Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  One page is blank except for what her brother, Peter, first said to me. I add that to the list. Dead.

  I call Angela Schultz and ask if I can come talk to her. I tell her I’ve spoken to Carl Fitzner and would like to get her version of some things.

  After a long pause, she says, “All right. I guess I’d better set the record straight.”

  Angela’s apartment is sun-bright and spacious, with the walls muted shades of green and peach, and shiny hardwood floors. The carefully hung pictures, the plants, the curtains, all make me think of how little Hannah and I have done to our apartment, how temporary it still looks. We have crates stacked in the kitchen, box springs and mattresses on the floor in our bedrooms, a dead plant on the porch in a cheap plastic pot.

  It’s true that Angela Schultz, at home, is not the same demure girl I saw at the doctor’s office. Her hair is down, falling past her breasts in a dark smooth stream. She’s wearing jeans and a clingy V-neck T-shirt, her feet bare, with red toenails. I can’t picture her the way Carl does, snorting butane, cracking a whip. If those things are true, I’ll see it in her. What you are always bubbles up eventually, a dead body rising to the surface of a lake.

  “That little shit,” Angela says after I tell her a few of Carl’s opinions. Then she tells me that Carl was infatuated with Allison, that she turned him down and he soured. He left a poem tacked to her door about how he used to want to cradle her like a kitten but now he could see she was no soft kitten but a vituperative snake who had bitten him and run hot poison through his veins.

  “Something like that,” she says, sighing. “He’s not normal. Even all these years after high school, he still followed her around. He would turn up at her gigs, at places where he knew we hung out. She was much nicer about it than I would have been.” She doesn’t look angry anymore. Her eyes well up. I pretend not to notice, writing in my notebook: vituperative snake. I think of Carl’s tongue, the way he darted it out, picked the tobacco off it. I write down: not normal, and underline it twice.

  Whips? Angela says. Knives? She hauls out pictures of herself in tight jeans in high school and shows me that she painted her fingernails black. She asks, “So what?,” turning the thick pages of her photo album. “Didn’t you wear too much makeup in high school?” she demands. “Didn’t you?”

  “Of course.” The truth is I can’t remember when I stopped. It doesn’t matter, because nothing wins a source’s trust like sympathy. I have looked into a murderer’s eyes and said, “I understand.” It’s nothing to pretend I coated my face with foundation and blue eyeshadow until I was twenty, that that could be me in the pictures, wearing jeans as tight as skin.

  The front of Angela’s album is decorated with cut-out felt letters spelling her initials, the name of her high school, and the year of her graduation. She tells me she decorated matching albums for herself and Allison. Purple and white, she says, running her fingers over the felt like it’s braille, were their high school colors. Allison is in some of the pictures, her hair like an explosion, permed into curls, her lashes thick with mascara. There are pictures of her with boys, with beer bottles in her hands, and in one it looks as though the white object between her fingers is a joint. In another Allison is on a stage in a high school gym, leaning into a microphone with a band behind her. “You can’t really see, but that’s me on the drums,” Angela says. “I was terrible. Allison said, ‘Angela, honey, your talents lie elsewhere.’ She knew how to tell you the truth without making you feel you’d been criticized.”

  “Is that a joint?” I ask, pointing at the photo.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Angela says, leaning in close.

  “So Carl wasn’t lying about some things,” I say.

  “Of course not,” she says. “Allison gave great parties when her parents were out of town. We knew how to have a good time.”

  “And when you got older?”

  She sighs. “Look, I’m sure some people would describe her as a little wild. But a lot of them would be Bible beaters like my mother.”

  “Mine too,” I say, and she smiles.

  “Allison wasn’t like Carl says,” she says. “She did what she wanted, that’s all.”

  She shows me a picture of the two of them standing together in flowered dresses, squinting into the sun, arms wrapped around each other’s waist. “We were just normal girls,” Angela says, “me and Allison.”

