.

  To survive, they must run.

  But before they leave, Emily can’t help but seize an impulse, grab her phone and send a text message, though really it’s from both of them, to set the record straight.

  SALAMANDRA: THE EMILY PORTIS STORY

  Mount Washington is the tallest mountain in New England, 6,290 feet tall. The mountain stands farther north, going by latitude, than Toronto, Milwaukee, or San Francisco. Geologically, its makeup is mostly quartzite and mica schist, a bluntly pointed mound of rubble, shaped to earn its local nickname, the Hand. Some people say it looks like it’s giving the finger to Massachusetts.

  Historical documents explain that the first man on record to climb Mount Washington achieved the summit in 1621. Born in Boston, a son of Welsh immigrants, Aron Prichard mountaineered with the assistance of two American Indian guides, whose names were not recorded, except that they likely belonged to the Sequassen, a tribe native to the region.1 The Sequassen called the mountain Sahkekapáwo and said it was a holy place. According to his account, Prichard’s guides acted mainly as porters and balked from fear when he went for the summit. The allegation fit his plan. He’d pursued the climb to make a point, he wrote, that he wished the Sequassen to know that they were correct to be intimidated, and that they should also fear the white men as gods, men like himself whom he believed to be the humans closest to the all-powerful, with skin tone to match the peaks and clouds. After all, if holy strongholds could be breached safely by the white man, what hope had any red or brown men, bound to soil?2

  Since that day, many thousands have reached the top under their own steam, people of myriad skin tones and passports.3 In the same time period, over a hundred climbers have died.

  Since 1943, the United States Alpine Research and Mountaineering Institute has kept a taxonomy of deaths, with an eye for detail. Fatalities are filed under categories such as “Fall on Ice,” “High Winds,” “Inadequate Equipment,” “Inexperience,” and “Exceeding Abilities.”4 Anecdotes describe ice climbers tumbling down gullies. Mountaineers die of exposure. Climbers fall down headwalls and “tomahawk” until their necks snap. Hikers lose their footing. Backcountry skiers, overrun by avalanches, choke to death in head-high snow, and are filed under “Asphyxiation.”5

  So no surprise, really, that a popular bumper sticker in the area reads THIS CAR CLIMBED MOUNT WASHINGTON.

  Recently, a girl and a boy, New Hampshire natives, sixteen and twenty, hereafter called the Girl and the Boy, decided they wanted the sticker for themselves. A silly thing, just something to do, but in their case it was also a gesture of specific profundity. Also, they invited a journalist to come along. And this should be an oddity under normal circumstances; the two of them are not frequently in the company of journalists. But days are strange.

  The Boy was only just released on bail, to await trial for two charges of homicide that may or may not stand. The father of the Girl, who happened to be the sheriff of their county, was also charged with murder, two murders; in fact, the same pair of killings that the Boy originally was accused of, before the sheriff’s guilt began to seem more plausible to prosecutors, based on forensic evidence.

  Furthermore, sexual matters were being discussed publicly, which involved the Boy, the Girl and the sheriff, and other parties. And so their hometown of Claymore, a small former fishing village6 in southern New Hampshire, has lately been abuzz with rumor and allegation and gossip, and wasn’t where they wanted to be. Instead, encircled by chaos, two young people decided to visit the tallest mountain in the state, the nearest, largest thing that would appear to be immovable, to have forever been the way it was.7

  In the short lives of the Boy and Girl, during their brief romance and sudden infamy, the world had shown itself capable of rapid, uncontrollable transformation. But what if it had always been this way?

  * * *

  When the Boy and Girl invited a journalist—hereafter called the Journalist; to be explained later—to join them for a road trip, the plan was to blow out of town. They’d settled on driving north, just north; and when the Boy said this out loud, “north,” the Girl determinedly nodded her head, hooked her fingers into his waistband, and he put his arm around her, protectively.

  The Boy is under average height, with deep-set blue eyes and greasy dark hair that he tucks behind his ears. Sometimes, in front of the Journalist, when the Girl was absent, he complained about his current place in life, his rotten luck. But he was also quick to smile, eager to please, always outgoing with strangers they met on the road.

  The Girl is two inches taller and slender, with straight brown hair to the middle of her back and small brown eyes. Shy where the Boy is garrulous, pensive when he is humorous, somehow, time and again, she came across as both middle-aged and preteen.

  But these are just one reporter’s observations. This past summer, the Girl was portrayed in many ways, across all sorts of media around the world. But reports tended to suggest one thing to a point of cliché: that a young woman with her previous experiences was not merely teenager but mutant. That a girl of such “psychological scarring,” an oft-repeated phrase, would determinably become, in due course, that most coveted archetype in our society: the Victim. Victim of violence at home. Victim of nurture, if not nature. A person engulfed by her upbringing, then unfolded by tragic events in public view.

