CHAPTER TWO
She watched the trees and houses zoom past. The summer was in its full heat, but within the air-conditioned car, Leah was comfortable and sleepy.
Her father was busy concentrating on the road. She picked up her paperback again, but was unable to concentrate as the car bumped and vibrated. Instead, she pulled out her headphones and turned on the music. It was slow, metallic, angry, and self-hateful.
Her mother was staying behind in Early Winter until the house was sold. That meant that she was going to spend some time alone with her father for a while.
The new town’s name was Hopeville. She had visited the place twice, but she knew very little about it.
As they reached their exit, Leah turned off her music and looked around. The trees were shorter here. The land was flatter, and the streets were more narrow. But somehow, it had its own beauty and charm that Early Winter did not have.
Looking up at the white split-level that they would soon be calling their home, Leah didn’t see how she would ever be able to appreciate it the same as she had her old house. But once she got inside, she felt immediately that she was home. She collapsed onto the bare hardwood floor, exhausted from a full day of traveling, and flailed her arms around. She was tempted to go to sleep right there in the living room.
A few weeks passed, and cool winds blew their way into town. In the first week in September, she started school. The monstrous stone schoolhouse was a looming, gigantic structure nestled in a forest of pines. Due to the recent building of a second high school in town, the old fixture was only half-occupied, which made it seem even larger.
Inside, the ceilings were high and it looked like a cathedral, with arched doorways and buttresses. The lighting was inadequate, for the square windows were too small and the electricity was poorly set up. The flickering lightbulbs reminded Leah of flickering candles at a wake.
On the first day of school, Leah covered her face in make-up more thickly than usual and donned an ankle-length dress with short sleeves and a subdued floral print. She covered her body in a layer of cologne and pinned her hair back on either side with a black barrette.
She made little friends. Not that she really cared, at this point. She decided that she was tired of trying to make impressions. She decided that she was going to be a “loner” and eat lunch every day in the library by herself. She proceeded to talk with a few people on a friendly basis on occasion, but the cycle that had begun in Early Winter soon continued.
“Hey, bitch!” a girl yelled. Her name was Stacey. She was “popular”—had tons of friends and always had groupies congregating around her.
Leah spun around. She looked weakly in Stacey’s direction, not wanting a confrontation.
“Hey, I’m talking to you! Don’t you have anything to say?”
Leah shook her head uncertainly. Stacey approached her, getting unsettlingly close. “I don’t want trouble,” Leah simply said.
“Yeah, well you’re going to get trouble if you don’t stay out of our way.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know what I mean, freak. You’re new here, aren’t you? Just stay out of our path, and we won’t fuck you up.”
Leah walked away.
They started to make fun of her. They teased and cajoled her. They followed her partway home after school in order to try and scare her. They, too, thought she was strange.
She had dark hair and wore mostly black clothing. She rarely smiled. She was overconfident and egotistical, they thought. She didn’t talk enough; she was too quiet. She didn’t go to parties and she didn’t hang out after school.
She spent her free hours writing poems and reading horror novels. She dreamed about using the gun, which was still in her possession, and going on a killing spree.
Her mother had just arrived. She couldn’t take this anymore. While the days were getting shorter, and the nights were getting cooler, she made a decision.
She called her friends from Early Winter and told them that she was going to run away.
“I’m coming back,” she said.
“How nice,” they said. “Well, we’ll see you when you get here.” They didn’t believe her; they thought she was just talking shit. She also told a couple of people from Hopeville. They, also, did not believe her.
She arranged for a cab. She cut class one day to walk into town to buy a train ticket.
On the morning she was supposed to leave, she kissed her parents and told them she had to go to school early to work on a project. She walked to the house where she had told the cabbie to meet her, but the cabbie didn’t show up. She didn’t know what to do.
In the coldness of early morning, her breath fogging in front of her face, she saw an office complex about two blocks away. She started walking towards it.
When she got there, the front door was open, and she peeked her head inside. A woman behind a desk said, “May I help you?”
Leah threw her hands to the side. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in exasperation. “I called a cab to come and pick me up to take me to the train station, but he hasn’t shown up. May I use your phone?”
“Go ahead,” the lady said.
Leah dialed quickly, then waited for someone to answer. But no one did. She then explained her situation to the receptionist, leaving out important gaps of information that might incriminate her. A woman in a pants suit, who had been listening to the conversation from behind her door, jumped out and spontaneously offered to give her a ride.