  “What about your boyfriend?” I ask. “The whip scars?”

  “Truth is, his daddy beat him. If he said it was S and M, it’s because that sounded better to him than telling people his daddy whipped him in the basement when he got drunk.” She shows me a picture of a slim dark-haired boy in a heavy metal T-shirt and sunglasses, a cigarette in his hand, a smile pulling at his lips. “He wanted to seem tough,” Angela says, “but he was just a poor scared boy.” She shuts the photo album. “People have secrets,” she says sadly. “They’re just not always the ones you think.”

  “I believe you,” I say.

  She leans forward and touches my knee. “Men like Carl,” she says, “they have a way of making you feel dirty just for being a woman. You know what I mean?” She watches my face seriously while I nod. Then she smiles. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I never offered you a drink.”

  Although I said it to win her over, I do believe her, because our opinions of others are built on details, Angela’s felt-lettered photo album versus Carl’s Zippo lighter. It’s true that I left Carl feeling like he had revealed himself as the kind of man who believes a rape victim in a low-cut shirt deserved what she got.

  It’s also true that if I see a woman walking down the street with her breasts bouncing out the top of her shirt, I think slut, just like he does.

  I am watching Angela’s face. She cries a little, I hand her a tissue, she grows angry, I shake my head with her in disgust, she wanders into her philosophies, I murmur agreeably. I prompt. I’ve stopped taking notes, but I’m listening to everything she says, and the whole time I’m thinking, Why does she trust me? I never said I wouldn’t put any of this in the paper.

  According to the surveys, no one likes a reporter. No one is supposed to want to talk to me. The secret I know is that almost everyone does. They’re on their guard at first, until they realize what they have in me. I’m a rare thing, a listener so interested she writes down their rambling sentences word for word. It starts slowly, with the facts. Once they get started they can’t stop. One revelation tumbles after another. Because they want to be heard, they want to explain themselves, they want to be famous, because seeing their opinion in print makes it fact. And because I listen they think I am their friend.

  Often they don’t remember what they’ve said. Some of them read their words in the paper and call my editor screaming that I’ve gotten it all wrong. One woman insisted on coming in to hear the tape of her interview. We sat in an editor’s office and listened together as her voice recited each and every word I’d put in the paper. Still she didn’t believe it. “But that’s not what I meant,” she insisted. She pointed at me. “She knew that wasn’t what I meant.”

  Whatever I knew or didn’t, it doesn’t matter what she meant. I reported what she said.

  Angela says that she took Allison to an abortion clinic when they were sixteen. “I talked her into it,” she says, her eyes fixed on my face. “I said she was too young. And if I hadn’t . . .” She chokes up, presses her hand to her mouth. “If I hadn’t, maybe she would have had it. And now, she’ll never have any.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” I say. I reach over the coffee table and squeeze her hand. She squeezes back and holds on. I think of the girls I knew in high school who got pregnant. Some of them kept coming to school until they were too big to fit in the desks, and then you’d see them working at McDonald’s or the 7-Eleven. The wealthier ones disappeared for a few days and returned with stories about visiting an aunt in the city. One girl left town halfway through the school year. When she was back at school in the fall she
joined the cheerleading squad, as though she wanted the whole school to see her in those short skirts, shaking her pom-poms in the air. She was on the JV squad. Varsity wouldn’t have her.

  “I’m just glad her mother doesn’t know,” Angela says. “She’d be thinking there was a piece of Allison she could’ve kept.” I remember how my own mother shook her head over those girls, said they were all careless and sinners, and some of them murderers. I never knew how she knew about them. I didn’t tell her.

  Angela dissolves again into gasps and sniffles. Her hand is hot and moist and my shoulder begins to ache but I hold my position. “What’s her mother like?”

  “I hate to say this now,” she says. “But the truth is I never liked her. She looked at Allison like she wanted something from her. I always thought she was jealous of me, that she thought I wasn’t good enough for Allison.”

