by Sarah Bannan
Adam told us that she looked tired, that he could see her through his rear-view mirror, and that he felt bad she had to walk that whole way home. “It’s a long fucking way to walk – I’ve done it when I’m too stoned to drive or see my mama.” He laughed when he said this. Adam’s brother had been four years ahead of us in school – a senior when we were just in eighth grade – and he and his wife moved back to Adamsville straight after college, and they lived two streets over from Carolyn and her mom. People said it was weird that Adam hadn’t volunteered to give Carolyn a ride. At first, he told people he hadn’t thought of it, and over time, as the story got bigger and bigger, he insisted that he’d been too stoned. Only then it didn’t make sense that he remembered all that stuff, all that detail – how far it was, how tired she looked – if he’d really been so stoned, and eventually he changed that too. “She looked like she wouldn’t have taken a ride anyway. She would’ve thought I was trying to pick her up.”
We were never sure which version to believe, but we had an idea: every guy in our class wanted to sleep with Carolyn, from what we could see, but they were afraid of her too. Afraid to approach her, to speak to her directly, to draw attention to themselves, afraid someone might call them fags, or say they had herpes, or that they’d wet themselves in the third grade. The newspapers insisted that Carolyn was a loner, that she was “isolated” and “distant.” But that wasn’t true. She still had her followers – freshmen and sophomores mostly, at this stage, but still. There were people who liked her, who thought she was amazing and different and funny, who followed her like she was some kind of Twitter trend, wanting to know what she’d do next, who she’d talk to, who she’d sleep with, whose locker she’d be standing by. They didn’t talk to her or walk with her, so it was easy to see why people thought she was alone. But lots of us still liked her. Even if we didn’t come right out and say it. If we were to do it over, we said things would be different, and we bet that people would be more straightforward, would have been more vocal. We thought that things could have been different. But we didn’t totally believe that. Not really.
Adam said it started as an accident, or at least that’s what it looked like. Brooke was still throwing ice at Shane, and then he was throwing it back at her, always toward the chest, trying to get the cubes to melt into her tank top or, better still, to make their way down underneath it, in her cleavage, into her bra – a black Victoria’s Secret from the Angel line, probably, something that cost over forty bucks. She spent so much on her underwear that she had to get her money’s worth, had to put it out on display.
Shane and Brooke were throwing ice, and the flirting was crazy, that’s what Adam said. And they were throwing it harder and harder, reaching back into the cooler and taking out four or five cubes at a time, then handfuls, then Shane was piling it up in his polo, so he could get to it quicker. Adam said he saw a flash of Carolyn’s hair in his rear-view mirror and then she was in front of his car, walking straight toward the Explorer. In the newspapers, it said she was trying to avoid them, but that’s not what we heard. “She was on her way to tell them something, looked like she was gonna tell them off, or something.”
She crossed in front of Adam’s car; Shane and Brooke still hadn’t clocked her, they were still in the middle of their game, of their throwing – was this all the fuck they got up to? And then Shane threw a fistful, his arm so strong from baseball, and hundreds of tiny shards hit Carolyn’s face.
Adam said he unlocked his doors, he was about to get out, only then Shane and Brooke got up, and they were laughing, and he thought Carolyn was laughing too. Looking back, it seems hard to believe, that this would have made her laugh, but Adam said he stayed put ’cause he didn’t want to look like a fucking spy, and didn’t think they needed anything. Not really.
Carolyn stood still and wiped herself down, the ice melting to water almost instantly. Her t-shirt looked tie-dyed or something as the water spread into rings, into patterns, circles inside circles inside circles.
Then Carolyn spat. This is what we heard. This is what we knew. She got close enough to Brooke that she could spit on her and then she did. Carolyn Lessing spat on Brooke Moore.
And then we heard the rest.
Brooke reached into the cooler and took out a glass bottle and threw it. Adam said she was aiming for Carolyn, he was sure of it, but the bottle missed her, and it smashed to the ground, the brown liquid fizzing, spraying Carolyn, clear shards of glass going everywhere. Adam said Carolyn “stood real still ’n’ quiet, like she was fixin’ to do something but I couldn’t tell what.” Brooke and Shane were laughing like crazy now, Brooke doubled over “like she was gonna pee herself.” And then Adam looked over at Carolyn again, and she was crouched on the ground, like an animal, he said, like a deer somebody had shot and wounded but hadn’t managed to kill. Carolyn stood up, and she was holding the neck of the broken bottle in her right hand. Adam said she looked like she might cry or laugh or something, and then Brooke called out: “What’re ya gonna do with that, Carolyn? You gonna cut yourself?”
Carolyn lunged forward and Brooke jumped down from Shane’s Explorer. “And she ran over and got all in Carolyn’s face, grabbed Carolyn’s hand with the bottle in it,” Adam said.
He said Brooke’s voice sounded like a bark: “You wanna cut yourself? Is that it?”
Carolyn barked back, louder than he had expected: “Get away from me.” And Adam said Carolyn pushed the bottle forward and he thought it might scrape Brooke’s chest, but Brooke was stronger than Carolyn, so much bigger, and Brooke pulled hard on Carolyn’s hand, trying to get control of the bottle or something.