Leah felt relieved. Her train was scheduled to leave in less than half an hour, and the station was at least twenty minutes away.
On the way there, she lied constantly. Oh, she was just visiting in town. Oh, she was staying with her aunt and uncle. Oh, they had left early for work and couldn’t take her to the train station.
Leah thanked the woman and got out with her bookbag, which was stuffed with clothes instead of books. She rushed to the platform and hopped onto her train just in time.
She was starting to enjoy this lying thing. On the train trip to Early Winter, she engaged in a lively conversation with an elderly woman with a friendly face. “I’m a freshman in college,” she said. “I’m going back home for a week because I miss my parents.” What fun! The woman didn’t even know the difference.
She stepped off the train and headed for the town’s main street. Cars were buzzing along, and the street was alive with activity. In that moment, Leah felt the greatest rush of excitement and the biggest feeling of freedom that she had ever had in her life. She was here alone, and quite possibly, no one knew that she was here. She wanted to fall to the concrete and kiss the ground.
She wandered the streets for a couple of hours, and then decided to call Christie. She found out that her parents had discovered her missing and had been praying for her safe return. Again, Leah didn’t know what to do.
She was so close to freedom, but realistically, she didn’t have any money or any place to stay. She gave her friend the okay to tell her parents where she was, and ten minutes later, they picked her up and brought her to their house to stay the night. It had been a short rendezvous with freedom, but to Leah, it was worth it.
Her mother was in furious tears when she arrived to pick her up. They had the loudest, most passionate argument that they had ever had right there in her friend’s living room.
Her mother, Connie, dragged her back home by force. Leah felt disoriented and dazed as they made the five-hour drive back to Hopeville, Minnesota. She realized, as they were driving, that she had only missed a couple of days of school.
In the coolness of early Fall, Leah lay in the hammock in their backyard, looking up at the tops of the Ponderosa Pine trees. Serene, plump clouds were floating amidst a deep blue sky. Despite the growing tumult within the family, at that moment, Leah felt one of the greatest feelings of peace that she had ever had.
At school, they treated her differently. They didn’t make fun of her or tease her anymore. They weren’t any more friendly, either, but Leah was satisfied that she had, at least, gotten a little bit more respect.
She thought about Brendan on a constant basis, but by now she had little awareness of it because it was so automatic that it was practically subconscious.
She wrote him letters. Long, emotional outpourings. Every two weeks, she sent him one. Of course, she never got a reply. Sometimes she sent him letters; sometimes she sent other things—like pictures. He must have thought she was insane, but she didn’t care.
She turned to food to comfort her. She didn’t like to eat around other people; she considered it a highly personal activity. She hoarded food in her room, and ate when her parents weren’t home or weren’t looking. She didn’t gain weight, however, but amazingly retained her underweight figure.
One night, while her parents were at a concert, she looked in the cupboards for some crackers and stumbled upon some liquor bottles, instead. She pulled one out, opened the top, and sniffed it. She winced.
She had never been drunk in her life; and the only time she had ever had a taste of liquor was in the ninth grade, prior to her meeting with Brendan and her psychiatrist. Nevertheless, she decided to pour herself a glass. Taking just small amounts from each bottle, she mixed and matched her own custom-made drink.
It proved to be enough. She drank quickly and it burned going down. Sitting in front of the television downstairs in the den, she watched a Snoop Doggy Dog video, “Gin and Juice,” when it hit. She felt like she was swimming in water, and it was the best song she had ever heard in her life. The room swayed as she lifted her arms and rocked from side to side, dancing to the music, savoring this wonderful, new sensation.
She thought about calling her friends, but thought better of it. She was mindful of her state.
By the time her parents got home that night, she was in the bathroom, vomiting. Thankfully, they didn’t hear her. She told her mother that she was sick, and her mother made her some chicken broth and sent her to bed. Leah wobbled up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom.
In the middle of the night, she woke up famished. She reached for the chicken broth beside her bed, but it was cold and lumpy. She nearly vomited again.
In the morning, she had her first hangover. She wasn’t accustomed to feeling this terrible. But even through her sickness, she knew that she would drink again.
She didn’t do it every night; that would be too obvious. Her parents would surely see that alcohol had been taken from the bottles.
But every couple of weeks, she drained enough of the stinging liquid to make her feel dizzy and disconnected from the world.
