Whitman’s poem was called “There was a Child Went Forth,” and I had read it the night before even though I know half the people in the class don’t do the reading, but it was assigned, so I had to. Smith asked a few questions about it just to see how much of it we got, and I have to admit, it pretty much went right past me. It seemed like a meaningless string of words, and when I got to the end I was clueless, so when Smith asked if anyone wanted to try and explain it, I didn’t raise my hand.
He read it once through, and it really helped to hear it. I started to see images of this kid learning more about the world, experiencing farm animals, water, mean kids, drunks. Then there were these lines:
Affection that will not be gainsaid, the sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious whither and how
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
It’s about how you question reality. How sometimes you wonder if anything is real. It wasn’t like this was a new idea to me, but I think it made me realize just how much I felt that way, like I was dreaming my life and none of it was really happening. Hearing Smith read it out of a textbook right there in school, written more than a hundred years ago by this famous guy, freed me to let the feeling come to the front of my head. It made me understand a little better about gay people, and how living your whole life pretending to be different from what you are makes you crazy, and if you don’t get too depressed and do something fatal, eventually you might get brave enough just to be yourself.
That’s what happened to me. I’m not gay, but I’ve been faking my life big time. That passage in that poem made me realize that the reason I felt so bad was that my life was mostly a big lie, and it had became too difficult to live it, even though it was all I knew how to do, all I’d ever done. After that morning, it kept getting harder to go through the motions.
Natalie
That little weasel! Corey! Goddamn him! The image I get in my head of him doing that to Kristen makes me want to throw up. Jesus! I know he did it. When she started talking to him at school, I knew he would be trouble, but not like this. Shit! Shit! Shit!
The cops were waiting at my house when I got home from work Saturday afternoon. They still acted pretty clueless, like they didn’t know yet what really happened to Kristen even though Corey was already in jail, and they came on to me like they thought she ran away or something. Since I was the last to see her, they grilled me pretty hard. The cops pretend to be nice, but it’s fake. They’re trying to trap you in a lie and you’d better have your story straight. I had to tell them about going with Brad, but I left out a lot, and I had to give them his cell number because I told Kristen’s stepdad I had it and that we were old friends and of course he’d passed every detail on to them. I knew they would grill Brad too, so I had to call and fill him in (which he was cool about, considering how stressful the day we met had already been for him) before they surprised him with a lot of questions.
While the cops were still talking with me, one of them got a call about Kristen’s car being found in the parking lot at the mall near the theaters. They were pretty tight-lipped, which is their job, I guess, and I think they only let me know about the car to see if it would make me open up and say something I was holding back.
Jesus, if I knew, I would tell them. I was worried sick. I’m still sick only it’s gone beyond worry. Then I just wanted to know where she was, probably a lot more than they did. I hadn’t let myself imagine the worst yet, at least not in a way that stuck. Now I have this awful feeling because I can imagine Corey doing it, I mean all of it, hurting her, killing her and everything, and I can’t shake the pictures in my head of her body all pale and waxy-dead, buried like you see in the movies, in some shallow grave in the woods or tied to a weight at the bottom of the river or out in the bay. He had her car, so her body could be anywhere.
I don’t know what she saw in him. He’s a goddamn weasel loser. I’ve seen him be nice like you’d almost believe it, and he’s smart enough to be dangerous. The core is rotten. He’s an asshole and I’ll never forgive him. When Kristen started talking to him I warned her about him, but I didn’t tell her why I hate him, because I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Trust me, Natalie,” she said, “He’s not that bad. You usually don’t judge people.”
It’s true, people misjudge me, so I try to be fair. Kristen didn’t judge me. That’s why we’re friends, but her parents still do—judge me, I mean. Usually I can win people over if I want to bad enough. I’ve made mistakes too, but I really did learn from them, and changed. I didn’t tell Kristen why I hate him, because I really am ashamed and I don’t like to remember. She didn’t live around here then. I’m sure she’s heard about it by now anyway. There aren’t any secrets around this place. Maybe she didn’t hear until after she got to know me. She never brought it up, so I never said anything. But he was part of it, and I can’t forgive him.
Okay, so remember how I said there was this incident and Aunt Trish and I had a big blowout about it? The blowout itself didn’t straighten me out. It was the incident, and it’s really embarrassing to talk about, but it made me think a lot, and it involves Corey, so I’ll tell you, but I won’t get graphic or anything.
I developed kind of young and the older boys started paying attention to me even before I was in high school. Since I was sort of unsupervised and pretty much on my own, I went to parties and there was this guy who’s graduated now, but he was one of the cool juniors at the time, and I had a crush on him. Because of my mom, I’ve had to think about drinking a lot, and now I don’t do it much, but back then I was still testing it out, and sometimes I thought that because my mom is the way she is, I was just doomed to becoming like her, and anyway I was drinking that night at this party. I was a freshman and this guy who I thought was way cool was feeding me hard lemonade and treating me like I was special and like he really liked me, and we ended up in one of the bedrooms, and that goddamn Corey was in the closet with a video camera. I found out later it was all a set-up, that they had made a bet on it.