“Let it go!” Brooke was yelling now, Carolyn had turned her body into herself and Brooke got behind her, not letting go of Carolyn’s hand.
Adam said he couldn’t really see what was happening, only that Brooke was practically wrapped around Carolyn; it didn’t look like either of them could move. “I never saw a girl fight before,” he told people. “And I thought it was awesome at first, if I’m really fuckin’ honest.”
Carolyn was struggling to get free – “she was weaker, you know?” – and Adam reckoned they were both still holding on to the bottle, that was what was keeping them together. And then Brooke rammed her knee into Carolyn’s back – she was so much taller than Carolyn that it hit her right in the small of her back, “right where it would hurt the most,” he said. Carolyn screamed and the bottle smashed to the ground and she fell down, like she was shattering too. Brooke let go; she looked around for a second, and then she ran back to Shane, “real fast, like she knew what she done.”
Carolyn stayed hunched on the ground for a beat. And then she stood up.
She was bleeding, Adam said, and he couldn’t believe how much, and then Brooke looked back and her face fell and went white – she was freaked too. The cut was like a butterfly on Carolyn’s chest, spreading out from the center, rivulets of blood making tracks against her skin, patterns like little rivers, and from far away you imagined it could look beautiful, like a henna tattoo, like she’d decorated her chest with red diamante.
Carolyn looked down at her chest – Adam said she had no reaction at first and then like a child, “like some kid that doesn’t know to scream until her mama turns up,” she saw the blood and screamed. And then she screamed more and she started to run. Shane and Brooke hopped out of the trunk, and got into the car. Shane started the engine and they waited for two, maybe three minutes – the time it took Rhianna to get to the first chorus of “Umbrella” – and they left. They drove out of the parking lot.
Some of the papers said that they followed Carolyn, with the windows down, shouting at her as she walked home. Brooke and Shane denied this, said they went straight to Shane’s house and that Brooke was crying because she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
Brooke told people later the spit hit her hair, just missed her eye. Shane neither confirmed nor denied that it happened. People asked Adam if it was true, if that was wh
at had started it, and he said it was too far away to say for sure, to see that thin and beautiful girl spit on the high school’s future prom queen. Taylor Lyon told people it had happened for sure – Adam had told her but told her not to tell anybody – but once the court case began, she pretended she had never heard or said anything.
Brooke told the cops – and the liberal reporters and the local television stations – that it was the spit that had started it. She didn’t tell any of us that, mostly ’cause nobody would talk to her after it had all gone down. Who cared what the hell she said now? And the Adamsville Daily wouldn’t print it.
There were things that were found, things that were printed, things that the cops used, that the District Attorney used to substantiate their charges.
Carolyn’s phone. The text feed:
CAROLYN OMG. I’m alone and crying and I can’t take this anymore . . . Seriously freaking out.
x Oh my god. Are you okay? What happened????!
CAROLYN B & S in parking lot when I was leaving school. Threw glass at me and cut me, I’m not kidding. Bleeding like crazy here.
x WTF? That is INSANE. They are such assholes, ignore them, she is such a bitch. ARE YOU OKAY?
CAROLYN Everybody hates me here. This cut is gonna leave a crazy scar forever. Swear to god.
x OMG so many people love you. You know they are just jealous. You need to stand up for yourself. Where are you? Want to meet up?
CAROLYN How can I stand up for myself? It doesn’t matter anyway.
We found out later that she hadn’t gone home. At least not immediately after. Shane and Brooke hadn’t seen where she went, they were too freaked by the blood. But Janitor Ken had seen stuff, and so had a couple of teachers, though they were never named. Carolyn had walked out of the parking lot, yes, that much was true. And Shane and Brooke drove out behind her a few minutes later. You could see why some people assumed they’d been following her, that they’d chased her home. But when she walked out of the lot, she turned left, not right, and she walked into the football field. We imagined her there, just like the first day we’d seen her, unsteady on her feet, shaking, looking down at her phone. We thought that she had probably texted from there, from the field. Or maybe from the locker room – that’s where she went next.
Janitor Ken was cleaning out the toilet stalls in the girls’ locker room that afternoon. He didn’t see Carolyn come in at first and didn’t hear her either. He wore his iPod, he explained later, was listening to Kenny Chesney or something – and so he couldn’t say for sure how long she’d been in there before he saw her: standing in front of a row of lockers, shirt off, wearing just her bra. He said there was blood on her chest and that she had blood on her hands, too. He went toward her but she screamed, he said. “I didn’t want to hurt her or nothing,” he told Mr Overton later. “I just wanted to make sure she was all right.” The school’s attorney clarified: “There was a sign saying ‘Cleaning In Progress.’ She shouldn’t have come in.” He said he backed away and, as he did, she opened the palms of her hands. She was holding something in one of them: “something silver and shiny,” he said. The police said later that it was a razor blade. She had cut herself, they figured, and was “involved in self-mutilation” in the hours following the incident in the parking lot.
