Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (15 page)

We were allowed back onto campus. Craig backed my car up outside of Kendrick. He took a crate out of my hands to load it for me.

“You got in an accident, huh?” he said, his voice gentler than normal.

I looked at him blankly, having totally forgotten that I'd knocked out my headlight and gotten a shoddy repair job at the cheapest place in town.

“I'm sorry,” I said, panicked I was in trouble. “I got it fixed.”

“It's
okay, Sarah. Don't worry about it. We're just glad you're okay.”

I stood frozen, relieved and stunned. It was probably the nicest thing he'd ever said out loud to me. He had always been there in my life, but I had never felt close to him or had any sense that he saw me as his daughter. Now it hit me: he loved me and would have been sad if I had died. The thought had never occurred to me before. I needed love just then, and I was grateful for his kindness. But I was still so loyal to my dad that I couldn't really let Craig's caring touch me. And it didn't change the fact that my father hadn't called.

A
s soon as we got home, I wanted to be back at school. I was obsessed with the news coverage and made Mom buy the
Boston Globe
every day. I spread it on the floor in front of the wood stove, craving the fire's comfort, and looked at the picture of Wayne Lo in a Sick of It All T-shirt and handcuffs. In that moment, I wanted him to die. I read partway through the first headline, and then my tears became too thick for me to read anymore.

The story that was unfolding was damning and terrible. Wayne had received ammunition in the mail the day of the shooting. The package had been noticed in the mailroom because the return address belonged to a gun dealer. Wayne had a reputation on campus for being intolerant and hostile. This was clearly troubling, and the dean was called. Apparently, after some administrative discussions and concerns that it would be illegal to tamper with the mail, Wayne was allowed to pick up his package. An RD went to his dorm room, but Wayne wouldn't open the package in front of her. Quoting the school procedures catalog and claiming they needed two RDs to search his room, he wouldn't let her proceed further. Wayne apparently also spoke to the dean about the package; he showed him an empty ammo case and some gun parts, and he claimed it was a Christmas present for his dad. Then Wayne took a cab to a nearby town, used his Montana ID to
prove he was eighteen, and walked out of the store with an SKS assault rifle. He brought the gun back to his room and modified it to take more of the hundreds of rounds of ammunition he'd received in the mail that day. During this time, one of Wayne's friends called in an anonymous tip saying Wayne had a gun and had said he was going to shoot the Kendrick RDs. Instead of intervening with Wayne immediately, the school let him attend a dorm meeting I'd been at, as had Galen. Wayne was then allowed to go back to his room, unsupervised. Meanwhile, the other adults in charge helped the Kendrick RDs evacuate with their small children, which was why, when Wayne started shooting, there were no adults in our dorm.

G
alen's funeral was impossible, but at least it was comforting to be around his family and my Simon's Rock friends, who I was certain were the only ones who would ever understand. Then, it was back home to Maine and the real grief descended.

My dad and I spoke around the holidays, but he didn't get it: what had happened or what it meant. He hadn't been paying attention to how much I'd loved Simon's Rock. I wanted him to do something to make me feel safe. He did not. He didn't ask about the shooting, and when I brought it up, he barely seemed to register what I was saying. I felt the opposite of what I had with Craig, as if my dad would not have cared if I'd been shot and killed, as if he didn't love me. He said he would visit me during my vacation, but I didn't really believe him, and—true to form—he didn't follow through.

I was desperate to get back to school and be with my friends. But I was afraid to be back on campus. I couldn't imagine driving past the guard shack, going into the library where Galen's body had fallen, seeing bullet holes inside Kendrick.

The RAs returned early to attend a two-day crisis management training led by a woman who was brought in when airplanes crashed. We were given a fat manual written by the National Organization for
Victim Assistance with the title “Managing the Trauma of Crisis.” As far as we were concerned, it was total bullshit.

