So Much Pretty (27 page)

Despite all this, Alice was unpretentious, you could almost say unaware. A lot of adolescents like her thrive on their difference and stick together, but she wasn’t like that. She had a sweetness and an openness that you normally see in much younger kids. She gave off the sense of being incredibly loved and cared for. Open to the world. And I know she was an only child. She liked to argue and explain things in class, and she had a loud, distinct musical laugh that was a pleasure to hear. Standing in the classroom, you could hear it out the window or down the hall, and it just made you feel happy.

Audio File: Bailey, Theophile, 4/21/09
Stacy Flynn, Haeden
Free Press

I’m Theo Bailey. I live in Annandale-on-Hudson. It’s April 21. Again, I don’t think I have any insight here, unless what you’re looking for is evidence that she was my friend.

My memory practically begins with Alice. We used to fall asleep on the couch. Her parents had this big long paisley couch, and we used to fall asleep lying there when we were like six years old. If Claire and Gene and Ross were having a party. If they were playing Scrabble or Boggle. If Connie was in town, they would stay up talking, and sometimes we’d listen to them, but mostly, we played. Sometimes we’d lie on the couch and braid our hair together on the side and pretend we were switching brains. We always ended up falling asleep there.

I don’t know how we ended up together later. It was like being in love was a thing we already were, and it was a thing we needed to practice to be grown up. We were lucky to have each other to talk about how it felt or how it would work. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love her. I’d rather you not write any of this. But I think it’s important to understand, considering everything. She was an incredibly happy, gentle person.

Nothing seemed to connect who we were then and who we are now.

We were always talking about who would go out with whom. We had crushes on other people, we dated each other’s friends, and then we were somehow together. Always.

I thought whoever I married would be like this. I thought I would marry my best friend. But I never thought I wanted to marry Alice. Most people who met her at school thought she was my sister. Like we had imprinted on each other before we could even talk right or understand things, and after a while there was no question how it would go.

We were free to love anyone else, but I don’t think anyone else wanted to be with us. The other was always so present. And for us, other people seemed foreign. Their voices, their bodies, their ways of speaking.

I want you to know this stuff because I think it makes it pretty obvious that we were happy together and that she didn’t have conflicts with any guys.

With Alice, the world was a secondary place. A place that was already false because it existed at all. The way objects are imitations, and ideas are originals. Our world was the real world. Everything else was a mass-produced tenth-generation copy.

She would never place herself in the center of that false world. She was too smart for that.

Alice

SPIRIT DAY
HAEDEN, NY, APRIL 14, 2009

M
Y PARENTS USED
to say “Beneath the paving stones, the beach,” and they used to say “Demand the impossible,” things they told me the situationists and the surrealists and the “modern primitives” said. I grew up on these expressions. Axioms of an underground and unrealized wish. Today is the day I stop wishing.

After Wendy White was found, I got that saying stuck in my head—“Beneath the paving stones. Beneath the paving stones.” It upset me, and I didn’t know why until I had this dream. Body after body. You lifted up the sidewalk on Main Street and there were bodies, lined up, pressed together, naked. Women’s bodies. Their skin was blue and white and dirty. Their hair was sticking out like grass growing up through the cracks, but it was like it had been caught between the stones. Their fingers were broken from trying to push the cement away. Some of them had begun to dig down instead of up. It wasn’t just one grave or one mass grave—it was the sidewalk of the whole town. In the dream, I knew this was what was beneath the sidewalk that led away and also beneath the roads. Underneath it all was this white-blue skin and skeleton and hair. And I knew that my parents, whom I love, were utterly wrong.

Beneath the paving stones and the fields and the parking lots and the woods lies something else.

And all the boys I had ignored or pitied or excused throughout school were also something else. They were something entirely different.

