Too Young to Kill (19 page)

“Sarah hated sluts,” a former friend added. “Sarah said that since Adrianne had come into the house and fucked Kory Allison, ‘she’s a bitch and she’ll pay.’”

Sarah was back at the party house with Jill Hiers later that day after school. Sarah asked Jill to call Adrianne at home. She wanted to harass her.

Sarah leaned into the phone receiver so she could hear the conversation.

Under Sarah’s direction, Jill told Adrianne she had made a huge mistake in sleeping with Kory. She should have never done it.

The call seemed to prove that they were messing with Adrianne. Teasing and taunting her. Playing some sort of a game.

Bullying.

Adrianne sounded sincere. “I made a mistake, come on. Tell her I made a mistake!”

Sarah listened and laughed.

“I will. . . .”

Sarah and Jill looked at each other. Giggled.

“It was just one little mistake and it will never happen again.”

Adrianne reached out to several of Sarah’s friends, telling them she was desperate for Sarah’s forgiveness. But she also wanted to know why Sarah was now trying to turn everyone against her.

True. One by one, Sarah went around and started to bad-mouth Adrianne to those in the group.

Mean Girl
stuff.

From that moment on, Sarah later admitted, Adrianne called her cell number repeatedly.

“Every hour on the hour.”

But Sarah did not always answer.

It was as if she was torturing Adrianne for doing something Sarah herself had set up and put her stamp on. To Adrianne, she and Sarah were
not
an item. It wasn’t as if she had gone out and cheated on Sarah. What the hell was the big deal?

Get over it.

The next day (now two days after Adrianne had slept with Kory), Adrianne was at the party house hanging out. She had gone over to see Henry Orenstein.

Sarah showed up and initiated an argument with Adrianne.

“Slut!” Sarah screamed at her. Adrianne was officially now on Sarah’s shit list. She could do no right in Sarah’s eyes.

“Why do you hate me so much?” Adrianne asked. “I thought you liked me, Sarah.”

Sarah got in her face. Henry was there, watching.

“Whore!” Sarah said. Then she pulled a knife from her pocket and, after flipping the blade open, held it out in front of herself.

Adrianne looked down. “If you want to kill me,” she said, “do what you must!” She started crying. Ran down into the basement.

Sarah left.

36

Several days after Adrianne had sex with Kory Allison, Sarah showed up at the Rock Island party house. By now, Cory Gregory later said, Sarah and the others—including himself—were referring to Adrianne as a “slut” and “whore.” And also spreading vicious rumors about her. Yet, things were about to get much worse than name-calling for Adrianne Reynolds, who believed she could gain back Sarah’s trust and friendship.

“I was just going over there to hang out,” Sarah later claimed, referring to the day she showed up at the house after that night when Adrianne had had sex with Kory Allison. Sarah made it sound as though she had just happened to be in the area and decided to pop in and party a little bit with whoever was on hand at the house.

This was a lie.

Jill Hiers was there. As soon as Sarah walked in, Jill approached her. She had some “huge” news to share. From this alone, it’s obvious Sarah showed up at the house because she knew what was going on.

“Adrianne’s here,” Jill told Sarah, “and you’ll never guess where she is.”

Before Adrianne had retreated to the basement with that “headache” on the night she first went to the party house, she and Henry Orenstein had sat together on the couch in the living room and talked.

“She was brought to the house, just kind of,” Henry remarked later, “everybody was just walking around talking to everybody that was there. Eventually I just got to Adrianne and was talking to her for a while.”

This was before Adrianne went downstairs with Kory.

Adrianne and Henry expressed a desire to see each other and hang out again in the coming days. They wanted to spend time together alone. Henry had a soft spot for Adrianne. He liked her. She was not some object to mess with and tease. Henry, who was slightly older than Cory and Sarah, undoubtedly more mature, saw Adrianne as a fragile teenager, like himself. Someone who needed a friend.

