OUR HOUSE GREW CHAOTIC; not all houses are built to protect the people inside them. For a season we lived with my father in San Luis Obispo again, weighing our options. I was old enough to get an allowance—a quarter—which I spent on two-cent candies and packages of stickers or trading cards. Wacky Packages were new and hot. Any boy whose bike didn’t sport several stickers was out of touch.
Gage even had the big poster, the one you could get by saving up twelve wrappers and sending in two dollars; I admired it the first time I saw it after moving back to town.
“I know,” he said, “but they had something even cooler than Wacky Packages a while ago. Check it out.” He dug around in a bulging box of old toys and Super Balls until he found a repurposed Band-Aid tin. Inside were cards with scenes from horror movies—vampires, mad scientists—captioned by Borscht Belt one-liners (“Look Ma, no fillings,” a vampire’s mouth agape, her fangs dripping blood). There was a woozy gravity in the moment. I’d been away for almost two years, but we were still the same boys who used to play “Frankenstein’s Revenge” in the driveway—a game in which one plays the monster, pulling at imaginary chains that bind him to the garage door, while the other plays the scientist or his misshapen assistant, mocking and tormenting the creature until all hell breaks loose.
“I’ve never even seen these,” I said.
“They’re from England. They had ten packs at Rexall. I got three.”
It was only a shared exchange between old friends, still young, but it confirmed that our growth had traced similar arcs in my absence. I did not, at the time, have the language with which to describe what the renewal of this bond meant to me: how it connected me to a safe place beyond the disorder that had stealthily taken over the reins in my family’s life.
We were gone by mid-August. I am unclear on the details; I was a kid. Gage and I kept up correspondence for at least two years; we had both grown old enough to be dropped off at a movie theater for a couple of hours on a Saturday, and we’d send each other reviews of what we’d seen.
At some point we fell out of touch, and somewhere along the line I lost his letters. Of course, I heard all about his success later on. At supermarket checkout counters nationwide, his name, for several years, was a hard one to miss. It was a welcome beacon from lost years for me. In the flashy typography of his books’ titles and in their eye-popping front covers, I sensed that he was the same person I’d known back then; and this was a comfort to me. Our visions may flare or recede according to the errands of our lives, but they remain.
It would be years until we met again. My family moved, then moved again: five times in eight years. Gage became a remembered figure from early childhood. That our friendship had been hardy enough to survive the initial sundering was something of a miracle, I see now. Making new friends grows harder when you don’t stay put; I learned, at my third new school in three years, that I had formed a mistrust of groups. I preferred the company of one friend to hanging around with a bunch of classmates. Your earliest friends hold a place of privilege in memory. As I began pursuing a solitary path heading into junior high, I would remember Gage, and wonder how he was: what sort of friends he had now, and whether we’d still be friends, given the chance. I always pictured him in the same house, safe and secure. Leaving and returning from the same doorstep, days turning into years. Growing into the person he’d always meant to become. A figment of my imagination, I understand now, but we imagine things because we need them.
3.
IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN YEARS LATER. My life had no discernible direction—I was drifting. Sometimes the drift went nowhere, and sometimes it headed for dark waters; there had even been a point, just a year or two earlier, when it would have seemed to any onlooker that I was idling haphazardly toward any of several early graves. Every affirmative choice I made whittled down my options a little. Every good chance I got I squandered.
It was like that for a while, and then it wasn’t: if we get lucky, we emerge from our valleys. One autumn there was a movie in theaters called River’s Edge. A time of moral panic was in ascension, and River’s Edge, though a good and complex movie, heralded the rising of the curve. It was about a teenager who strangles his girlfriend to death and leaves her body in some brush by a river; his friends, who all knew the dead girl and numbered her among their own, see her body with their own eyes but tell no one.
Any teenager who sees River’s Edge begins registering objections as soon as Samson tries to purchase a lone can of beer instead of a six-pack, but most viewers will overlook a botched detail or two in the service of having their biases confirmed: the youth of today have no values; moral rot consumes them. There is, among the public, a perennial urge to believe the worst about the generation that will eventually replace them.
I knew about this urge firsthand: Diana Crane’s case had been hot currency on the playgrounds of San Luis Obispo. Those days had been on my mind. Browsing in a Montclair mall bookstore recently, I’d seen, prominently displayed, The White Witch of Morro Bay, by Gage Chandler. The byline seemed to sort of float in the air in front of me when I saw it. I’d only ever met one person named Gage in my entire life. It had to be him.
I couldn’t afford the hardback, so I made a mental note to check out a copy from the library. But I was not, at the time, a person often found browsing the stacks. Various other errands on which I spent my days had a tendency to erase any other thought not directly connected to them. So I didn’t think about The White Witch of Morro Bay again until a few years later, when they made the movie. It premiered on a Friday night after an extensive ad campaign of billboards and thirty-second TV spots around Southern California. By Monday morning everybody everywhere was talking about the movie based on a book by my childhood friend.
* * *
THE OTHER THING I knew about River’s Edge was that the crime that had inspired it took place in Milpitas, the small town where I’d lived for two years as a child. I remembered reading about the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad; I was fourteen years old when it happened. Milpitas had receded into the mists of childhood. Still, sitting at the dining room table in Claremont, leafing through the Los Angeles Times and feeling sophisticated about it, I wondered: What if, in some imaginary timeline in which staying in that house had been not only viable but safe, we’d stayed? Would I have known these kids who’d seen the body of their friend and agreed to keep it secret? What might I have done—turned tail and run to the cops, or stayed safe with the pack?
I wrote poetry as a teenager, endless poems—the poems themselves were terrible, but writing them made me feel powerful. I’d sit at a manual typewriter in my room, staying up late, lighting candles or incense, and generally cutting quite a figure. The day I read the newspaper story about the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad, I wrote five poems, all from the imagined perspectives of her friends—the Circle of Five, I’d dubbed them; there was an Arthurian echo in the story for me, friends who hope that their bond will protect them from the wiles of the world.