Kaley

Kaley

by Jennifer Lauren

                                                                

They find the dead girl sophomore year.
        Aria,* a junior at my school. I never met her. Someone strangled Aria, stabbed her, and crushed her head with a rock. Left her blood-soaked body in the Innis Arden Park up the street from my house.
        She’s all of us. Watching after-school specials. Heeding the warnings not to talk to strangers, avoid idling white vans. Looking both ways before crossing the street. Always checking her Halloween candy for razor blades.
        But life isn’t an after-school special, and following the rules doesn’t keep you safe. Not when you’re Mike Walker’s girlfriend.

                                                                
~~~
It’s 1990. I’m in seventh-grade art, sitting with Chrissy Perkins and Kaley Walker. Kaley is tiny, smaller even than me, but stout. Thick around the wrists, ankles, and neck. Her extended brow pushing the skin of her face down like a bulldog puppy. She seems older than the rest of us, even though she’s so small.

They tell jokes, and we laugh, very much twelve. We have big bangs,
leftover from the eighties, hair sprayed into a spirograph pattern above our
foreheads. While we draw self-portraits, Chrissy makes up a limerick:

There was a girl named Kaley,
Who had a two-year-old baby.
Her thumb got numb,
She married a bum,
Poor old crazy lady.

The stupid thing gets stuck in my head for thirty years.

                                                                
~~~
It’s 1992. Freshman year Homecoming. I’m dancing on the edge of the circle with the almost-cool girls: Jessica. Heather. Another Jessica. I move my body to pounding music, jumping when the music demands jump jump. The lights flash, strobes pound. I’m wearing a short skirt at night, breaking the rules of every after-school special.
        I notice the boy. He’s older. Dark blond hair, pronounced brow. He stares at me through slitted eyes that caress my body. No one has ever looked at me like that.
        “Who is he?” I ask one of the Jessicas, the damaged one, who keeps us up late at slumber parties telling us about the men who’ve touched her, how she said no but got touched anyway, and that’s just the way things are. She tells us how to kiss, how to suck on the boy’s tongue, and how if you touch his dick just the right way your boyfriend will do anything you ask.
        Jessica is our queen bee. We listen to her stories in a mystified amalgam of hero worship and pity.
        She follows my gaze to the boy who, for once, is watching me, not her. She snorts. “Mike Walker.”
        “Kaley’s brother?”
        Maybe Kaley will introduce us, and I can have a real boyfriend, practice the lessons Jessica has taught me, which I am too young and stupid to question.
        Jessica shakes her head. “Not him.”
        “Why not?” Jessica is constantly pointing boys my way, her cousins, boys she meets at the mall, cast-offs who couldn’t get her attention and will settle for the mousy best friend who follows her around like a puppy.
        “He’s … bad.” She doesn’t elaborate, but if Jessica says someone’s bad, they must really suck. I look away from the cute boy and dance.
        He probably wouldn’t like me anyway.

                                                                
~~~
After they find Aria, grief counselors swarm our campus. Kids who never met Aria huddle and sniff, sob into paper towels they pull from dispensers in the bathrooms. It’s impossible to know who actually knew this girl—everyone walks differently, heads down, arms around each other’s shoulders because someone like us was left bleeding in the grass, forever sixteen, skirt bunched around her waist.
        People look up from their grief huddles when Kaley walks down the hall. They stare. She looks worn out. Older, even, than her normal old-man state. Everyone stops talking, sniffling, and sobbing when she enters a room.
        She walks up to the rest of us before class, trying to pretend she doesn’t feel the eyes caressing her neck.
        “My brother didn’t do it,” she says.

                                                                
~~~
“Good,” Jessica says when I tell her Aria’s dead. I know Jessica has demons, but the vehemence in her voice takes my breath. It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say anything unkind about someone who’s dead. Aren’t we supposed to canonize them, talk of whatever sweetness we can find?
        Jessica has played enough games in her life. She’s not playing that one.
        “She was awful and so were her friends,” Jessica says. And I don’t know what to think about this because I didn’t know Aria, and Jessica can be dramatic.
        Later, I find Jessica in a huddle of girls, crying on a bench, so maybe she’s playing that game after all, or maybe she sees past whatever petty grievances she retains, all the way through to the human girl who won’t get to grow up.
        I sit with Kaley in English. She tries to act normal, resuming her usual banter, making fun of teachers and organized religion. She has an evangelical preacher voice that leaves me in tears. I don’t ask her about Aria, about Mike.
        I’ve always liked Kaley. She’s smart, she keeps to herself, and she never follows the trends. Kaley is one-hundred percent herself.
        I’m maybe ten, twenty percent. I don’t know myself well enough to be me, yet. That will take decades.
        Kaley doesn’t have decades.

