Blood Games (23 page)

The following year, when he normally would have been in the ninth grade, Neal was taking junior and senior courses but was assigned to a sophomore homeroom. “They really never could decide exactly what I was,” he said.

But school officials recognized that he needed more than what was available at Bartlett Yancey High, and that year Neal was accepted at the prestigious North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, a free-tuition boarding school for some of the state’s best students, where he would be considered a junior.

Weldon Slayton had grown closer to Neal than he’d ever allowed himself to get with any student, and although he and Neal’s mother realized that Neal needed to get away from Caswell County to live up to his academic potential, both were concerned about him going off at age fifteen to live on his own with older students. Neal never had close friends. He was still very immature, without social skills or self-discipline. Would he be able to function without close and caring supervision? Would sending him away help him or harm him?

Before Neal was accepted by the School of Science & Math, he wrote in Weldon Slayton’s yearbook:

All hail the mighty Slayton!

You’ve always been the guiding force in my life. But who knows where you’re guiding me! I hope that (if I’m here next year) I get you for English. I don’t know why though, maybe I’m a masochist

Always your semi-willing Slave

Neal

After his acceptance, Neal wrote again in Slayton’s yearbook:

Revenge of the Neali,

Ha! I’ve remembered to write in your year book more (pitiful grammar). I suppose I’d better get serious. I’m really sad that I’ll have to leave prematurely. Your strange ways and speech patterns have become part of my existence. Going away will tear that out (albeit temporarily). I hope that you won’t mind if I call, half-crazed with panic instead of completely crazed (as usual). You’d better come and visit me or I’ll come and visit you! Just always be around and be my mentor/friend and everything should be alright.

Your devoted pupil,

Neal Henderson

Neal did call Slayton from Durham on a regular basis, and Slayton called him. Slayton also went to the campus to visit him, yet everything was not all right. Neal was doing more than procrastinating with his class work. Some of it he wasn’t doing at all.

Soon after his arrival he had become involved in several groups playing Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games, and for the first time he began making some close friends among the players.

During a D&D game in his first week at school, he met a female student from Charlotte and they began seeing each other regularly. Neal never had dated before, and he was mesmerized by having a girlfriend. When they broke up after a month, Neal soon met another young woman. And with yet another girlfriend he had his first sexual experience. Girls and D&D were taking far more of his time than studies, and his grades soon showed it. He was placed on probation, the principal lamenting that he was among the school’s top students in ability and among its lowest in using ability. Despite warnings from his mother and Slayton, Neal did little to improve his work, and although he passed all of his subjects with Cs and Bs, he was not invited to return the following year, a polite way of ejecting him.

He returned home to finish his final year of high school at Bartlett Yancey, still a year ahead of his classmates from elementary school, chagrined about letting down his mother and Slayton and others who had expected great things from him, but not at all sorry about leaving the School of Science and Math.

“It wasn’t for me,” he said. “I just couldn’t handle the freedom. I didn’t have the self-discipline to do my work.”

Despite his lack of success, Neal returned to a campus where he was as well known as the captain of the football team and the head cheerleader.

“He was the Great Neal Henderson,” said Kenyatta Upchurch, who soon was to play a major role in his life. “He was a geek, but he was
the
real smart guy on campus.”

Neal was keenly aware of his reputation, or, as he called it, his “celebrity for better or worse. They think I’m weird. Fine. I’m going to be weird. And I think I was remarkably successful in that endeavor.”

He made friends with a few of the smarter male students and organized them into a group playing some of the fantasy and strategy games he’d learned at the School of Science and Math. He created a spy game and ran around the school hallways pretending to be Agent Double O Six and a Half. He was secretary for the band, in which he played tuba. He worked on the school yearbook. He sold candy to help the Junior Engineering and Technical Society raise money to buy a computer, then became the school’s computer whiz, programming it even to play his fantasy games.

Weldon Slayton remained concerned about Neal and some of the habits he had gotten into during the year he was away. He spent too much time playing games and too little time at his schoolwork. And he was personally slovenly. Slayton had been shocked at the condition of Neal’s basement room when he visited him at home.

The room, which had been partitioned off with plyboard paneling, was a scene of wild clutter. Somewhere beneath it all was a bed, a dresser, a bookcase, a chair rarely employed for sitting. A stereo and records filled a big shelf. Another shelf was lined with trophies and certificates. A big closet was packed with his grandparents’ old clothing. Posters—the Beatles, characters from science fiction and fantasy tales—decorated the walls. Clothes were strewn with superhero comics, books, and Dungeons and Dragons materials.

“Neal, this is a pigsty,” Slayton said. “You need to clean this place up.”

If Slayton was concerned that Neal had become slovenly and lazy, paying too much attention to frivolous activities, before the school year was up, he would discover that Neal had found another reason to devote even less time to his studies.

Kenyatta Upchurch, first cousin of Bart and Emory, knew Neal only by reputation. She was in the eighth grade at Dillard Junior High, where she, too, was a gifted student. Resentful of her free-and-easy, back-to-the-land upbringing and embarrassed by her parents’ continuing sixties-alternative lifestyle, she had begun spending much of her time with her grandmother Carolyn at her big house in Milton. Her life, as she saw it, had been independent and lonely. As a small child she had been shy and withdrawn, but that had changed. Now she was talkative and almost hyperactive, aggressive and outspoken about her feelings.