  “And Peter?”

  “Peter’s a great kid,” she says. “He idolizes Allison. You know how some younger kids, it’s almost like they have a crush on their older siblings? He’s like that. She’s a good big sister. She takes care of him, looks out for him. Once, before he got his license, she let him drive their mother’s car and he hit a parked car, did some damage. Allison took the blame. She had to pay the deductible, and she wouldn’t let Peter help, said it was her fault for letting him drive.” She squeezes my hand. “That’s what she was like. Those things Carl told you, that’s not what she was about at all.”

  She lets go of my hand to reach for a tissue, and I sit back, resisting the urge to rub my shoulder. “What about Allison’s boyfriend?” I ask. “What’s he like?”

  “I already told you,” she says sharply. “No boyfriend.” Her hands hide her face. I don’t ask again. “I’m just crying all the time,” she says in a small voice. “I can’t make it stop.” She looks at me and I notice that her eyes are enormous and green, and that she has again blinked wet mascara onto her skin. If Hannah had just been killed, I wonder if I would still put on my makeup.

  “Is it because I miss her?” she asks me, voice trembling. “Or because I’m afraid?”

  “Both,” I say. “It’s only natural. You’re grieving.” I reach for her hand again.

  “What happened to her, it could’ve been me. It could still be me.” Her hand is still beneath mine, and she is not crying now. She says, “It could be you. You even . . .” She stops without saying “look a little like her,” watching my face. Her voice is suddenly so firm, so cold, I lift my hand from hers and put it back in my lap. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Across from me on the sofa is a girl like any number of girls, pink-cheeked with blush and emotion, smooth and painted and smart enough without being too smart and pretty even in her grief. Across from her she sees a woman her age, wearing no makeup but lipstick, hair cut short, businesslike in a skirt and tailored shirt, a closed notebook beside her on the couch. We’ve been sitting here comfortably, talking like friends, but now as she stares at me my head whirls with the thought that neither of us has any idea what lies beneath the skin.

  Then her eyes tear up again, and she puts her face in her hands. “She didn’t deserve to die this way,” she sobs. I watch her, my discomfort fading. I know exactly who Angela Schultz is. I could take a few details and put her in the paper for anyone to see, captured in a sentence like a moth beneath a glass.

  At the door, I turn and hug her. She sags against me like her own weight is unbearable. Her body in my arms is everywhere soft, her breasts against me, the cotton of her shirt beneath my hands. She takes a trembling breath. “Thank you for listening,” she says.

  “You’re welcome,” I say. I don’t say “It’s what I do.” “Please call me if you need to talk. Not for a story or anything. Just if you need to talk.”

  She pulls back, but keeps one hand on my upper arm. “Listen,” she says, “I need to go over to Allison’s and get some things before her mother clears it out. Would you come with me? I can’t bear to go alone.”

  This is how easy it is. A few tissues, one hug, and this girl opens up her life and asks me in. I like her. I feel sorry for her. We could be friends, although I’m using her. If it’s hard for me to tell the difference, she can’t be expected to. I think about asking her why she’s asking me, if she’s sure, if she wouldn’t rather take another friend of Allison’s instead of me, a reporter.

  When I joined my college paper, the news editor told me the best way to get an answer someone doesn’t want to give is to close your notebook, exchange pleasantries, and then, as an aside, ask the question you really wanted to ask. Off guard, because you’re standing, and smiling, and your notebook is tucked away inside your bag, the person answers. You say thank you, go out in the hall, and write it down. I think about telling her that just because I don’t have my notebook out doesn’t mean I’m not taking notes.

  “Of course I will,” I say. “When?” We make plans to meet at the building Monday morning, and she says she’ll see me later. “By the way,” I say, turning at the door, “who was the father?” I’m imagining a lean-muscled football player, or a dark troubled boy like the one in Angela’s picture.

  She looks at me blankly.