My parents’ lives, the rooftop garden, our little “farm,” were all just another way to ignore the fact that there is no beach down there, and there never was. That’s not what you find when you go digging. There are bodies and bones. Women’s bodies, which first became their coffins at puberty, a skin coffin. A place from which you will never be heard, except maybe by those who are buried nearby, or those with their ear to the ground.

After Wendy White’s body was found, I saw the world as it was for the first time. When her body was found, I was also found. I woke up in her grave and gazed down at my legs, took in the power of my lungs, my biceps, my hands, and knew what they were for.

EVIDENCE
P47914

4/15/09 8:00
A.M
.

Cpt. Alex Dino

Video Record 0003

McClean, Gavin

My name is Gavin McClean. I’m a senior at HHS. I was there yesterday. April 14.

She was standing in the middle of the four corners where the downstairs hallways meet—she was, I don’t know who it was. I guess I don’t know if it was a girl, but I know it was a swimmer, dressed like a girl swimmer, because she was dressed like they did for Spirit Day in a green mermaid wig and the Titans shirt and glitter makeup. I remember they all wore glitter. She was in the middle of four corners when I saw her pull the gun out of her backpack. No. It wasn’t. I didn’t actually see a gun. She had a little bag or stuffed animal or something, I don’t know what it was. I know I saw a swimmer there. There were a few swimmers there. And everyone was coming back from lunch, and the bell had just rung.

I guess all I know is a swimmer pulled a smaller bag out of her bag. She set the backpack down like she was going through it to look for something. And when she stood up, she had another bag. A makeup bag, maybe. I don’t know, I guess it wasn’t Alice’s pack. ’Cause hers has a frog on it. And this was . . . I don’t really remember. It was crowded because of lunchtime, and people were walking outside. Paul and Bruce and Chris and Kyle were walking from the cafeteria up the hall. I heard this pop, like it was definitely a gunshot and really loud. Then Paul fell, and then the other three, but they fell like it was fake. It looked fake. Just shocked faces or no expression at all, and
they fell. Then I saw blood, and at first I thought,
This is not real, they’re trying to make some point about school violence
. That’s what I thought. I thought,
This is a play
. Then there was just a ton of blood. I didn’t really know where the shots came from at all, but I guess it must have been her. People started screaming and running. People were screaming and crying, and I ran back up the hall and outside and kept running. I live two blocks from school. I didn’t really know what had even happened. When I got home, I locked the doors. I called 911, but they already knew. I called my mom at work and told her I was okay and she said what was I talking about and I told her and she started crying. She said, “Stay right there. Stay right where you are. Don’t go anywhere, don’t leave the house.” Then I couldn’t believe what I had seen because it didn’t make any sense at all and I was sure it was a big hoax. It really looked so fake. They must have been faking the whole thing.

But then I knew they weren’t. I knew Paul and Bruce and Chris and Kyle were probably dead. And they were dead. They died right there in the hallway.

She killed them right there while they were walking.

EVIDENCE
P47914

4/17/09 8:00
A.M
.

Cpt. Alex Dino

Video Record 0004

Rumsey, Leslie

I’m Leslie Rumsey. I am fifteen. I was in global studies at the time.

We heard shots, and our teacher closed the door and locked it and told everyone to get under their desks. She called down to the office on her cell phone. The loudspeakers told everyone to get inside the classrooms and lock the doors. Some of us crammed into the closet because we were afraid to get under the desks. And everyone had their cell phones out and were texting their parents or other kids, telling them to get out. And someone said don’t get under the desks, everybody expects you to get under the desks now, and they just shoot the lock off the door and then shoot you under the desk. Those kids at Columbine were hiding under the library desks, and it didn’t help them.

We were all dressed up for Spirit Day, so everyone was easy to see. People had glitter in their hair, and the football team had fake horns they were wearing, and the cheerleaders were in their uniforms, but they all wore the same blond wigs and glitter face paint and glitter lip gloss. The track team had on black shirts with pictures of tridents on them. We were all dressed up and scared. Then we heard a whole lot of people screaming down the hall. There weren’t any more shots, so you didn’t know why people were screaming.