What happened was awful enough, but what saved me from something that could have been a whole lot worse was that I wasn’t completely blotto, and Corey had drunk enough to be unsteady. While I was getting myself back together afterwards, I heard this noise from the closet like someone’s in there, and the door, which was cracked, came open more, so I looked inside, and there’s Corey, camera in hand. I went fucking ballistic. I mean I completely lost it. I started screaming at Corey, expecting the asshole I’d been on the bed with to join in and beat the shit out of him or something. I didn’t know the whole sorry story yet.
I used every swear word I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t nearly enough. I grabbed the camera and threw it at Corey. He ducked and it missed and bounced off the doorjamb, then fell to the floor, broken with the tape holder popped open. I had the presence of mind to take the tape out and stomp on it and I kept screaming at Corey and tried to kick him in the balls, and the bastard who fucked me was just sitting on the bed trying to act all innocent, but he couldn’t keep himself from laughing, so I screamed at him too and threw the ruined camera at him, then broke down crying and picked up the smashed tape and left.
It was a pretty traumatic experience and it changed me. The sex wasn’t my first time or anything, so that wasn’t the main part of the trauma. I’d walked in on my mom a couple of times when I was little and Trish has guys over sometimes, so it’s not like I think sex has this giant significance. And it didn’t make me hate guys in general or anything like that. I got suckered bad, and I hated the people who did it, but only them.
The traumatic part was the way I felt used and humiliated, fucking lied to. I mean I felt small and hurt and pissed-off, and I decided I never wanted to feel that way again. When she calmed down after the big fight we had, Aunt Trish was great about it. She let me talk it all
out and helped me get over feeling like a slut, like she really understood because she’d had something humiliating happen to her too, only she never came out and told me any details. She helped me try to figure out what to do to move on. That was when I started to believe she loves me. It did change the way I look at sex, and I don’t sleep around anymore. In fact, I haven’t done it since then, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t if the right situation came up and I trusted the guy.
Anyway, that’s why I already hated Corey and thought he was a slime-ball before any of this happened. And maybe he didn’t kill Kristen, and I hope he didn’t because I miss her and don’t want her to be dead, though it’s hard to believe she’s not since I think he’s capable of it and things rarely turn out better than they seem. After all, this is the land of serial sex killers, like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway. I know she always stopped and gave him a ride when she saw him on the road, even late at night. She wouldn’t have hesitated to go out there. I know she walked up Sugarloaf Mountain with him, but at least that was in the daytime, and a lot of people go there, so he probably thought it was too risky to do it then. It’s just plain creepy that he had all that stuff by the river and would slink around out there alone in the night, plotting.
Corey
She had this perfect image. I just realized they’ve got me doing it, talking about Kristen in the past tense, as though it’s true that she’s gone. And it’s confusing because more than anything, I want her to be alive. The odds are always against what you really want happening, so I find it easier to believe bad stuff. But it makes me feel like I’ve betrayed her somehow.
She has this perfect image. She’s way too perfect for me, and I couldn’t believe it when she started talking to me in English class. I mean none of those girls ever talk to me. It’s like I’ve got loser stamped on my forehead. It’s not that I’m ugly or anything, or at least I don’t think I am, though I’m really short, but they avoid me like poison and when I ended up sitting behind her, I expected her to ignore me, and she did at first.
She’s tall, at least compared to me. It made it strange when she started waiting for me and walking out of class with me. I feel funny about being short anyway, but walking next to her and being eye level with her shoulder and her being so damn perfect and beautiful made me really want to disappear, but she was too nice. I mean she made me feel like what I said meant something and I was worth something, so I had to act like I was.
It was Smith who got it started. He’s our English teacher and he makes us write stuff in a notebook all the time. Besides what we write in class, over the year, we have to write an eighty-page journal about our lives, about the people, places or events that made us who we are. That’s part of why I’m writing this; at least that’s where I got the idea. We can write it any way we want, and I hope Smith will read it, even though passing English seems pretty pointless now, but I’m writing it like a memoir to tell my side of the story in case it matters to anyone.
In class Smith makes us write our thoughts about some idea or question he puts on the board, always heavy, like you would actually want to think about that stuff when you’re still trying to wake up. There’s five or six people, girls and guys, who sit to the right of me. They straggle in late, smelling of pot, and when I’m thinking about what to write I imagine being one of them, trying to sort through and find words to make sense out of a statement like, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I couldn’t even start.
This one was about truth. “How do you determine truth?” It had a connection to what we were studying that I could sort of see. Smith said the guys we were reading in our textbook were a bunch of outlaws who wanted to overthrow the king. They thought they were right and the king was wrong and the stuff they wrote was them trying to prove that the way they saw the world was the truth. Kind of like me now. I don’t want to overthrow the king, just my stepdad, and I sure seem to live in a different reality than the one the cops live in.