Kenyatta played flute in the junior high band, and in the spring of 1985, she was scheduled to take part in a concert at the high school auditorium. Friends who were supposed to pick her up failed to do so. Fearful that she was going to miss the concert, she rode her bicycle to her uncle’s house in tears. Her cousin Bart drove her to the school. She arrived still upset. In the lobby of the auditorium, a friend beckoned to her.

“Kenyatta, come over here. I want to introduce you to Neal Henderson.”

“I was crying,” she recalled years later. “I thought, well, big deal. I didn’t pay any attention to him.”

Not long afterward, she was in the band room at the junior high when Neal came in to pick up some equipment to take back to the high school. “Something about him just clicked,” she said.

She developed an immediate and immense crush, although she could never explain why.

“Neal looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy,” she said, “a real veg type. And he walked like a turtle with his head all stuck out. I would see him get off the bus and just watch him walk. I was just crazy about him. You know how eighth-grade crushes are. They’re very embarrassing.”

Her cousin Emory had become friends with Neal, and she pestered him to tell Neal that she had a crush on him until he did it. On Thursday, April 18, a date she never would forget, she got word that Neal wanted to meet her after school. She came on her ten-speed bike.

“He was standing at the road waiting for me by the stop sign,” she said.

They went into the school and talked while Neal plunked away at a computer. Two hours later, they were still talking, and Neal had given her his class ring.

“He told me later that he was desperate to get a girlfriend at that point,” she said.

By summertime, they had moved beyond going steady. A basement door led to Neal’s room at his grandparents’ house. Kenyatta began riding her bicycle several miles to the house, hiding her bike in the woods, and sneaking up to the basement door, where Neal would let her in. “I bet I spent half the summer in that basement,” she said later.

By telling her parents that she was staying at her grandmother’s and telling her grandmother that she was staying at home, she even was able to spend nights in Neal’s room and they reveled in the illicit excitement of knowing that they were getting away with something right under the feet of Neal’s mother and grandparents. It was made all the more delicious by the knowledge that Neal’s mother didn’t like Kenyatta and didn’t want him seeing her.

All of that came to an end soon after school started again late that summer. Neal was repeating the twelfth grade. After his poor performance at the School of Science and Math, his mother and Weldon Slayton thought it best that he hold back and go to college with classmates his own age. Another year of high school would allow him a chance to mature and think about the responsibilities of college. That fall he was to begin an independent study of calculus, a class of one, the first student ever to do such a thing in Caswell County.

But one school-day morning in September, Neal and Kenyatta were in bed in his basement room. Neal got up and went upstairs to bid his mother goodbye before she left for her job at J. C. Penney’s in Danville. Kenyatta remained in bed.

“Next thing I knew,” Kenyatta recalled years later, “I heard her high heels clicking down the stairs.”

Neal’s mother tried the door, but Neal had locked it from the inside as he left.

“Why is this door locked?” Kenyatta heard her demanding. “There’s somebody in there, isn’t there?”

“There’s nobody in there, Mom.”

“Open the door, Neal.”

“I can’t.”

“O-pen the door,” Neal’s mother said with deliberateness and force.

“Open the door, Kenyatta,” Neal said in resignation.

Kenyatta opened the door to find Ann Henderson in a hot fury.

“She called me everything in the book,” Kenyatta recalled later. “Called me a homewrecker. She told Neal, ‘I can’t believe you would jeopardize this family like this.’ She said if his grandfather knew this was going on, he would kick the whole family out.

“I just stood there. I’m like, ‘Excuse me, Neal, would you like to step in here?’ He never said a thing. He never took up for me. He just let me take the brunt of it.

“I just left. I got all my stuff together and split. Next day at school he told me, ‘I think it would be better if we broke up for a while.’”

The breakup did not last long. It was only the first of many in what would be a long and tumultuous relationship. Once tapped, Neal’s libido was boundless. “He was excited twenty-four hours a day,” Kenyatta claimed. Three times during Neal’s final year at Bartlett Yancey High, Kenyatta would discover that he had sex with other girls while going steady with her.

“He didn’t think that sleeping with other girls should affect me, because he didn’t love them and it was only satisfying a physical need, so it wasn’t a big deal,” Kenyatta said. “Of course, we argued about that. That was a big point of disagreement.”

“Neal told me that girls were easy to use,” Weldon Slayton said. “It was their fault if they got hurt.”

As Slayton recalled it, he said, “Neal, you can’t
use
people.”

“But they’re so easy to manipulate,” Neal replied.

“Be more honest,” Slayton said.

“Well, it’s their fault if they can’t figure it out.”

Kenyatta discovered that year that her competition for Neal’s attentions was not just the vulnerable girls he found so easy to manipulate, but his games and his male friends as well. Neal had joined Bart Upchurch’s Dungeons and Dragons group and was becoming more and more involved in their long campaigns. Kenyatta thought that Bart and the other dungeon members resented her, thought that she was imposing herself on Neal and trying to take him away from the game. Neal balanced precariously between the two. The truth was, however, that he found D&D more mystifying and intriguing than Kenyatta or any other female.

“It was a kind of intellectual exercise,” he said later of D&D. “I like the idea of having spell-casters and ladies to save.”

When he first joined Bart’s dungeon, Neal became a magic-user-fighter and created the Legion of Love, his own version of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. But the game soon took another turn.

“Neal was always scheming,” Bart later remembered. “His character was always trying to get more powerful. He rarely went on adventures. He was just scheming to kill somebody’s character and get his stuff. Neal controlled everybody, and they never knew they were being controlled. With Neal, if you didn’t work for him, you worked against him. You were his enemy. It got to be everybody against Neal.”