  “When Allison got pregnant.”

  “Oh.” She gives a short, bitter laugh. “I think it was her boyfriend at the time. Tommy.”

  I hesitate. “You think?”

  She shrugs. “Allison was never exactly faithful. She sort of . . . scooped people up.”

  “Even Carl?”

  “Oh, Carl. I think she went out with him once, kissed him maybe.” Watching my face, she says, “You have to understand. She was special. Everyone wanted to be around her. It was like she was buzzing with something.”

  “Sex?”

  She frowns, taking it as a criticism of her dead friend. “More than that. It was like, she wanted to touch everybody. Not just physically.” She shakes her head. “I can’t say it right.” Lifting her eyes to the ceiling, she says slowly, “It was like she wanted to touch the whole world.”

  We stand in silence. I think, and this death is what finally made her famous, though I know that what this girl is talking about is not exactly fame. Then Angela drops her gaze to mine. She presses something into my hand and closes the door. I’m left standing in the hall, the picture of Allison I had been forming blurred once again, like a home movie that keeps slipping out of focus. I look down to see what she’s given me. It’s the photo of her and Allison in flowered dresses, their arms around each other, smiling into the sun.

  I come back to twenty messages on my voice mail, three of them hang-ups, one a man who says, “Oh,” in a surprised voice and then breathes heavily into the phone until the beep cuts him off, sixteen of them women telling me they know who killed Allison Avery, every one of them with the same rushed, anxious inflection in her voice.

  I spend a couple of hours calling them back, all of these women giving up their fathers, their boyfriends, their ex-husbands as the murderer, their voices sharp with bitterness and fear. He hits me, they say. He hit my mother. He broke my leg. He drinks too much. He’s a thief, he’s a liar, he’s a drug addict. He tied me up and raped me, one woman says, and then breaks down, sobbing quietly into the phone.

  I take down the names they give me. One name I recognize, though it takes me a few minutes to remember why. He’s dead. His body turned up on a golf course almost three months ago, and still his daughter tells me with conviction that three days ago he raped and killed a young girl. “I know it,” she says tightly. “I just know it.”

  I don’t think any of these women know what happened to Allison Avery. All they can tell me is what has happened to themselves.

  After I hang up with the last woman, I rest my forehead on my desk and close my eyes. I keep thinking about things Carl Fitzner said to me. When he told me about Allison’s fast crowd, her low-cut shirts, her short skirts, he meant the same thing Janice Smith meant. Just a matter of when.

  The phone rings right by my
ear, making me jump. “Olivia Dale,” I say into the receiver, my voice sharp, annoyed.

  There’s a silence. Then, “It’s Peter Avery.”

  I sit up straight. “Hello, Peter. What can I do for you?”

  “Do you know anything?” He sounds businesslike, abrupt, not the lost boy from yesterday.

  “There’s been no news,” I say carefully. “Have you talked to the police?”

  “Why bother,” he says bitterly. Then he lapses into silence. I wait it out. After a moment he says, “My mother asked me to call you. She’s going to offer a reward.”

  I reach for my notebook. For information leading to an arrest in the murder of. “How much?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “That’s a lot,” I say before I think.

  “Yes,” he says slowly, scornfully. “It is.”

  I’m picturing a headline: VICTIM’S FRIENDS, RELATIVES SAY SHE ‘DIDN’T DESERVE TO DIE THIS WAY,’ or something better, depending on what the mother says. Subhead: Distraught parents offer reward. “Peter,” I say. “I can run this information, but it would help if I could speak to your parents. A personal appeal is always—”

  “No,” he cuts me off. “They’re not ready. My mother is . . . my mother is very private.”

  I consider pushing it further. “All right,” I say finally. “When they are ready, I want you to know I’d do it right.”

  “You’ll be the one they call, don’t worry,” he says. “We don’t want to deal with television.”

  “Okay,” I say, letting it go. I soften my voice. “How are you?”