But after Adrianne retreated downstairs and had that tryst with Kory Allison and left, Henry realized he never got the chance to obtain her phone number. With Adrianne gone, he figured,
What the heck. Didn’t matter.
Maybe he’d see her again, maybe not.

“I wasn’t really interested in Adrianne in that way at first,” Henry said. “She kind of grew on me.”

Adrianne opened up to Henry earlier that night, telling him about some of the problems she’d had back home in Texas. She also spoke of her passion for singing and a career in music someday. Adrianne told Henry she loved Tony, her father, but more than that she respected him.

“She couldn’t say the same thing for Joanne,” Henry recalled. “Adrianne was hurt that Joanne didn’t trust her.”

Henry came home from work the day after that party-sex with Kory to find Nate Gaudet, Sarah, Cory, and Jill together in the living room. They were laughing. They seemed high. They had someone on the other end of the telephone line. Someone they were obviously messing around with.

It was Adrianne. They were calling her any insult they could think of.

That day, Henry soon found out, had started with Sarah showing up at the house and telling Jill she was “jealous” of Adrianne and all the attention she was getting from the group. “You call her,” Sarah ordered Jill, “and talk some shit to her. I don’t want that bitch over to this house anymore!”

Sarah dialed Adrianne’s number and handed the phone to Jill.

Henry didn’t like what he had walked in on, but he didn’t say anything. He knew his place.

They were taking turns, passing the phone around, “talking shit,” one of the kids later said. “Calling her [names].”

“You’re a stupid bitch,” Sarah said at one point. “I’m gonna beat your ass next time I see you.”

“You’re a liar!” Nate Gaudet shouted.

“Whore!” Cory screamed, his hands cupped on the sides of his mouth.

Then they’d all laugh out loud, sure Adrianne could hear.

Sarah and Cory viewed Adrianne as an outsider, someone who seemed “cool,” but someone they didn’t truly know much about. On top of that, Adrianne lived in what was a strict household compared to the rest of them. They wanted to be certain Adrianne was the person—the rabble-rouser—she had claimed to be. Sarah came up with the idea that the best way to see who she was would be to give Adrianne that little test. See if she passed.

“[Sarah] knew that if she brought Adrianne to the house,” a source said, “she’d be able to test her trust, as long as Sarah didn’t inform [those in the house] of her plan.”

Sarah had told Adrianne that “it was cool” if Adrianne went off with one of the guys in the house and got her groove on. Some said she even encouraged Adrianne to do it. This was why Adrianne was so rattled by the name-calling and change in demeanor on everyone’s part. She couldn’t understand what was going on.

“She pretty much told Adrianne that everything was A-okay, but then as soon as Adrianne did it, Sarah turned around and changed her story,” a source recalled.

“Slut . . . whore . . .” They continued hurling insults at Adrianne over the telephone.

“What y’all doin’?” Henry asked as he walked in on the situation.

Sarah explained.

Henry laughed along with them, he admitted. Then, after they got sick of messing with Adrianne and hung up on her, Henry said, “Hey, let me have her phone number and I’ll call her, too.”

Sarah jumped. “Here,” she said, handing him the number. “Go ahead and call her.”

More laughter.

Henry Orenstein took the number and the phone and went off into the bathroom by himself.

As soon as she picked up the line, Adrianne screamed, thinking it was Nate, Sarah, Cory, and Jill calling her back.

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Yo, yo! Hold on there,” Henry said. He explained himself.

“What now?” Adrianne asked. She didn’t trust any of them.

“Hey, I’m not callin’ to give you any shit. I’m actually callin’ to see if you were serious about comin’ over to hang out with me.”

Adrianne went quiet. Then she stopped crying. “Sure, sure,” she said.

They set up a time to meet that same week.

“Guess what Adrianne’s doing?” Jill told Sarah after she walked into the party house. Jill looked toward the door heading down into the basement bedroom.

“What?” Sarah asked.

Jill pointed.