It felt spooky to be on campus, and being one of the only people in Kendrick that night felt like sleeping on a ghost ship. I locked my door but knew that wouldn't deter phantoms. I had dreamed about Galen right after he died, and I wanted him to come back, but I was also afraid. My new room looked out over the dining hall. I lay awake, feeling like the scene of Wayne surrendering was playing on an endless loop outside the window.

W
ayne's trial lasted a month. His lawyers claimed several different psychological explanations, including that he'd been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, pointing to passages from Revelations he'd copied out and hung on his wall. It was hard to picture this happening in my dorm, impossible to imagine a scenario in which one of my fellow students behaved like this. I wondered for a moment whether he was, in fact, crazy. But none of us could really believe it. The court-appointed psychiatrist who diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder seemed to have it right.

My dark secret was that as much as I hated Wayne, I also felt guilty. I knew we hadn't been nice to him. I couldn't help but feel we should have known better after we'd all absorbed so much meanness in our previous lives. We'd helped to create the monster in our midst. But we didn't deserve to die for this. I'd been raised by liberal parents and was vocal about my liberal beliefs, but they ended with Wayne. When he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, I was deeply relieved. I didn't care if he could be rehabilitated; I didn't want him to have the opportunity to enjoy his life.

I
n the wake of the shooting, things got dark. The boys in the freshman class turned to cough syrup. These weren't the happy hallucinations
of our freshman-year cavorts in the Labyrinth. One of my guy friends bumped against a corner in the student union, again and again, like a windup toy that had lost its way. We tried to round him up before he got busted. My kids needed me more than ever, but I had less and less to give.

I started drinking again. My favorite destination was an upperclassman's off-campus house, where Beth and Claire and our friends snuck away to get drunk. When I had tried to be good, it had all gone bad, so why even try?

As spring dawned, Matt shaved his eyebrows, an outward signal that he was having a hard time coping. He went home at spring break, and it was unclear whether or not he would return. He'd repeatedly asked me to move to Tennessee and marry him, even though I'd just laughed and said I couldn't get married at seventeen. I felt incredibly guilty that I couldn't give him even a little bit of everything he wanted from me.

None of us had words for what we needed, or the pain we felt, and so we drank, and we rubbed one another raw with our frustrations, our crushes, our competitions, our need to always, always, always be together, and our irritation that none of it was helping.

Graduation day arrived. Due to the enormity of our loss that year, Senator Ted Kennedy had agreed to speak. The Secret Service men scattered throughout campus gave everything a strange, dark vibe that didn't seem entirely at odds with the mood that lurked beneath the festive graduation ceremony. Grammy came, with Mom and Craig and Andrew. My dad didn't even send a card.

Craig once again backed my car up to the bridge that led to Kendrick. It was all over. The best place I'd ever experienced was also the place where the worst thing I'd ever experienced had happened. I couldn't imagine how anyplace else could compare. But I'd decided to transfer to Bard for my final two years and was eager for a new start.

A summer at home in Maine certainly wasn't going to be the answer. Nothing had any flavor or color. I worked as many shifts as
I could pick up at the Anchor Inn and got myself down to Portland as much as I could, but even that seemed flat and dull now. I didn't just want something to happen. I wanted the same thrill I'd found at Simon's Rock: the inflamed conversations and hours of perpetual motion jokes it was possible to have with truly brilliant, weird, damaged people, my people.

I was at least grateful for the relative lack of tension around the house, especially compared to the previous summer. Mom and Craig had both been supportive and kind in the aftermath of the shooting, which I appreciated. Even more than that, my mom especially got all that had been lost, not just the lives but also the miracle of this oasis we had found. I was still fiercely independent and always eager to run off to the next adventure, and with Andrew still only seven, I continued to feel that the three of them formed a complete family without me. But after the year I'd had, a part of me just wanted to stay at home forever, where it was safe. And so I was glad for these few months when I didn't have any choice but to be there, during which the impending unknown was momentarily delayed.

