is it awful that I miss her most in the summer? every word of this (abridged, though still long) story is true. except for her last name and the name of the man who took her life. the first out of respect for Kristy and the second as well. the beginning of this story isn’t here – basically she was my childhood friend. her dad was our fifth grade science teacher. we used to go to the ratty alpine slides in the summers and sleep in cheap nylon sleeping bags at my house. in junior high, the rest of us became obsessed with future juvies but she stayed tried and true. we went to different high schools and lost touch but i remembered her. and i do now.
*
senior year ran in tandem with the last months of the clinton administration. we came of age eagerly, lacking the cotillion balls that were held 140 miles south and 120 miles west. we didn’t need it – we were content with R&B deejays the way that we were content with roast beef slabs that threatened to sprout salmonella under those red heating lamps. our prom was at a place called the via appia, though I sensed no inherent roman connection beyond some half-hearted sixties murals in the entryway. her prom was at genetti manor, a county institution that’d seen at least three-fourths of her grade over the years, kids awkward and beaming in cummerbunds and patent leather.
i picked princeton on coat-of-arms alone. a school with its own colonial canon, i reasoned, loomed far above all others. i balked once receiving the thirty-four page application booklet, complete with stream-of-consciousness questions that would’ve made any dada artist proud. i settled for boston, that bastion of busing controversies and what everyone told me was a fabled ball team.
kristy selected a local institution, an establishment once victim of the nation’s rigid gender split. it had a rotunda, complete with a nude Apollo and marble flooring. it had an excellent pox of fast-growing ivy on all the brick buildings that did warrant, as it happened, a touch of natural camouflage to hide the fifties architecture. kristy would be happy there. the tennis courts were shit – the nuns who were top brass at the school countered the theft of the string nets by replacing them with metal – but to the best of my knowledge, she’d never taken up tennis, anyway. i pictured her, aligning her text books in a working pyramid and tying the lot of them up with string.
the day before her university commenced was a bloated one. no less than four church picnics dueled for public dollars by firing high cooking grease into the late summer air. the mayor stirred sub par chili while old men worked the keg truck. the county went on garbage strike, allowing block after block to be inundated with half-consumed corn cobs and watermelon rinds curled into smiles. after two days in the sun, not even the raccoons would pick at the spoils.
virginities were lost in earnest. the plane rides to schools in seattle and new orleans and topeka would be full of the hidden knowledge that a fast one had been pulled over parents and jesus and convention alike. the new football boys suffered through two-a-days, trying on spin moves and fresh uniforms for size.
kristy dodd opened the morning shift at wendy’s, with one serf to arrive an hour after her. the establishment lost out on trucker volume to the mcdonald’s that sprouted, on universal rule, as close to interstate ramps as was permitted. maybe she got in early to sort the lincolns from the jeffersons. maybe she applied chapstick, though probably she didn’t.
she did not hear the janitor come in because he was there when she arrived, pilfering the safe with a blunt hammer that was covered in blue paint aged seven years.
and i doubt that she yelled at him when she encountered him, although perhaps primary instinct betrayed her. he went at her with blind fury, the fury of forty years. it was a tally of anger that was an entire lifetime in its scope. walter taft was a caught rat, a thief, a nobody with a whole luckless life to show for it. he was thirty years too old to have ever witnessed any of her botched lay-ups or her indiscreet flirtations with a boy named artimus, a boy of dubious character whose favorite football team was the cowboys.
kristy was the fairest-skinned human being to ever exist. she was paler than those people in alaska who only glimpse sun for three hours a day in winter. her thin hair did nothing to counter the ultraviolet, so she evaded cancer by means of blind luck, instead. I wish that there had been a way for her to evade evil in human form, evil that trapped her in a back room, evil that did not brake for anybody. it’s funny how cancer can be easier to thwart. if there was an evil-be-gone capsule i’m sure we all would’ve dutifully ingested it. the molecules created by some benevolent chemist would not only protect our organs, they’d protect our fates and they’d analyze every path our decisions might eventually take.
nothing in the story reigns fair: not the stunning weight difference, not an eighteen year old kid whose only potential flaw was being a bit too into the music of sarah mclaughlin up against a man who allowed the polyps of his brain to petrify and rot. she put up a fight -and i’m happiest about that, her refusal to give up on how perfect a tomorrow it’d be, no matter the weather or the sentiment, no matter how groggy she’d feel upon waking. she dueled him, her fingernails against his forearms and the blunt instrument that was exponentially tougher than her. she scratched and tore up pieces of him. but it didn’t put him in check. nothing could. the evil-thwarting pills could’ve, maybe. and better luck, luck seven million times more proactive.
when he had ended her, the molecules that’d worked overtime for eighteen years as bit players in the greater consciousness of kristy took their time in seeping inward, mutating into objects dim and sparse. even though she couldn’t speak, she used this time to examine neurons that held significance, launching them off as irrational fireworks within her head. her last thoughts were a muddy, if not beautiful, pool of vacation polaroids and mementos stuck into keepsake tins. kristy dodd died sixty years ahead of her time, held up on her feet by a man who’d successfully robbed himself sixty-three dollars. In the backlit chamber of wendy’s, he waltzed her awkwardly to the ground.
****
i refused to pay my respects to her, finding the action equally daunting and irreverent. i thought i’d catch Bad Fucking Luck from her coffin, tragedy better than anything shakespeare or the jerks from six feet under could write. plus maybe the killer would stake out her funeral for potential new targets. i pictured him maiming me three days before my departure to boston. i was slothful and bent on beating the heat in the blue easy chair that’d been my father’s pride and joy since 1985.
you’ll regret it, my mother said, before leaving.
i’ll live with it, then, i’d said. an invisible parrot of regret, for life, in the corner of every room i inhabit.
**
kristy hung back in the densest cemetery in town; a real grand-looking institution and historical, to boot. miners, prohibition rebels and the casualties of five american wars were buried there. we’d all promised to walk the grounds and locate her. the moss plagued the stone entrance, attempting natural erosion at a glacier’s pace. echoes from automobiles reverberated off the bellies of the mourning cherubs. there was a grub problem one year; the keepers thwarted it with the natural pestilence of the migratory geese.
taft was tried and committed. an apology was never birthed, not even conceived. I like to think of her shrugging it off, deeming it no worse than a spot of bad luck. likely she’d eradicate the myth of a mere three dimensions by floating around in something close to fourteen. as a ghost of mist and memory, she’d haul her remaining atoms into the audience of ballets and presidential addresses. i imagine her never favoring one over the other. dwelling above an occupied chair, she’d appear pensive, in that good way, never favoring the fifty-second president with a trademark stammer over the miniature nutcracker suite girls who lumbered around the sugar plum forest.
giant birds, mongrels and possessed bears that were darkened and silent on a side stage for 85% of your dining experience. then, someone/satan would trigger a switch, and their eyes would come aflame. their motorized mouths would move in unison to a tinny song. it was like they were imprisoned singers in a brothel or a 1930s speakeasy. they sang songs of quiet desperation as you happily chewed on your institutional pizza.
