by Sarah Bannan
We said later that it was funny how the mood changed – and how nobody said anything about the irony of ganging up on Gemma and Brooke, of egging their lockers and houses, of throwing bricks into Shane’s car window, of writing anonymous notes to Andrew, telling him that he should leave town before they make the final arrangements for his funeral. Some girl – from a school in Cullman – came to Adams and waited in the parking lot after school the following fall. She had a knife and some scissors and she and some other girl pinned Brooke down and then cut off a chunk of her hair. Coach Cox got there before they finished and that made it look worse, we said later – her asymmetrical hair-cut, a penny-sized bald spot a few inches from her ear. She went to a salon in Birmingham to try to fix it, but Brooke’s hair never grew back the way it used to look. Her hair – which used to be shiny, glossy, swishy – was like hay, in color and in texture, and you’d be afraid to get too close to it. It would scratch your skin, cut you.
We thought it would never feel better. That this would stay around our necks forever, we’d carry it with us to college, and to our first jobs, and into our marriages, and bestow it on our children, and then our grandchildren. Not a gift, but a curse, or just a heavy stone that you picked up as a child and never took out of your pocket. Years later, when things did start to feel more normal, the guilt would kick in. You did something horrible. And you’re too horrible to even realize it.
None of the charges stuck, not in the end. Gemma and Brooke and Shane had to do community service – we’d see them in Harper’s Field picking up garbage on Saturdays, or at the Knights of Columbus serving spaghetti dinner – and Andrew, well, Andrew was cleared of everything completely. There was backlash to all of this, too, of course: from the foreign press, the liberal bloggers, and from people in the town. Nobody could remember what had really happened but everybody had an opinion, including us. We wanted them to be held responsible. If they were, it meant we were off the hook.
Andrew and Shane went to college – we’d heard they had trouble getting in, had been waitlisted or straight out refused from Alabama and Auburn – but when the case finally cleared, they left town. Took them maybe two, three months – but then they were gone. Andrew went to California – nobody could believe it, him going that far away – and Shane to Ole Miss. We wondered if the story followed them around – if their hallmates recognized them from the news, from the footage of them emerging from the Courthouse, in their suits with their heads bowed low. We wondered if they ever told anybody themselves. Our parents would tell us that years ago it would have been easier to make a fresh start – but the web made it all more difficult. There were still Facebook sites devoted to Carolyn’s memory, devoted to avenging her death.
It was harder for Brooke and Gemma, that was clear. Gemma’s dad requested a parish transfer – but it wasn’t granted – and attendance at the church dipped and then leveled off completely. People started going to First Baptist in Cullman so as not to hear him preach. The State Convention still couldn’t find a new parish for him, so he was forced to step down, eventually. He wasn’t prepared to let the whole parish crumble, just because of a bad story in the paper. Things got worse when the church could no longer pay him: he took a job in the Winn-Dixie packing groceries, and Mrs Davies got some hours at Parisian’s. They put their house on the market and when it sold, two years later, they moved to another state. Nobody asked for a forwarding address. Gemma was home-schooled the whole time, so we only saw her every once in a while – and she looked the same, we thought, only sadder.
Brooke tried to go back to school – she showed up on the first day of senior year and even tried to sit with Tiffany and Taylor at lunch – but they had already arranged the seating. She ate her lunch in the bathroom for the first few weeks and then started skipping classes so often that she was suspended. While she was out, she got mono or Lyme disease or something like that and Mrs Matthew arranged for all her assignments to be sent home and she graduated with all of us in 2012, but she didn’t turn up for the ceremony. We heard she’d be going to Cullman Community the following fall, and a few people saw her registering for classes that August. She’d put on at least twenty pounds.
Taylor Lyon seemed fine over the summer – we’d see her at the country club, at church, in the mall – but we heard later she took it really hard: she never admitted any responsibility, but we thought she should. She cut her hair short and dyed it dark brown, and she got really skinny during the second half of senior year. She turned rexy, we said. And we wondered if her problems were connected to her friendship with Carolyn. We couldn’t tell. Taylor was a ditcher, a fair-weather friend. She was Carolyn’s first connection to Adams, and she severed it when she got scared, or bored, we weren’t sure which.