                                                                
~~~
All of the kids in sobbing huddles, the teachers who sniffle in shock, even us, even Jessica—we all think Mike did it. But we don’t tell Kaley that.
        People talk about Mike and Aria with the reverence that will someday be reserved for Kardashians. Mike and Aria become our high school’s Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. They dated and broke up and then dated again. People say she was obsessed with him. That he screwed around, but always went back to her. That he was violent, and she went back anyway, and what does that mean when she ended up dead?
        People say Mike showed up at his best friend Ben’s house covered in blood and confessed. That he beat Aria to death. Kids throw around the word “rape” like a dodgeball everyone’s trying to avoid.
        Kaley says Mike was home watching TV. We nod and hug her in sympathy. But no one believes her.

                                                                
~~~
It’s fast. Maybe only days. Mike is arrested and charged with murder.
        Kaley stops making fun of our teachers and organized religion. She sits quietly in English, her eyes sinking more deeply into her head, replaced by shadows under her pronounced brow.
        I’m fifteen. I know better than to bring it up, but not how to make it better.
        Reporters descend on Kaley, camp out on her lawn, follow her to school. She hates them. She says they get everything wrong. She just wants to be left alone.

                                                                
~~~
The school holds Aria’s memorial on an impossibly sunny day. We sit outside on the grass while teachers speak in front of a giant portrait of Aria. Years later, all I will remember is that she was beautiful and blonde, a caricature of a popular girl. I’ll Google her name, trying to find a picture, but no images of her face survive. The only pictures that transcend into the digital age are those of Mike Walker.
        But here, today, at the memorial, her friends sing “Wind Beneath My Wings.” They cry. We cry. Even those of us who never knew her. Even Jessica. Even me.

                                                                
~~~
Life goes back to normal. We go to the Spaghetti Factory for Kaley’s birthday. Jessica rents a limousine, and we dress up and pretend we’re going to prom.
        When I tell my mom we’re going, she says, “Didn’t Kaley’s brother kill that girl?”
        “So?”
        Kaley didn’t kill anyone. Kaley is smart and keeps to herself; she’s one of those people who won’t even go to sleepovers, which to me feels like moral superiority, but in a good way. It’s like she doesn’t know how to do anything wrong.
        But my mother doesn’t know that. “Stuff like that runs in a family. I’m not sure you should be hanging out with her.”
        I’ve never cared what my mother thinks, so I go to the party. We tease our hair big, wear dangly earrings, and paste our faces with makeup. Jessica’s boyfriend orders an entire second dinner while the rest of us eat bad spaghetti and spumoni ice cream. Kaley laughs so hard she spits.

                                                                
~~~
Mike’s best friend, Ben, spends three days in jail on contempt charges before he agrees to testify at trial. He describes Mike’s confession; the newspapers love it:
        “He said she wouldn’t die. He said he kept choking her, and that wasn’t working, and he didn’t know what to do, and he kept feeling her heart, and it kept beating.”
        Mike now claims Ben killed Aria. Kaley believes him.
        When Mike is found guilty, Kaley is watching with her mother and sister. Praying for a miracle, even though she told me she doesn’t believe in God. I guess some things make you believe whether you want to or not.
        She writes about it, later. About how, as they lead him out of the courtroom, reporters swarm her family. They run to the bathroom to hide, but the cameras follow, filming as they cry curled up on the cold tile floor.
        Mike tells the judge to give him as much time as she wants, because eventually “the truth will come out.”
        She sentences him to 41 years, calling him “amoral, cocky, manipulative, cruel. A sociopath.”
        She says if he ever gets out, he’ll do it again.

                                                                
~~~
It’s spring of junior year. For most of us, it’s over.
        Kaley and I drift apart, but I still see her. People stare when she walks down the hallways. She starts dating her male best friend. They make out wildly in the hallway, like she’s begging the world to see her as anything other than her brother’s sister, but no one is fooled.
        People talk. People listen. But high school is finite, and none of us can wait to reinvent ourselves. We all graduate, except Jessica, who dropped out after sophomore year. We throw our graduation caps in the air, walk out of high school and into the rest of our lives.
        All of us except Aria, who will forever be sixteen.

