Little Lost Angel (2 page)

Their joint chamber of commerce referred to the three as the “Sunny Side” of Louisville. But actually there was a sense of living in Louisville’s shadow. The interstates that flowed through all three towns brought fast-food restaurants and motels, but southern Indiana residents turned to Louisville for its television and radio stations, concerts, plays, and fine dining.

Many New Albany residents felt as if they had the best of both worlds. They could buy a house in a nice tree-lined neighborhood for half what it would cost in Louisville. If they wanted culture they could cross the river to see a touring company performing
Phantom of the Opera
at Louisville’s Center for the Arts. But more likely they’d spend their weekend nights at the local high school, watching their own or a neighbor’s son play basketball in front of five thousand cheering fans.

Unlike the rougher areas of Louisville, they could walk any street in New Albany at any hour without fear of muggers. There was an ease to life here. At lunchtime on weekdays, downtown office workers nodded to each other as they crossed paths on their way to cafeterias and delis. An old-fashioned wooden Indian stood guard outside the only tobacco shop in town—a shop that sold as many baseball cards as it did cigars.

New Albany, Indiana, was a slice of small-town America. A town that went to sleep early, woke up early, and yawned frequently. A town seemingly immune to the violence that filled bigger cities. A town in which people took life as it came and raised their children without fear.

*  *  *

When Shanda came home after her first day of school she was brimming with good news. She loved Hazelwood. Her teachers were nice, and she had already met some friendly boys and girls.

“Shanda was just glowing,” Jacque said later. “She seemed so happy. I thought, Well, I sure wasted a lot of time worrying about nothing.”

But it was just two days later that Jacque received a call at work from Hazelwood’s assistant principal. The news was startling. Shanda had been in a fight with another girl. Jacque couldn’t believe it. Like most children her age, Shanda had been in arguments before, but none had ever gone beyond name-calling. Jacque knew her daughter had a mischievous nature and liked to play the class clown, but she’d never been punished for anything more serious than talking in class.

When Jacque got home she found Shanda in tears. Her daughter had a cut on her face and a bump on the back of her head.

Jacque sat in stunned silence as Shanda explained what had happened. It had started when a girl in Shanda’s class told her that she wanted to break up with her boyfriend but was too scared to give him back his ring. “I’ll do it for you,” Shanda offered, eager to prove her friendship. “Just point him out to me after class.”

The girl’s boyfriend was leaning against a locker on the second floor of the school when Shanda boldly walked up and handed him the ring.

“What’s this?” the boy asked.

When Shanda told him that his girlfriend wanted to break up, the boy became angry. “Then why doesn’t
she
give it to me?” he asked. “Who are you?”

“Look, just take it back, okay,” Shanda said, determined not to let her classmate down.

A crowd of students began to gather, adding to the boy’s embarrassment. “Hey, I don’t even know you, girl,” he said. “Why don’t you just butt out?”

At that moment a wiry girl stepped out from the crowd and moved between Shanda and the boy. “What’s your problem?” the girl asked, eyeing Shanda up and down, taking her measure.

“I don’t think this is any of your business,” Shanda replied shakily.

“That’s my cousin Nathan you’re talking to,” the girl said, stepping closer to Shanda. They were now only inches apart.

Shanda’s pulse was racing. The strange girl exuded toughness. Her short brown hair was cut in a boy’s style. She stood with her shoulders squared, the sleeves of her sweatshirt pushed up and her fists clenched.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Shanda said. “I’m just trying to—”

She never finished. The girl bumped her chest into Shanda, pushing her back into a locker, and wrestled her to the floor. The girl was on top of her in a flash, her fists flying. Shanda tried to defend herself but the girl was too quick, too strong. The girl hit Shanda in the face, driving her head backward to the hard floor. The crowd of students had formed a circle around the fight, some shouting encouragement to the girl on top—“Get her, Amanda!”—but none offering a hand to stop the attack.

Finally a teacher pushed through the students and pulled the girl off Shanda. Down to the dean’s office marched the three of them: the angry teacher, the still cocky Amanda, and the dazed Shanda. One week of in-school detention was
the punishment dealt to both girls. Amanda smiled smugly at her sentence, while Shanda asked, “What’s in-school detention?” She was told that she and Amanda would spend the next five school days in a special classroom for students who didn’t follow the rules. Shanda glanced at the cool, pugnacious face of her assailant and shivered.

“Shanda told me that the other girl thought the whole thing was funny,” Jacque said. “I told Shanda that I didn’t like this school, but she kept saying that everything would be okay. I felt sorry for her but she still got grounded for a week. I told her it was her responsibility to stay out of fights.”

*  *  *

The fight with Shanda wasn’t the first for fourteen-year-old Amanda Heavrin, who lived with her father and older sister in a small, weather-beaten house in one of New Albany’s poorer neighborhoods. Amanda’s mother had left home years earlier and her father, Jerry Heavrin, had custody of the children.

Amanda struggled with her schoolwork. Although slightly built, she was a good athlete and played on the Hazelwood basketball team. While she tended to be quiet and polite around adults, she walked the school’s halls with the swaggering gait of a jock and was seldom seen wearing anything but her usual uniform: baggy jeans, sweatshirt, and a baseball cap. More than one Hazelwood student had mistaken the plain-faced, flat-chested Amanda for a boy.

While Amanda’s boyish appearance discouraged male suitors, it had attracted the attention of eighth-grader Melinda Loveless.

Melinda had been held back a year in school and was approaching her sixteenth birthday. She had a graceful figure, ivory-smooth skin, a delicately beautiful face, and long black curly locks. Boys, some several years older, stayed on her heels, begging for dates, but Melinda was not interested in them anymore. For after several unsatisfying sexual experiences with boys, Melinda had decided to follow the example of her older sisters, both of whom were lesbians, and find herself a lover of the same sex.