Abby Lessing did lots of spots on the news – she was even on Oprah – and she looked the same as ever: young, pretty, thin. She seemed more drawn, that was for sure, and tired: there was a blackness underneath her eyes that never seemed to go away, not even when she was on national television. She hardly ever talked about Gemma and Brooke and Shane and Andrew, even when the reporters tried to draw it out of her. She blamed the school, she told them, the administration, for not doing more. When the charges were dropped against the four of them, though, she went on record to say that she was “disappointed” and that “justice had not been done.” We never saw her in the flesh again – she had moved back to New Jersey for good – and we never got to see the dad in real life either. He did lots of media too.
He was weird, the dad, everybody said that. He was older than anybody had expected, looked like he could be Carolyn’s granddad. He was quoted as saying he “didn’t blame the kids” but that he wished the school had done more “for a girl in distress.” We thought it was weird that nobody criticized him for living so far away, for not being more involved. But nobody did. They were immune, her parents. And we wished we were too.
She had a special page in our yearbook, Carolyn did. And kids who hardly knew her, we thought, would cry at the mention of her, would cheer when they heard about the charges against Brooke and Shane and Gemma and Andrew.
AUGUST
Epilogue
At the end of that summer, we went back to Harper’s Field. The festival was planned the same as before, though Jessica Grady’s dad had said that it might be “scaled down,” given all the town’s publicity over the summer, the impending trial, the downturn in the economy, everything else. We didn’t make big plans around it, but we went all together.
We arrived later than usual, around noon . . . too late to get a balloon ride, we figured. To be honest, we didn’t know why we left it so late – we were about to be seniors, it was lame to care about this stuff so much. It was too hot, too humid, too cheesy, all of that. But, really, we had a feeling it had to do with Carolyn. Every place we stepped contained a memory of her – whether real or imagined – and, sometimes, we found it hard to breathe.
As we drove into the parking lot, we could see the balloons, rising and falling, red and purple and green and blue. The band was playing – “Proud to be an American” or something real redneck like that – and we took our time as we walked into the field. We made our way to the balloons – we could eat and hang out and all that later, if we could bear it – and we saw Jessica’s dad in the distance with the balloon, red and white, inflating it. He waved us forward and, without thinking, we ran towards him, weaving in and out of the balloons, the baskets, the people. We kept our eyes on him and ran, maybe skipped, and we smiled – this was as it had always been: us together, ready to rise into the air, weightless.
We stepped into the basket and Mr Grady released the rope. We moved faster than usual, we said, there was a breeze that carried us quickly, carried us high. We looked down at the ground and saw it all change in front of us. People blurred into colors, the ground blurred into shapes. From where we were, the ground started to make sense, appear complete, under control. We were at a distance from it and could see only what
we needed to see. From here, we thought, if a car crashed, you wouldn’t hear it and, even if you did, it would look like a toy, it wouldn’t be real. From here, we couldn’t distinguish the adults from the children, the new buildings from the old, the pools from the ponds. We liked it up here, we knew this, to be at a remove from things, to be out of touch, out of control. We asked Mr Grady if we could stay up for a little bit longer. We wanted a little bit more, we told him, and he smiled. He said that it wasn’t possible. They’d be starting the light show soon. Couldn’t be in the sky for that.
We looked down again and followed the shapes, and instead of trying to identify places, people, buildings, we tried to imagine that it was something else entirely, our town. As we fell further from the sky, we closed our eyes, afraid to open them again. We saw Carolyn heading for the trees a year before, holding Shane Duggan’s hand. We imagined ourselves yelling to her, calling her close. But even in our dreams she couldn’t hear us: she walked behind the balloons, behind an oak tree, and out of our sight. We couldn’t reach her.
We felt the wind blow us from the side and we opened our eyes. We didn’t look at each other. We looked down and saw the balloons and the fair and the band. Our church and the country club and the pool. We saw our school, we saw Fifth Avenue, the Halls’ family farm, the Old Courthouse. We saw a map of Carolyn’s year, the year we had witnessed, had observed and recorded, to which we had not objected, laid out in front of us, like a grid. We looked at it and felt the tears form behind our eyes and we tried to blink them away. And then we looked up.
Acknowledgements
My colleagues at the Arts Council have become a sort of a family to me, and I am deeply grateful to work in an environment where creativity is fostered and encouraged. I am especially thankful to my colleagues Stephanie O’Callaghan and Seán MacCárthaigh, who read my work at an early stage and told me (well, insisted) that I keep going. All of my colleagues have been tireless cheerleaders, particularly Aoife Corbett, Maeve Whelan, Helen Meany, Anthony Glavin, Claire Doyle, David Parnell, Joe Stuart, Jennifer Lawless, Audrey Keane, Kate O’Donnell, Aoife Moynihan, Fionnuala Sweeney and Monica Corcoran.