Someone said, “What if it’s the guy who killed Wendy?” My heart was pounding because at the time I really believed that was probably what it was. What if the guy who killed Wendy White had come into the school?

We were there like that for an hour, listening and freaking out. We heard four or five shots, and a few minutes later, another I don’t know how many, then sirens. The scary part is that after we heard screaming and people running and doors slamming all in a row—like boom boom boom—then it was really quiet. We were afraid there were bombs in the school because people always say they’re going to blow up the school. Everybody says stuff like that, I couldn’t even tell you who. But we were scared. I could feel my heart beating so fast. The kids at Columbine put bombs in their school, but they didn’t go off. I saw the movie of it on the Internet. They left a bag of explosive stuff in the cafeteria, but it didn’t go off, and they tried to shoot it to make it go off. “If there’s a bomb in the school, we should probably get out,” I said, “we should get out. Get out.” But our teachers said, “Everybody is going to have to breathe deeply and try to be quiet. We’re close to the police station, and we’re going to be okay.”

EVIDENCE
P47915

4/17/09 8:50
A.M
.

Cpt. Alex Dino

Video Record 0005

Salinski, Crystal

My name is Crissy Salinski. I’m a junior at Haeden. I had lunch and was going to bring my stuff to the music room.

We were coming out of the cafeteria right behind Paul and some other kids, and then there was this big crack and Paul fell to his knees and then over on his side. I looked up the hall and couldn’t see anything. Anybody. I was so startled, I didn’t look down again, I ran as fast as I could. There were more shots, but I kept running and I didn’t see anything. Everyone was dressed up for Spirit Day and people were screaming. People were screaming and running. I have never heard such a loud noise as people screaming like that. It’s like at my uncle’s farm when the pigs get scared and know something bad is going to happen and they all start squealing at once. But there was nobody with a gun that I remember. And I thought,
Maybe he killed himself and we’re all panicking
. Some of us ran and shut ourselves in the shop room.

Alice came running down the hall away from the shots, and she pounded on the door of the shop room—she wasn’t screaming or anything, she just looked freaked out, so we let her in. She was wearing the swim team’s Spirit Day stuff. She had blue glitter nail polish and was wearing the green mermaid wig all the swimmers were wearing and the shirt that said
TITANS SWIM
. Yes, I am sure it was her. She looked around at everyone. She said, “Everybody okay?”

And then she ran out again.

EVIDENCE
P47917

4/17/09 10:30
A.M
.

Cpt. Alex Dino

Video Record 0006

Wilson, Bill

Bill Wilson, April 17, 2009.

She knocked on the door to the weight room, and everybody was running out of the school or running into rooms to hide. People were screaming. She tapped really quietly, and I saw her look both ways like she was worried the shooter would see her. I was afraid to get up and let her in, but I couldn’t leave her out there, so I did it really fast. She looked terrified. She came in. She looked around. There were three of us in there, and she locked the door behind her. She put her backpack down. I remember it was brand-new. She turned around to open it—I thought she was looking for a cell phone. I said, “Thank God.” None of us in there had a cell phone, ’cause we were working out and they were in our lockers. Then she turned around really fast and shot Tony and then Rick. Just one then the other. But I don’t remember a gun. For a minute I almost thought the shots came through the door. Then she opened the door and ran out. I went over to Tony, and he was still alive because she had got him in the neck, not the head, like Rick. I put my sweatshirt on his neck and it got soaked in seconds. It took seconds. He bled to death. I don’t know why she didn’t shoot me. They said nobody else saw her do anything. It was her, though. I’m sure of it. It was a swimmer. I think it was her. When I remember it, I don’t know, because all I can remember is Tony. I try to remember her face. No. I know it was her.
She had those blue eyes. There were no shots through the door, so it had to have been her. They said later that everyone who got shot died. No one was wounded. I guess Tony was wounded, but only for about a minute.