North Fork (2 page)

She says she loves me and I believe her. It's not the kind of love you fantasize about from parents, the kind I've hated my mom for not giving me, but it's something. Aunt Trish's got my back. She couldn't have any kids of her own. She had a hysterectomy when she was pretty young because they said she was getting ovarian cancer. In some ways we're like sisters, only she's a lot older. She just doesn't have the resources. She's having a rough life herself. Like the car, for example. I think she'd let me use it, but it's all she's got. She needs it to get to work and if something happened to it, we'd both be screwed. I mean she doesn't even have insurance, so if she got a ticket, it would be a disaster. We live on the rez in an old HUD house but we're not Native. They just keep letting us live here for cheap rent even though my uncle, who is Native, hasn't stayed here for a long time. The house is in his name and I guess, legally, they're still married.

So I didn't get to tell Kristen about Brad–that's his name, Bradley Morgan Stanfield the third, Mister Mercer Island–and the scare he gave me out there by that ditch and that barren field. My night had turned out okay, and I was looking forward to her reaction. I kind of assumed her night would end well too, and she would have a story to tell me. Kristen likes hearing my stories. That's probably why we're friends; our lives are so different. I think it's cool how she asks a lot of questions and wants to hear every detail about some of the dumb-ass stuff my relatives pull. She seems amazed, like I'm living this exotic life, so sometimes I
play the story for its effect.

Her life seems exotic to me. I mean she lives in this cool house. It's huge and has a view of the bay. She has her own computer and a TV in her perfect girly room. They gave her a car when she first got her license. True, it was her mom's old Taurus, red, not the perfect color, but it's not that old, maybe five years, and it has a CD player and still smells new.

Brad and I stopped at a restaurant to talk more on the way home. That's why I was so late. He's really a pretty nice guy for a rich kid, and he'd had a rotten day. We probably won't become a thing or start going out, but we got to know each other a little.

I didn't sleep that night, and I don't think Aunt Trish did either. In the morning, I went to work dog-tired, wondering if Kristen had come home and where she had gone. This was really unlike her, so I was a little worried; I was worried even before I called Sterling, but I hadn't let it sink in. I thought about what had happened with Brad and how scared I was, and it made it easy to imagine disaster. I knew Sterling wouldn't think to call me, especially if she was okay, because to him my worry didn't count, and he probably thought I was in on whatever she was up to, so I would have to wait for her to get access to a phone which might take days, considering how much trouble she would be in. I assumed Monday at school would be our first chance to talk. I only wish.

I always did the homework. I'm pretty anal that way. That's what Natalie called it. She was always real, nothing fake about her at all. I was just getting to know Corey, just starting to crack open the “valves of my attention,” and the connection didn't have time to develop. The valve image makes me picture myself, or at least my soul, which is the essence of me, alone in this cement box like a big bathtub or a tomb, all cold, damp and drippy with a bunch of faucets on the ends of rusty pipes sticking through the walls. If you open most of them, the water that comes out will be freezing and make you so cold you want to die, but there's the possibility of warmth, so that miserable as you are in a dirty, concrete box, you have to try to make yourself feel better. I got warm water from Natalie's faucet. I got a little from Corey that was warm too, or I would have stayed away from him. But it wasn't enough.

You know how sometimes when you read, an idea just jumps out at you and you know it's true, or at least you recognize it as important even if it doesn't make complete sense at the moment, and it sticks with you? It isn't always reading that does it. It can be a song you hear, or a poem, or even just something in a magazine, but sometimes there will be these words, usually just a few lines that stick in your head. Well, it happened to me in English class not long after Christmas break, and it started this thing going that I couldn't let go of. It became the obsession that landed me here. I must not have wanted it to stop or I would have ended it. But I didn't.

It was a normal English class morning, nothing unusual
until it hit me. We had been reading poems that week by Emily Dickinson whom everyone thought was weird because she was a pretty alone kind of person. She wrote this one poem about the soul selecting its own society—choosing only one other soul to let in, then shutting everyone else out, shutting the “valves of her attention.” She was interesting because she kept writing even though she didn't get money for it or become famous, and her poems got me thinking, but it wasn't just Emily's words that set me in motion. There was also this guy named Walt Whitman, and some other things that happened.

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.

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.