I am eternally grateful to my wonderful, wonderful agent, Sarah Williams. I am grateful that you took a chance on me, grateful that you continue to give me the world’s best advice, grateful that you are unstintingly calm and patient and wise and very, very funny. Thank you, too, to Sophie Hicks, for reading my novel early on and giving it your very essential and meaningful stamp of approval. I am also indebted to Ed Victor, Nathalie Hallam, Rebecca Jones, Therese Coen and Morag O’Brien.
I am thankful to my course tutors at the Dublin Faber Academy, James Ryan and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and to my fellow writers on the course, especially Anne Learmont. Thank you also to Siobhán Parkinson, Elaina Ryan, Rachel Pierce and Faith O’Grady for giving needed encouragement. I owe thanks to many, many teachers and librarians who have deepened my love of reading and writing, especially Jeanne Stroh, John Glavin and Norma Tilden.
Emily Bazelon’s reporting on the Phoebe Prince case in Slate was of great assistance to me in researching this book, as was her tremendous book about bullying in the twenty-first century, Sticks and Stones.
At Bloomsbury, Helen Garnons-Williams has been the kind of champion a writer dreams of, and your wisdom, insight and kindness have made everything about this process a delight. Thank you also to Alexandra Pringle, Ellen Williams, Oliver Holden-Rea, Helen Flood, Elizabeth Woabank, David Foy and David Mann: every one of you have made me and my novel feel special and loved, and it’s hard to express just how much this means. I extend my gratitude to all at RepForce Ireland, particularly Louise Dobbin, Peter McIntyre, Cormac Kinsella and Bríd Ní Chuilinn. Any author who works with you is very, very lucky.
At St Martin’s Press, I am indebted to Elizabeth Beier. Every note you have given me has made this book better. I cannot thank you enough for believing in the novel and its voice; your enthusiasm and passion are infectious. Thank you, also, to Michelle Richter and Anya Lichtenstein for your efficiency, professionalism and thoughtfulness. I am grateful to Dori Weintrub and Ivan Lett for their savvy, skill and support. And I am indebted to Sally Richardson for allowing me into the St Martin’s Press family.
Thank you to John Boyne and Colum McCann for reading the book when it was in its infancy and for giving me the confidence to submit it to agents. Thank you to the great Roddy Doyle for reading it much later and giving me a badly needed boost of confidence. I am grateful to Paul Murray, Claire Kilroy and Chris Binchy for their light-hearted and more serious advice about this business of being a writer, and a parent.
I am grateful to have grown up in a house full of books, where reading was a central part of our lives. Thank you to my mother, Ann Dolan Bannan, and my father, William Bannan, for giving me a happy childhood (and adulthood!). In the fifth grade, my mother would read my 500 word themes and give me her notes. You were my first, and best, editor. To my sisters, Elizabeth Placencia and Kathleen Didio, I thank you for reading this before it was edited and telling me you thought it was good. And for being such amazing sisters. Thank you, too, to your families: Doug, Nolan and Margaret Didio and Rodrigo, Elena and Thomas Placencia. Thank you also to my cousin Hannah Fandel, who was kind enough to give me insightful notes about being a teenager in the South today.
I extend my thanks to my Irish family: William and Philomena Keegan; Vanessa, Pascal and Teia Marsh; Christian Keegan; Trish Bunyan and Gary Keegan; and Laurie, Derry, Hunter and Wilde Schneider. Never in the history of the world has there been a family more supportive of the arts and creativity. Artistic geniuses, form an orderly queue!
And, finally, but most importantly, I thank my endlessly brilliant, supportive and kind husband, Duncan Keegan, and my daughter, Niamh. The two of you make me want to do something that matters. Thank you for putting up with me, for making me happy and for making me laugh. You are my world. My life.
A Note on the Author
Sarah Bannan was born in 1978 in upstate New York. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2000 and then moved to Ireland, where she has lived ever since. She is the Head of Literature at the Irish Arts Council and lives in Dublin with her husband and daughter.
#Weightless
@sarahkeegs
First published in Great Britain 2015
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