Adrianne was back, all right. In fact, Jill explained to Sarah, she was downstairs right then, having sex again—only this time with Henry Orenstein.

37

Adrianne would not have been able to go back over to the party house if Henry Orenstein had picked her up. Tony and Joanne Reynolds were somewhat onto Cory and Sarah. Adrianne had mentioned that she thought they were messing with her. Tony and Jo had seen how upset Adrianne had become over the situation. On top of that, Tony and Jo did not want boys picking Adrianne up at their East Moline home.

Adrianne had called and left Henry Orenstein a voice mail message early in the day. “Sarah turned everyone against me. . . . I don’t get it! I just want to be Sarah’s friend. I didn’t know she didn’t want me to sleep with Kory.”

So Henry Orenstein had Melinda Baldwin (pseudonym), another teen who lived in the house at various times, call Adrianne.

“Yeah,” Adrianne told Melinda, “please pick me up. . . . I cannot leave my house with a guy.”

Melinda said she’d be right over. The plan was for Melinda to tell Jo and Tony, if they asked, that she was Sarah’s sister.

Now Adrianne was back in the basement of the party house, after that phone call Henry Orenstein had set up; this time, however, she was in Henry’s bed, and Sarah Kolb was upstairs with Jill Hiers, listening.

Henry, of course, being the horndog that he admittedly was, had planned all along to get Adrianne into his bed. And if one believes him, “It wasn’t hard to do,” he recalled. But there was more in this for Henry, he added. He liked Adrianne.

Henry Orenstein didn’t think anyone else was in the house—besides Melinda Baldwin, who was upstairs in her room—while he and Adrianne were downstairs.

“We chilled,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” Adrianne told him as they snuggled after sex, “why Sarah and them hate me so much? They said they were my friends. I don’t know what I did.”

For Adrianne, this was the worst part of the tension separating her from Sarah, Cory, and the others: the
not
knowing. She had no way of defending herself, sticking up for her cause, if she didn’t know the problem.

Henry had no way of reading into Sarah, he said. He didn’t know her that well, other than seeing her at the mall, talking to her at the house, drinking and smoking with her once in awhile.

The Juggalo culture in the QC was, at one time, “pretty much open,” a QC Juggalo explained to the author. “You could walk around, see somebody you didn’t know, and start up a conversation. You knew they were a Juggalo and you could just start talking to them without all the frills of introductions. . . .”

Sarah was not, by definition, a Juggalette. She didn’t like the rap music Juggalos listened to; but she did adhere to just about every other attribute of the culture, fitting right in.

Henry heard people walking upstairs.

“I’m goin’ up there to get a cigarette,” he told Adrianne. “I’ll be right back.”

He walked upstairs. No one was around. He went into the kitchen. Then he heard all of them in the attic above.

He went up.

“You got her down there, don’t you?” Sarah asked, smiling.

“Yeah . . . ,” Henry said with a bashful (if not boastful) smirk, indicating that he had slept with Adrianne. “And y’all need to leave her alone.”

They busted up laughing. By now, Cory was there, too. He and Sarah were as high as they could get without falling out. Nate Gaudet was with Jill downstairs.

Henry watched as they got up and decided, he later said, “to go sit in the living room.” In front of the door heading down into the basement.

They wanted to be there when Adrianne came up.

In the living room, Sarah and Cory sat together, eyes focused. Ready. Waiting. Nate and Jill came in and joined them.

Henry went back down to his basement bedroom.

“I have to use the bathroom,” Adrianne said. Henry could tell she was nervous. Adrianne knew who was upstairs.

Adrianne opened the door and went straight for the bathroom. Henry came up right behind her and waited in the living room.

When she came out of the bathroom, Adrianne slipped on some newspapers spread out on the floor outside the door and fell on her butt.

The crowd in the living room erupted into laughter.

“Look at you . . . on the ground!” somebody yelled.

“They started making fun of her,” one housemate recalled.