                                                                
~~~
It’s 1997. I’m home from college, outside my skin in my childhood home, away from my friends and the boyfriend I plan to marry next year whether my mother approves or not.
        A storm brews, tossing pine branches and needles, rain pelting the windows, flashes of lightning.
        I’m alone when Jessica calls. We don’t talk much anymore—she’s married now, with a daughter. I visited her after the baby was born. As Jessica sat nursing, she told me she was astonished that her life worked out. “I just planned on having sex with guys and partying until AIDS took me down, you know?”
        Now, her voice is hesitant, missing the cockiness or confidence or whatever it was that made her the popular girl I followed around like a puppy. “Um, do you remember Kaley?”
        “Of course, I remember Kaley.”
        “She, um. She died.”
        She was almost twenty-one.
        “Do you know what happened?”
        “No. They’re going to do an autopsy.”
        “Oh, my God.”
        Kaley’s best friend found her in bed. She was already cold.
        “Did you know she was gay?” Jessica asks.
        I didn’t. I wish I had. I wish I’d known a lot of things, like what I could have said to help someone who would have been my friend, when her life was falling apart.
        Jessica hangs up, and I don’t want to be alone. The house feels like an oversized sweater that used to fit, but now hangs off me loose, like elderly skin.
        I call the boyfriend. He lives with his parents in Tacoma, almost two hours away. They don’t want him to drive in the storm. He tells them my friend died, and I’m alone. Scared. But when they forbid him to come, he listens.
        I lie awake in my bed, all night, listening to the rain patter the window.

                                                                
~~~
My first funeral is a high school reunion with Kaley at its center.
        She lies impossibly still, her hair styled the same way it was when I met her in seventh grade, but without the spirograph bangs. Rings decorate each finger, and someone dressed her in a matronly floral dress.
        Other than the rings, none of it seems very Kaley.
        Her closest friends sob. I sit with them, in shock. It’s hard to move. Hard to show emotion. The friend she used to make out with points a wet glare my way, as if I have no right to be here, like I still have to justify my existence. But Kaley would never have asked me to justify anything.
The funeral is Greek Orthodox, and Kaley would have hated it. As the priest talks about Jesus, I hear Kaley’s evangelical preacher voice from sophomore English. I wonder if she knew him, if he’s who she based it on.
But he couldn’t have known her, because he insists she was a sinner, begs God to save her soul. Kaley wasn’t a sinner. She was a twenty-year-old girl who died too young, who saw good in everyone.
        Even her brother.
        His hands are chained together as he walks up the aisle, tears wetting his face. He stumbles out his words.
        “She always believed in me. She was the only one who was there for me, after what I did…”
        Did I just hear what I think I heard?

                                                                
~~~
At the reception, Jessica and Heather greet the priest who called Kaley a sinner.
        “It was such a beautiful service,” they say. I say nothing, trying not to be rude at a funeral. But I’ve never had a poker face.
        “She’s definitely in heaven,” Heather says, her voice and face serene. Jessica agrees. I’m glad they’re finding comfort, but this is not for me.
        Across the room, boys I used to know wear suits, ties dangling from acne-pocked necks like they played dress-up in their dads’ closets.
        “See you at the next funeral,” one of them says.
        “I’ll see you at the reunion,” I correct.
        I don’t go to any reunions.

                                                                
~~~
Kaley died of an aneurysm. Someday I’ll learn that aneurysms can be caused by stress, but I don’t know that yet. It feels random, like any of us could go at any time. It’s not something that’s occurred to me before.
        My mom asks how Kaley died every few months, probably as off-kilter as I am about a girl my age dropping dead. I call her, tell her.
        “She was always such a nice girl,” my mom says, which is true. But.
        “You didn’t want me hanging around her, because of her brother.”
        “I never said that,” she says.

                                                                
~~~
I marry the boyfriend, even though my mom doesn’t approve. Jessica is my maid of honor. I don’t invite anyone else from high school.
        We talk about Kaley.
        “I saw her mom the other day,” Jessica says. “She looks really old.         She gave me a hug and said, ‘this is so hard.’”
        I can’t imagine pain like that. Losing her daughter after losing her son. I say something inelegant to Jessica along these lines.
        “Yeah, and then he confessed at her funeral,” she says.
        Oh. I guess I did hear what I thought I heard.

                                                                
~~~
I get older. Kaley does not.
        Two kids and a law degree later, I’m perusing the Innocence Project website, thinking about volunteering. There’s a list of men whose claims they’re investigating.
        Mike Walker is on the list. He’s married now, with babies born of conjugal visits.
        The Innocence Project only takes cases if DNA could exonerate a person. Mike says the DNA on the rock used to bash Aria’s skull will not match his. He still says Ben did it. His wife has a website dedicated to his freedom.
        I don’t volunteer for the Innocence Project. I shut the computer, play with my children.
                                                                

*”Aria” is not her real name. All of the names in this story were changed to protect privacy.