  A young woman, therefore, who lacked the agency to grasp her own story, to see herself for herself, and so her story, the Victim’s story, needed to be told by others.

  The Boy drove, the Girl rode shotgun, the Journalist rode middle-back. The truck belonged to the Girl’s family, a 1997 Chevrolet 1500, brown and ramshackle, with red trim. By noon in mid-August, a hot sunny day, it was roaring up a state road, headed north, at which time the Journalist decided unwisely,8 fifteen minut
es into their trip together, to kick things off by paraphrasing the situation that the Girl now found herself in, with regard to how people saw her, both in town and in the media.9

  The Girl responded, with hardness, “That’s not all of it.”

  The Boy said quietly, “This is stupid.”

  “We invited her. We both did,” the Girl said, as if to confirm it for herself.

  “Hey, check it out,” the Boy said, reading a passing sign. “Mount Washington. A hundred miles.”

  * * *

  Two days earlier, during a self-staged Media Day of her invention, the Girl’s story was disseminated in a different fashion from the norm. As if to demonstrate her savviness, she auctioned off interview and image opportunities to those national and international media willing to bid for them.10

  From which she and her appointed representatives—her best friend and her best friend’s older sister—sold seven interviews, five photography sessions, plus two telephone interviews, with journalists in Japan and Brazil respectively, for a total of $21,675,11 paid in cash or through online money transfers.

  “I just wanted it all to end,” she said. “It seemed like the only way.”

  In addition, she received supplementary offers that she did not accept, like round-trip travel to fly to Qatar, all expenses paid, to audition for an aspiring film director. Or a bid of two thousand dollars for a one-year option on the screen rights to her story, submitted by a production company in Los Angeles.

  Also not interesting to the Girl: from the adult entertainment company Azuretory, the Brussels-based owner of video-streaming websites such as PornSwatch and Spanktoid, a bid of travel to the San Fernando Valley in California, plus accommodations, plus other compensation to be determined, for a modeling shoot, if not more.12

  Among further unsolicited things, the Girl also had several scary encounters in public, and received through the internet and postal mail more than one marriage proposal, proposal of gang rape, pornographic image drawn in her likeness. Advertisements in her name, to sell carnal services, appeared on escort websites. Her Social Security number became public knowledge. Trolls opened social media accounts in her father’s name, her mother’s name; one was even quoted in a newspaper article, as though verified.

  For a period of weeks this summer, New England Gothic was the new black. In cities and towns across the United States, the Girl and Boy13 were famous. People believed they knew just how this story went,14 all its shade. For example, they knew the Boy to be tethered to the state’s justice system by a tamper-resistant monitor attached to his ankle. They knew him to be a young man from an old family, yet one who’s virtually fatherless. Who dropped out of high school after a tragic snowmobile accident, and continues to live at home with a hard-drinking single mother—to the fulfillment of stereotypes everywhere regarding burnouts from the working class, though elevated to the ranks of hard-faded richie riches. In the same way, on the part of the Girl, she was believed to be many things, indistinctly, all at once. So, a sexpot. Abuse victim. Attention-seeking slut. A young woman who’d been isolated from modern society, like a lost tribe in the Amazon, until recent days when she’d been thrust into the hands of the twenty-first century and all its ruthless merchants, where her purity hadn’t only been spoiled, but exploited, sold into whoredom.

  In addition, the public knew that her dad, until recently the elected sheriff of Claymore County, stood accused of murdering two people to protect a terrible secret: his rape of the Girl over many years. The same sheriff who, postmurdering, as the allegations hold, then roped in the Boy—wrong place, wrong time—and told him to do away with the bodies, bludgeon their faces to prevent easy identification and bury them outside the state, then assume blame if the crimes ever came to light. Otherwise, the sheriff threatened, he’d flat-out murder the Boy’s mom.15

  In an interview16 for the German tabloid Die Sonne, a publication that boasts a circulation of three million, the Girl was asked how it felt to be a spokeswoman for victims of sexual abuse. How she’d come to decide, while demonstrating through her self-photographed sexuality,17 that women indeed may refute abuses visited upon their bodies through their own sexual self-manifestations. To which she said, or is quoted as saying, “I don’t know what that means. We just want to be left alone.” And the rest of the article was not much more informative than that, which didn’t seem to be of concern. Because it was accompanied by a photograph of the Girl in a one-piece bathing suit, posed next to a tree in the town square of Claymore—even though the closest beach is a half-mile away, and there’s no swimming pool out of frame, no sunbathing area—with as much cleavage on view as is allowed in a family newspaper.18

  Regarding this photograph, the first of many taken on Media Day, the Girl said the photographer art-directed the picture quite exactly, and she hadn’t yet known to what degree she could control the situation. But on this point, the Journalist protested that, actually, hadn’t she been in good and goddamn control of the situation? Hadn’t she created the situation? She was being paid for the situation, at her request? If she wanted to be left alone, why convene Media Day in the first place?