Melinda was drawn to Amanda because she thought the
fourteen-year-old resembled her father, Larry Loveless. Although he’d beaten Melinda’s mother and would later face charges that he’d abused his two older daughters, Michelle and Melissa, Larry and Melinda had been very close. He’d left home two years earlier, after a violent argument in which Melinda’s mother stabbed him with a kitchen knife. Melinda had fallen into a deep depression after her father’s departure, but in Amanda she’d found a substitute for her affection.

Melinda lived in a small, two-story home directly across from a cemetery along Charlestown Road, one of New Albany’s busiest streets. Her mother, Margie, had divorced her father shortly after their violent fight, and although she held down a good job as a nurse at Floyd Memorial Hospital, she’d struggled to make the house payments. Within a year of her divorce, however, Margie had remarried. Her new husband, Mike Donahue, held down a job in Louisville, and between the two of them they provided well for the household, which included Melinda and Melissa (the oldest sister, Michelle, having moved out by this time). Melinda had her own room, her own stereo, and a closet full of fashionable clothes, but she was unhappy. She resented her new stepfather and resisted his attempts to become friends with her.

She spent more time than ever with Amanda, exploring their desires in the secrecy of their bedrooms. Earlier that year, Margie had questioned her youngest daughter about a hickey on her neck, and Melinda had admitted that she and Amanda were lovers. Margie had responded to the admission with anger and disappointment, unable to understand why all three of her daughters were lesbians. But after a while she’d learned to accept Melinda’s sexual preferences.

Hazelwood students already knew about the two girls, who would often hug and kiss in the hallways. Some of the students harassed them, calling them “dykes” and “lesbos,” but the two young lovers ignored the taunts. They had each other, and what others thought didn’t make much difference.

On the afternoon of her fight with Shanda, “Amanda Poo” had bragged to Melinda that she’d given the new girl a
sound beating and complained about having to spend a week in detention.

At first Melinda wasn’t particularly concerned about Amanda’s punishment, since they had both been in this kind of trouble before. It just meant that they would not be able to spend time together between classes. But after a few days Amanda’s preoccupation with the girl she’d been in the fight with began to bother Melinda. Amanda said that she and the girl, named Shanda, had made up and that she really liked her. In fact, it seemed as though Shanda was all that Amanda ever talked about.

Worried about the effect Shanda was having on Amanda and determined to get to the bottom of their relationship, Melinda came in late one day so that she would be placed in detention with the two girls.

“Shanda was a very pretty little girl,” Melinda would say later. “I was sitting on the right side and Shanda and Amanda were together on the left side. Shanda went up to the desk to get some homework. I guess that was how it all started. Amanda was just staring at her and I noticed it. Then they started passing notes in the same room that I was in.”

Melinda did a slow burn as she watched Amanda and Shanda exchange smiles. From time to time Amanda would turn and smile at Melinda, and Melinda would smile back. But it was a false smile that hid an inner anger. The seed of jealousy had been planted in Melinda’s mind.

When the teacher told the students they could leave, Melinda grabbed her books and waited for Amanda in the hallway. She wanted to talk to her—alone. But Amanda came out with Shanda at her side. The two girls were giggling playfully and nudging each other. Amanda walked up to Melinda and introduced Shanda.

“Amanda told me that they were friends now,” the older girl recalled. “I could tell that Amanda liked her a lot.”

That afternoon after school, as usual, Melinda brought Amanda up to her bedroom, the place where they’d last made love. But this afternoon Melinda had something else on her mind. Earlier she’d watched Amanda stuff some notes from Shanda into the top pocket of her suspenders.
Melinda was not going to put up with this and, once inside her bedroom, tried to snatch the letters out of Amanda’s pocket. “Let me look at them!” she screamed.

“No,” Amanda said, trying to push Melinda off her. “There’s nothing in them. Just leave me alone.”

“What are you hiding from me?” Melinda smacked Amanda across the face and wrestled the notes away from her.

“One from Shanda said she thought Amanda was cute,” Melinda said later. “Stuff like that. I told Amanda to stay away from Shanda. I told her I didn’t think that it was right, you know. I said, ‘Just tell the little girl that we’re together, we’ve been together two years, and just leave it at that.’”

But Amanda couldn’t leave it at that. She was infatuated with Shanda and determined to win her over.

2

S
handa was in the kitchen helping her mother fix dinner when she broke the news that she’d become friends with the girl who’d attacked her.

“Shanda, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Jacque recalled telling Shanda.

“But, Mom, she said she was sorry about the fight,” Shanda replied. “She apologized. She just wants to be my friend.”

“She sounds like a rough type to me, Shanda,” Jacque cautioned her daughter. “I don’t want you running around with that kind of girl.”

“Please, Mom,” Shanda pleaded. “You always said you should give people a second chance. I don’t have any close friends at Hazelwood, and Amanda wants to be my best friend.”

In a decision she would come to regret, Jacque allowed Shanda to continue her budding friendship with Amanda. “I knew that she was trying to make some new friends at Hazelwood, so I decided to give Amanda a chance,” Jacque recalled. “I thought, Well, maybe I’m misjudging her.”

A few days later Jacque set eyes on Amanda for the first
time. She was returning home from work when she noticed someone sitting on the front porch with Shanda. That in itself was enough to irritate her, because she’d forbidden Shanda from sitting on the porch when she wasn’t home. As soon as the two girls caught sight of Jacque’s car, Amanda bolted from the porch and ran behind the townhouse.

“Who was that?” Jacque asked, getting out of the car.

“Do you promise not to get mad?” Shanda asked.

By now Jacque wasn’t mad, but she was curious. “Yes, I promise.”