We wished that we had been there that day, in the locker room. We don’t know what we would have done, or what we would have said, but we were sure we would have been able to stop things, to turn things in another direction, change the course of history, or maybe change just a few little things. Only maybe that’s not true. Maybe an intervention would have only prolonged it, made everything that followed more painful. We didn’t know. Looking back, we saw things no more clearly: at one moment, we would believe she had been on a path we had no control over, like Oedipus following his fate. At another, we would say she was someone in distress and only we had the ability to change things. Either way, we felt such shame it could be hard to sleep at night.
Ken told Mr Overton, and later the police, that Carolyn ran out after he’d seen her, after she’d screamed, after she’d opened her palms. When they pressed him, he got confused about how she’d gotten dressed, or whether she’d gotten dressed at all, and why she was able to get out without him stopping her. They didn’t understand why he didn’t call somebody, why he didn’t at least tell his supervisor, or one of the teachers still in the school. There were plenty of them around. Ken didn’t have very strong explanations, and later the PTA demanded his suspension. We thought this was sad. But maybe they were right.
Miss Simpson was in her office when everything happened. She gave an interview to some blogger months later and told them she was there, grading papers, while all this happened outside her window, in the parking lot, just yards from her desk.
We could imagine Miss Simpson there. In her office. Alone, with a PowerBar, a Diet Coke, some Reese’s Pieces in her desk drawer, her opening and closing the drawer every five minutes, taking another handful, until all but two she mislaid were gobbled up. She had been working on a paper for the school board and the student alliance for three weeks, a paper on the subject of bullying “in the context of new media” and how the school should respond to this phenomenon. She was using Carolyn as a case in point – she was studying some transcripts from Mrs Matthew’s office, things we would only discover later. She was studying the pieces of text that were public on Facebook, things Carolyn had written in her classes. She had a thesis, and she was determined to get it out there. We knew nobody would take her seriously.
There were so many people who were “culpable,” the newspapers said later. And we said it to each other, too. There were varying degrees, of course, but we all had a hand in it, we thought, every once in a while, though we never said this out loud. What we said out loud was different, less to the point, more defensive, if we were honest. Saying it out loud made it true, we thought, and there was so little that we knew was true. Not in the end.
Adamsville Daily News
27 May 2011
LOCAL GIRL FOUND DEAD IN BATHROOM
Carolyn Lessing (16), daughter of Abby Lessing of D’Evereux Drive, was found dead in her home on the evening of Thursday, due to asphyxia. Police suspect hanging to be the cause of death and have classified the death as a suicide. Her mother found the body after returning home from work at 5.45 p.m. She had received a number of phone messages from a classmate of Carolyn’s, who warned her that Carolyn was in a fragile mental state. Police stated that Ms Lessing left her workplace early in order to check in on her only daughter. Ms Lessing has refused to comment and has asked the community to respect her family’s privacy during this difficult time.
Carolyn Lessing and her mother moved to Adamsville from Elizabeth, New Jersey, last summer. Carolyn was a junior at Adams High School and had been a part of the Homecoming Court in October. She was a member of the swim team and was on the Honor Roll. Carolyn also displayed a special solo art exhibit early in the year, which featured her paintings and photography.
Richard Overton, Adams’s Principal, has expressed his deepest condolences to Ms Lessing and Carolyn’s extended family. He said that the death was a “tremendous tragedy for the student body and the faculty” and that “counseling services would be in place for students who wish to avail of them.” Overton noted that it would be inappropriate and a breach of confidentiality for him to comment on the girl’s mental state during her year at the high school but went on record to state that she was “a popular, bright and friendly girl.”
Funeral arrangements will be announced in the coming days.
JUNE
Chapter 26
We found out stuff about the hanging. There was a thing on The Today Show and they did a “reconstruction” at a house that was supposed to look like Carolyn’s, only it didn’t. It was too big and the furniture was too boring and everything was grey and beige and tan. The segment showed some girl sitting in a bathroom, one that looked like it was out of an IKEA cata
logue. She was texting, then taking off her clothes and examining her arms, her abdomen and her chest in the mirror. They’d put a big fake cut on her chest, like the one that was meant to have happened in the parking lot, and the actress touched it and then made a face as if to say the cut was painful and raw. We imagined it stung. The girl was still wearing her bra and underwear – she wasn’t completely naked – but people complained later about her state of undress and how it was wrong of the station to do the reconstruction at all. Ann Curry warned people before the piece started that there was “content of an adult nature” and “images some people may find disturbing.”
They showed the girl with a scarf, some crazy long one, like the kind that they were selling in Old Navy before Christmas. She tied it around a light bulb that hung from the ceiling – nothing like Carolyn’s house, nothing like any of their bathrooms, which had light fixtures that looked like they were straight out of Restoration Hardware – and then she stood on the toilet seat and tied the scarf around her neck, like she’d done it a million times before, like she was getting ready to walk outside on a cold, cold day. The camera went to the actress’s feet then, just in ankle socks, and she dangled one foot over the edge and then, after a few beats, she slid the other one off too. The camera flashed to black.