to get under way. She was barefoot, Lindy, she wore a dark T-shirt over her uniform, and, my God, she was already gone from me then. From all of us.
“Is it true that you’re the one who told?” she asked me.
I didn’t say anything.
“How did you know?” she asked me. “How did you know about that?”
This was an odd question to me.
“Your parents,” I told her. “The police. Everybody knows.”
Lindy looked crushed.
What did she think her parents had been doing, I wondered, in the days they went door to door with the cops? Why did she think our mothers brought all that food to her house as if someone had died? I didn’t understand it. After all, this was a girl who got ill overthe death of astronauts. Couldn’t she feel the mourning in her own neighborhood? Or, by this time, nearly two months after the crime, had she just hoped we’d all forgotten?
I didn’t get the chance to ask her. Lindy turned and ran away.
She did not speak to me again for a year.
In that year, Lindy tried on different personalities, all of them false and doomed. She began by taking a strange pride in her appearance, as if the secret had never gotten out, and started running around with an elite crowd. She wore large bows in her hair at school and jingly bracelets on her wrists. She sidled up to the most coveted virgins and laughed cattily at any younger boys that walked by. When this did not work, and the virgins crucified her, she quit the track team and grew dark. She listened to the heavy and slow music that older kids listened to, The Cure, Joy Division, and she wore black eyeliner to school. If you saw her away from Perkins in those days it was hanging around in dark places like the abandoned and unfinished dorms of Jimmy Swaggart’s disgraced church in Baton Rouge, where we all knew not to go, or maybe hovering on the outskirts of the movie theater, chatting with older boys in combat boots who had no business being there.
None of these disguises suited her.
But in my guilt, in my love, I followed these personalities, too.
I got my mom to take me to a high-end clothing store for Christmas, when Lindy was still in her bows. I grew furious when my mom tried to buy me knockoff Polo shirts and discounted shoes, as if she were out to sabotage me. I became nervous and self-conscious and spent days trying to tie the leather laces of my Timberland loafers in a manner called “the beehive,” which I had seen Michael Tuminello, the leader of the Perkins School preps, do. On weekends I stood outby the mailbox in my new pastel getups. I walked up and down Piney Creek Road and whistled, hoping Lindy might see me through her window.
And then, when Lindy went dark, so did I, shunning the expensive apparel my mother had bought for me. Instead I dragged her around to record shops and thrift stores. I got her to buy me skull rings, incense, and black T-shirts with band names I’d seen displayed in the patches on Lindy’s schoolbag. She worried about this, I know, but she did not deny me.
Yet my desire to catch Lindy’s eye grew so consuming that I began hating myself and my suburban appearance, as if this was to blame for nearly everything. After a while I even grew to hate my own curly hair, as the rockers Lindy liked all had straight hair, often cut in dramatic angles and gelled. So I slept in baseball caps to straighten my hair out. I used a hot iron to style my bangs. I shaved the sides of my head.
At the height of this period I began to get in minor troubles at school. I stuffed paper towels in the urinals and flooded the bathrooms. I wrote graffiti in Magic Marker on the lockers. Some part of me hoped that if I kept this up long enough Lindy and I might be sentenced to the same session of detention after school, where if nothing else we would be forced to speak to each other in the ridiculous roundtable confessional the teachers made us do. Yet this never happened, and Lindy was able to avoid me completely.
I therefore
“Is it true that you’re the one who told?” she asked me.
I didn’t say anything.
“How did you know?” she asked me. “How did you know about that?”
This was an odd question to me.
“Your parents,” I told her. “The police. Everybody knows.”
Lindy looked crushed.
What did she think her parents had been doing, I wondered, in the days they went door to door with the cops? Why did she think our mothers brought all that food to her house as if someone had died? I didn’t understand it. After all, this was a girl who got ill overthe death of astronauts. Couldn’t she feel the mourning in her own neighborhood? Or, by this time, nearly two months after the crime, had she just hoped we’d all forgotten?
I didn’t get the chance to ask her. Lindy turned and ran away.
She did not speak to me again for a year.
In that year, Lindy tried on different personalities, all of them false and doomed. She began by taking a strange pride in her appearance, as if the secret had never gotten out, and started running around with an elite crowd. She wore large bows in her hair at school and jingly bracelets on her wrists. She sidled up to the most coveted virgins and laughed cattily at any younger boys that walked by. When this did not work, and the virgins crucified her, she quit the track team and grew dark. She listened to the heavy and slow music that older kids listened to, The Cure, Joy Division, and she wore black eyeliner to school. If you saw her away from Perkins in those days it was hanging around in dark places like the abandoned and unfinished dorms of Jimmy Swaggart’s disgraced church in Baton Rouge, where we all knew not to go, or maybe hovering on the outskirts of the movie theater, chatting with older boys in combat boots who had no business being there.
None of these disguises suited her.
But in my guilt, in my love, I followed these personalities, too.
I got my mom to take me to a high-end clothing store for Christmas, when Lindy was still in her bows. I grew furious when my mom tried to buy me knockoff Polo shirts and discounted shoes, as if she were out to sabotage me. I became nervous and self-conscious and spent days trying to tie the leather laces of my Timberland loafers in a manner called “the beehive,” which I had seen Michael Tuminello, the leader of the Perkins School preps, do. On weekends I stood outby the mailbox in my new pastel getups. I walked up and down Piney Creek Road and whistled, hoping Lindy might see me through her window.
And then, when Lindy went dark, so did I, shunning the expensive apparel my mother had bought for me. Instead I dragged her around to record shops and thrift stores. I got her to buy me skull rings, incense, and black T-shirts with band names I’d seen displayed in the patches on Lindy’s schoolbag. She worried about this, I know, but she did not deny me.
Yet my desire to catch Lindy’s eye grew so consuming that I began hating myself and my suburban appearance, as if this was to blame for nearly everything. After a while I even grew to hate my own curly hair, as the rockers Lindy liked all had straight hair, often cut in dramatic angles and gelled. So I slept in baseball caps to straighten my hair out. I used a hot iron to style my bangs. I shaved the sides of my head.
At the height of this period I began to get in minor troubles at school. I stuffed paper towels in the urinals and flooded the bathrooms. I wrote graffiti in Magic Marker on the lockers. Some part of me hoped that if I kept this up long enough Lindy and I might be sentenced to the same session of detention after school, where if nothing else we would be forced to speak to each other in the ridiculous roundtable confessional the teachers made us do. Yet this never happened, and Lindy was able to avoid me completely.
I therefore
Similar Books