  To that, the Girl said nothing. Her face blushed angrily.

  The Boy, driving, rattled his fingers on the wheel, and his eyes snapped left and right like windshield wipers.

  For those who still don’t know, the primary reason the Girl recently attracted so much attention—on top of her father’s abuse, the arrests, the small-town homicides—was because, at nearly the same time that the sheriff was arrested, a series of photographs became known publicly on the internet, showing the Girl, often nude, in sexually suggestive poses. This people believed was a stunt of her own devising, that she commissioned the photos and spread them around to attract attention, for celebrity. Like so many sex-tape-style “scandals” of recent years. Whereas her claim is that she took the photos with a friend, as a private gift for the Boy while he was in jail, intended to be completely confidential, never for social media. But then, according to the Girl, another student19 at Claymore High School, a boy, managed to steal the images, screen-grab them, distribute them, pass them to friends via his phone, other boys who went on to upload them to assorted data dumps online.

  And still, the photos might not have reached an audience wider than zip codes near Claymore County if an article on the website of DROP hadn’t republished them, applying concealment bars to cloak nudity; though let’s be honest: the bars were not all that big. So buzz swarmed. And the original pictures were quickly found, reposted in corners of the web in full nudity, assembled into animations, featured in montages and performer pages on video websites catering to pornography for the general public.

  All of this no matter that the age of the Girl, the girl in the photos, is sixteen.

  Soon the farmhouse where she lived came to be under siege. Making it difficult for the Girl and Boy to live normally, to nidificate in peace, to go on believing each morning that what was happening around them would end someday soon, that this was not their new, permanent existence.

  During Media Day, for $750: A London photographer asked the Girl to lie in a mess of newspapers on a fur rug, in a skirt and crop top, while propped on one elbow, smiling, holding up a Boston Globe from that week. Headline: “Sheriff Portis Suspected as Slayer.”

  So not exactly Burt Reynolds in Playgirl. In fact something far more complicated, sinister, and wrong.

  * * *

  Half an hour before Mount Washington, the Boy stopped at a gas station to use the restroom. Two motorcycles were parked outside, horse-sized and shiny black. The Journalist took the opportunity to talk to the customers inside, two men and two women, all four in Harley-Davidson vests and black T-shirts.

  She asked them about the infamous photos, whether or not they’d heard of them, and then, yes or no, had they seen them?

  The men both said they’d heard of the story, the Claymore Kids—referring to a nickname bestowed on them by the national media. Both also sa
id they’d seen the photos.

  “Someone sent me a link to them,” one said.

  The women in the store were sisters; they also happened to be the men’s girlfriends. One had heard about the story on the TV news. The other was clueless. Neither had seen the photographs.

  When asked if any of them had known that the girl was underage, one of the men said no. The other said, after blustery silence, “Someone should be locked up, is what should happen.” He pleaded the difficulty of knowing the ages of any women online.

  One of the women said, “She shouldn’t have stuck them on the internet if she didn’t want nobody to look at them.”

  None of the four would give their names.

  * * *

  The village of North Conway, New Hampshire, with a year-round population of just over two thousand people, is considered a gateway to Mount Washington, with the top of the mountain being only about a thirty-minute drive from downtown.

  The group decided to find rooms for the night; the summit would be saved for morning. The Girl walked inside a small motel, the Snowdrift. The Boy and Journalist stood outside. Above them, the motel sign was striated with color, against a matte dark sky. The Journalist inquired after the Boy’s plans, by which she meant dinner. But he misunderstood and said the two of them had big plans, big plans, for their lives ahead, once his trial was finished. He elaborated quickly how they envisioned driving west, the sooner the better, and someday working in Hollywood together, in the movies, the Girl as a costume designer, the Boy in some unspecified occupation. “Probably as a production assistant to start.”

  From there he launched into a defensive, excited monologue, about how “everybody has to start somewhere,” and “no path fits everybody.” Besides, “the American dream’s only a fantasy at this point,” “to help rich people sleep at night,” and “college is a joke these days,” an open bar for rich kids. “Why not start sooner and get to work?”

  When his girlfriend came out, she reported that the motel would suit their needs. The group took two rooms. The Journalist watched the couple walk away, holding hands, to explore town.