“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 over the 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 out by 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 began to stay up late and sleep little, listening to bands I’d overheard Lindy talk about, and I hated this music. The lyrics were dark and without perspective, wrapped up in melodies that inevitably collapsed, self-aware, on themselves. Even as a kid I knew this. To get into her type of music was to sing along with a man on his deathbed. So that’s what I tried to do. I wrote poems about Lindy in red ink. I got an earring. I hit puberty.
All this to say that when Lindy and I emerged from that year, we were changed.
Lindy was now a brooding girl who roamed the halls of Perkins alone. Any friends that she did have were meek things who may as well have been shadows. She shunned bright colors, blue included, and wore only gray boxer shorts underneath her uniform at school. She rarely shaved her legs. She became increasingly obsessed with a band called Bauhaus that I was never sure how to pronounce and scribbled things like anarchy signs on her Chuck Taylor high-tops. She cut her hair to chin length and her bangs traced her soft face like sickles.
She became thin and, most said, bulimic. Rows of small pimples appeared on her chest.
This was a hard thing to watch.
But in the following year, when we were speaking again, when we were close, Lindy explained to me how all this had happened.
She said that therapy was to blame.
Lindy told me that her months in group counseling, something her parents insisted she attend, were the worst thing that could have happened to her. It was worse even than the way her father spied on her at all hours in the year that followed the crime, worse than the way she would see his car sitting inconspicuously in the corner of the movie theater parking lot as she bummed cigarettes off of random guys. It was worse than the sheepish way he would later act as if he hadn’t been spying at all, as if he didn’t know what she was talking about, when he cruised back around to pick her up at eleven. And it was even worse than the manner in which he eventually collapsed his remorse into hers, begging her to talk to him, and adding complicated locks on their doors.
Because what therapy did, she explained, was introduce her to a world of problems she never would have known about otherwise. The girl who cut herself; she was in her group. The anorexic. The bulimic. The nymphomaniac. They each offered rebellious possibilities to Lindy, which she explored. The girl in her group who’d watched her mother die in an automobile accident that she herself had caused. Now there was a look at depression, she said. The boy who was molested by his uncle. Good grief.
Ultimately, the scope of these ills made Piney Creek Road look obscene to Lindy, she said, the way the blossoms on our crepe myrtles bloomed. The lovely street was like an ignorant joke. Therapy had taught her this, and she wore the lesson all over her face.
So I took on the look of a troubled boy as well. I flipped my long bangs out of my eyes when adults approached me. I quit the soccer team, which I was actually good at and enjoyed, and started playing guitar instead because I thought Lindy might find it sexy. I smoked cigarettes, and later dope, in the Taco Bell parking lot on school nights. I rarely smiled.
But my image was papier-maché.
You could poke a hole right through me in those years and all you would see fall out were items from Lindy’s closet. No blood in me then. Only the one obsessed heart. I stood for nothing. I fought for nothing. Can’t you see?
I’m drawing myself as innocent here.
Don’t we all?