B
y the time I drove down to Bard at the end of the summer, I was cautiously optimistic. Through a paperwork snafu, Bard had assigned me a Simon's Rock friend, Beth, as a roommate. Maybe I actually could have broader creative horizons in a new place that wasn't shadowed by the shooting, but with friends who understood what I'd been through. I felt good about this new stage of my life. That lasted for about a day.

I was entering my junior year of college as a seventeen-year-old kid who had survived a school shooting nine months earlier and had received only the most cursory counseling for that trauma. I mostly dealt by smoking as many cigarettes as I could in a day and drinking as much as possible at night. The school was populated with brilliant, artistic kids, many of whom would have been a lot cooler if
they hadn't been obsessed with acting like we were living in the East Village.

Leaving my room always felt fraught. I was shy. My skin was bad. I didn't feel like my clothes or my comebacks were right. I didn't want to care, but I did. When I crossed the quad, I felt self-conscious, and I hurried with my head down, smoking, trying to act hard even though I felt anything but. I still adored conversation as much as ever, the joy of landing the perfect zinging remark, and I sometimes rallied and stormed the talk at a meal or party, loving how everyone laughed and got stirred up by an idea I threw out. But, like the revelry of a perfect buzz, I could only keep it up for so long.

My real savior at Bard was my classes. My fall semester writing class was with a New Yorker named Peter Sourian. He took a shine to my writing and me, and this small kindness was a lifeline. He always started each workshop by reading the day's story because he believed it was helpful for us to hear our work read aloud by someone else. The first time I was critiqued, he was a few lines into my story when he paused.

“You were read to a lot as a child, weren't you?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Why?”

“I can tell by your love of language.”

It was one of the first times I'd encountered the idea of “being a writer” as an inherent talent made up of qualities I might naturally possess or be able to cultivate.

Sitting at one of the round polished tables in the arts building, the autumn leaves shaking free of the trees outside as we discussed fiction and literature, I was happy.

W
hen we returned to school after the Christmas holidays, Beth and I moved into an insanely great room in Manor House. It had a small antechamber in which we kept our desks, and a short door that led out to a turreted balcony overlooking a vast field, the river somewhere down below. It felt full of possibility, and I loved the room deeply.

Not long into the semester, Claire showed up. She and her boyfriend had just split. She was already breakup skinny, and she seemed to get smaller even though we smuggled her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches out of the dining hall several times a day. For the next few weeks, she slept on the narrow space of floor in between our twin beds. Eventually, she got a job near campus and moved in with a Simon's Rock friend.

Despite her troubles, Claire was still my source for much that was cool. She made me mix tapes featuring riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. She was the person who made me a tape of Liz Phair's
Exile in Guyville,
which was like my journal but witty and badass. That year she gave me another gray Memorex tape, marked with a band's name and album title, but no song listings; another installment in our ongoing attempt to understand love. It was the tale of a relationship coming apart, confessional and dark and sexy. The male singer's tone was deep and knowing and said as much as his lyrics. I was smitten and listened to the tape again and again, his voice leaking into my bloodstream, his words admitting to dark secrets of the male psyche I'd first gotten a glimpse of through my dad. It was a relief to hear them spoken out loud.

I had become deeply obsessed with Courtney Love and her husband, Kurt Cobain, and the music of Hole and Nirvana, as well as their whole aesthetic and philosophy and love story. I collected every article, photo, musical recording. I dreamed about them, loved them. I was in our room in Manor in early April when I heard Kurt Cobain's body had been found with a shotgun nearby. Kurt was one of the matchless ones. He was just like us, but he was also so much better than us. He was that rare doting dad, that courageous artist who'd made something beautiful from darkness. He was exceptional, too exceptional in the end. And now he'd left me, too.

My own dad had started writing to me again. But for once, his letters fell flat. He still didn't ever really acknowledge the shooting. His incessant desire to make plans with me without any specific ­follow-through was beginning to wear thin. In the past, there had been
moments when he had paused long enough, in his letters, or on the phone, to ask me how I was. Those moments were fewer and farther between now. After everything that had happened since our fight in the parking lot, it was hard to imagine catching up.