When she was drunk, she didn’t care that she didn’t have any friends here. She felt alive; she felt free.
Outside, Leah had the presence of quiet courage and silent strength. She held her head high, spoke with intelligence, and was much more reserved than most of the girls her age. But inside, she was seething with hatred. When once her object of hostility was limited only to Brendan and a small group of his friends, now it spilled over to practically any person who dared cross her path in any kind of spiteful way. Before going to school in the morning, Leah would fill her thermos with liquor from the liquor cabinet. During her free periods, she would sit in the stairwell, sip her undiluted drink, and listen to her headphones as she glared at the students passing by. People had thought that she was egotistical; now, they were right. Leah felt a sense of unmatchable superiority towards the others—especially those who had once teased and made fun of her. She hated them with a passion, and once more, she began to have homicidal fantasies.
She would pin her hair up and use a hairnet so that no stray hairs would be left behind. She would shoplift a pair of shoes from the local Wal-mart, use them, then throw them in a distant dumpster. She would wipe her fingerprints from the bullets before she used them, and make sure to wear gloves.
She would use a silencer. She would walk to the victim’s house, break in through the bedroom window, and kill her while she slept.
While she sat, listened to music, and drank, she thought about the various considerations that would need to be made if she were to decide to finally use her gun.
Thoughts of Jeremy consumed her. He had been the only person in her life who had really understood her. They talked on the phone every night for hours, sharing their deepest, most personal thoughts. After Jeremy, Leah had never been able to find a friend that measured up to the love and understanding that he had given her.
He had never thought that she was strange. He had never once made fun of her, or made her feel like she was irrepairably different from the others. They shared a kinship that was never duplicated.
Leah had one friend in Hopeville. Her name was Camelia and she was a swimmer. When Leah first met her, she thought that she was homeless. Her hair was dirty and so were her clothes. She asked where she lived and she was vague about it.
They went to a restaurant downtown one day after school and ordered grilled cheese with tomato. Camelia asked her, “Do you like it here?”
Leah responded, “What’s not to like?”
Camelia had not picked up on the sarcasm. She didn’t have any other friends, but that suited Leah just fine. Every day, she was growing to hate the people of Hopeville more and more.
The summer was long and unusually hot. Leah stared out the window every day, refusing to go out and engage in some summer activity. She didn’t go out with friends, and lost touch with Camelia.
She stopped drinking for a few months. Instead, she involved herself in her poetry, and wrote two poems a day instead of one. As hot air blew in from her half-open window, Leah looked up and was surprised to see that the day was almost over. She had been writing all day, and then she realized that she had been writing all day every day that summer.
She continued writing Brendan letters every two weeks. None of them were threatening, but all of them had the undertones of quiet anger and desperation. How many years, she thought, would it take to get over the pain that he had caused her?
And she hated herself for not killing him. She hated herself for not having the courage to take what was rightfully hers.
Two weeks before her junior year, Leah was sixteen. She was walking outside in the darkness, taking a stroll around her neighborhood, when she realized her true feelings for Brendan. The stars stood out like brilliant lanterns in a velvety black sky. The warm breeze, which was considerably cooler than it had been during the day, brushed her hair back and kissed her cheeks. A dog was barking in the distance. On the nearby highway, the rush of cars sounded like a distant, roaring tide.
Leah loved him.
She started seeing him everywhere; in the mall, at the airport, in the grocery store buying papayas. She saw him from the back and was positive that it was him looking at a Tory Amos cd at the record store. She saw him from a distance, and there was no doubt in her mind that he had come all the way to Hopeville, and she was now seeing him. Each time, her heart stopped and her breath quickened. The emotional impact was powerful: afterwards, she would rush home, fall to her bed, and weep.
One time, it really was him. He was taking a train to Seattle and was stopping in Hopeville. She saw him from the back and immediately assumed that it was just one of her fantasies.
But when he turned around, her heart lurched. She stopped breathing. She could hear her heartbeat in her throat. She was frozen still for several moments, but then gathered the sense to run and hide.
Sure enough, it was him. He was walking and talking with his father.
She looked at him longingly as they turned a corner and disappeared.
Leah went home that night, and wrote a poem.
School started up again. Girls started making fun of her again, one in particular with a scrunched-up face and with an eternal expression that was a mixture of disgust and sarcasm. She fantasized about coming to her house, breaking into her room, putting the gun to her head, and killing her.