Until now, I wouldn’t have tried very hard to persuade anyone that I was more right than they are because I hate having someone else’s bull stuffed down my throat. I just want to be left alone, only now they think I killed her, and when I pull back and look, it doesn’t surprise me a whole lot. When I was with her I didn’t feel much need to prove anything, but now I sure as hell need someone to see things my way.
So that morning, the morning I learned she knew I existed, I’m sitting behind her. I haven’t talked to her at all, and to me she’s Miss Perfect with this squeaky clean, 4.0 GPA life, and I can see over her shoulder that she’s got nearly a full page before I get anything down. Her clean, girly, lotion smell mixed with the pot smell from the stoners is distracting, and even though I hadn’t smoked anything, I can’t think of what to say. When she started on the second page, I had to do something. Here’s what I wrote:
“What is truth? Most of the time life feels like a bad dream that I can’t wake up from. Is that reality, or is Kristen’s perfect life more real? I suppose what we all do is let our experience guide us. That Patrick guy in the book said that’s what he did. Hell, I don’t even know if this desk is real or if this assignment is all a dream. Are you real, Mr. Smith, or did I make you up? Was it real when I was a kid and my dad would come home drunk and my mom would scream at him? When I was ten and she took us camping at Deception Pass and I got up to pee and she was moaning in the tent at the next campsite with the asshole who is now my stepdad, was that real? How do we know what’s true? You tell me.”
We don’t have to hand in our notebook right away, and we can put the stuff we write in class in a special section in our journal. Mr. Smith collects them about once a month. I wonder if he actually reads them. After we write for five or ten minutes, he sits up there on that stool and makes us talk about it. Kristen nearly always has something to say.
“It’s like the scientific method,” she said. “You form a hypothesis, then you test it, and if it works, it becomes a theory. If the theory holds and can’t be proven wrong, it becomes a law, like gravity.”
“What’s a hypothesis?” Smith always makes us define the words. He’ll make someone tell him what a theory is and what a law is. Before the “Give me liberty or give me death” guys, we read this play about the Salem witch trials where they hung a bunch of people and a couple of dogs because some girls lied about dancing in the woods, which was against the rules. People were greedy and had things to hide and they believed in the devil and that if you signed his book you could send your spirit out to hurt people. Smith brings up the trials.
“What was missing in the witch trials?” This was a test question. He calls on one of the stoners and actually gets the answer.
“Evidence.”
“What’s evidence?”
He calls on me even though I don’t have my hand up. I say, “Proof.”
“Explain what you mean.”
“You know, proof, facts, something you experience. Witnesses, maybe”
“In the play, Goody Putnam experiences the death of her babies, and the court experiences the girls bearing witness to Mary Warren’s spirit tormenting them in the form of a yellow bird. Did that prove the accused were witches? Are there witches? Was there a yellow bird? How could you prove your answer? The play was about people who had real lives and they experienced being hanged by their government for the crime of witchcraft. Does that make witches real?”
Kristen says, “They were superstitious and scared.”
“Would they have agreed with that? What causes people—you, for example—to make the leap into accepting something as truth?”
“You have to be able to test it,” Kristen says.
Smith comes back with, “What about things you can’t test for yourself? Do we have to test everything?”
“You just go with the way you’ve been brought up.” This comes from a girl in the front row, a cheerleader who gets good grades and is on the ASB with Kristen.
“Do me a favor, Leslie,” says S
mith. “Go back by the door and flip that little plastic switch.”
She does it. The lights go out and the room is dark except for the light coming through the Venetian blinds that cover the single window.
Smith: “What just happened?”
Someone says, “She turned off the lights.” The stoners think that’s funny and laugh.
Smith: “So what made the lights go out?”
Someone from the class: “She flipped the switch.”
Smith: “True, but what really happened?”
Me: “Moving the switch opened the circuit, cutting off the flow of electricity to the lights.”
Smith: “Are you sure? She might be a witch who just sent her spirit into the wall and made it get dark.”
I’ve helped my cousin work on cars enough and paid enough attention in science class to know how an electrical circuit works. In fact, he helped me wire a parallel circuit and a series circuit on a board for the middle school science fair. I say, “It’s electrons flowing through a conductor from a generator that excites some gas in those light tubes.”
“Prove it. I want evidence. Have you ever seen an electron?”
Jake the farm boy hollers out, “No, but I pissed on an electric fence once, so I believe in them.” Everyone laughs.
“Witches!” says Smith. Then he says, “Okay, maybe it’s not witches, but the explanation for electricity is not something that you can easily witness. We witness and experience the results. They are predictable and repeatable so we accept the explanation as truth, but each of us didn’t have to do all of the experiments, follow all the steps, experience the process. We accept a lot of what we consider truth on faith, out of trust in sources that we consider to be authorities, like teachers, our parents, the government, because it helps make our lives easier, more predictable, and we only raise questions when something goes wrong, like when the government arrests our family members as witches, or taxes us too heavily. Then we have to reevaluate what we consider truth.”
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