But she never did anything about it.
Leah was losing strength. Every day after school, she came home crying to her mother, who received her with surprise and confusion.
Connie didn’t know the whole story. She, like most mothers, thought only the best of her daughter, and assumed that Leah’s intentions were always pure.
She wanted to tell her mother about her homicidal and suicidal desires, but she knew she couldn’t. To do so would mean that she would never be able to fulfill any of her fantasies. Hope, for Leah, would be lost forever.
But at the same time, she knew she couldn’t, in reality, commit the crimes. Leah, at her most primal level, was a scared, shivering kitten. She wanted her many tortures to be avenged, but at the same time, she feared the consequences.
She was starting to worry about the gun in her closet.
When she was a senior in high school, she was just about resigned to the reality that she was never going to have friends in Hopeville.
But Camelia, whom she had forgotten about, sat down next to her at lunch one day and started talking with her. “You wanna cigarette?” she asked casually.
Leah was surprised. Camelia didn’t strike her as the type of girl to be rebellious. Plus, Leah had never smoked. She was seventeen and didn’t know how to inhale. Nevertheless, she agreed.
Camelia had long, blonde hair and plump cheeks. She didn’t smile very much, but when she did, it was enough to set any person at ease.
Leah started doing drugs. Her first high was a snort of cocaine that Camelia had slipped her in the bathroom once all the girls had left the stalls.
Almost immediately, she felt her heart pumping in a strong, steady rhythm as her skin began to tingle. She looked into the bathroom’s mirror as she was touching up her makeup, and saw the color rise to her pale, yellow cheeks.
The music was loud and her head was spinning. For an instant, she forgot where she was. But then she looked at the backs of her hands, which were planted palm-down against the floor, and remembered: she was at a school dance. The gymnasium was dark and multi-colored strobe lights were blinking. Leah and her friends had loaded themselves up on pot just before they had entered the scene together.
She was sweating. She felt a heavy force, like increased gravity, weighing her down to the floor. She knew that she would not be able to stand even if she tried.
Her friends surrounded her. As she squinted her eyes to look at them, they looked like they were having fun. They were dancing and laughing, apparently not as affected by the drug as she was.
She swept her gaze across the room and lifted a shaky hand to her face. She tried to stand but was unable to.
Candace came to her and extended her hands. “Come on, Leah! Don’t sit out!”
The beat of the music rocked her, invigorated her. She wanted to stay in this moment forever. Close her eyes and just savor it.
For the first time, she had friends. Lots of friends. On a constant basis, she was surrounded by peers. She went out every day, dropping in on various people’s houses, getting high, walking downtown. They did everything together, shared everything, and were like sisters and brothers.
Life was surreal at this point. At any given time she would suddenly jump outside of herself and become aware that she was somewhere entirely different than she had thought—kind of like a time warp.
She walked through life in a haze, grabbing pleasure at every opportunity. Now, at the dance, she was vaguely aware that she and her friends had put pinches of pot in the donut holes found at the buffet table before the dance.
She wiped the hair from her face and realized that she now had the energy to stand. She got up, a little shakily, and joined her friends.
Such was life.
She experimented with every drug that she could find. She went to school every day under the influence of something different, reveling in the various sensations that each of them gave her.
It was time to apply for college. Since her freshman year, her grades had been gradually lowering. But she still had well over a 3.0 GPA, and everyone predicted that she would get into a good school.
Leah didn’t look to the future at this point; she savored in the moment. She remained intoxicated as long and as often as she could. She was waiting to graduate and leave this treacherous place, and chemicals helped her in the process.
She showed up at parties, not to socialize with other kids, but to take advantage of the products. She hung around with Camelia’s crowd and smoked cigarettes with them behind the schoolhouse.
She was neglecting her work. She was taking the exact amount of credits she needed to graduate, but it didn’t even occur to her that she might fail one of her classes and not graduate until it was too late.
On the day of graduation, she asked her Calculus teacher if she had passed the class.
“You’ll find out in your report card,” he said.
She placed her hands on her hips. “Look,” she said. “I need to know if I’m going to be wearing the cap and gown, so I think you’d better tell me.”
She’d passed, but barely. That evening, she paraded with her class and with Camelia and got her high school diploma. Camelia’s crowd, who was sitting in the bleachers, cheered them on.
Afterwards, she got high.