Under the Bridge (12 page)

Marissa, who looked like a pixie and was not yet fourteen, and thus the youngest girl under the bridge, was taken by surprise when she heard Josephine suddenly scream. Josephine screamed: “Why are you trying to ruin my life?”

She yelled this at this girl Reena, who looked startled as well.

“I'm not—” Reena started to say, but then Josephine's voice rose up, and all the girls under the bridge heard her yell again at Reena. “You're trying to ruin my life!”

Reena protested. “No,” she said. “I'm sorry. I—”

“Why are you talking bullshit?” Dusty said, or maybe it was Kelly, or
maybe Laila. The voices were a blur of accusations and girls' screams.

“No—” Reena said again. There was a lit cigarette in Josephine's hand. She pushed the burning cigarette into Reena's forehead, searing the girl's skin. Reena cried out and swung back at Josephine, and as she did this, as she moved to hit Josephine, Kelly rushed forward, by Josephine, and reached out as well, hitting Reena with a closed fist.

Dusty moved closer to Reena, but Marissa backed away. She left the dark cave under the bridge and scrambled up the hill, and she joined the other frightened girls and the two boys, Warren and Dimitri, who had also run up the stairs. Marissa buried her face in her boyfriend's arm.

“Oh my God …,” Tara was saying beside her. “Oh my God.”

Below them, a semicircle had formed, and this semicircle was surrounding the girl on the stairs, Reena. She had tried, and she tried again, to run through and past the girls who surrounded her.

“Don't let her leave,” someone yelled as she moved, or tried to move, out of the circle and up the stairs. Stopped by the swarming circle, she was thrown, forced down on the railing, and the circle tightened around her, closer, the fists to her head, the slapping hands on her skin, the fists on her shoulder.

Watching the circle below, Tara turned to Jen, and said, “I can't watch this. It disgusts me.”

Later Tara would tell the police, “They just kept beating on her and I can't … I don't even know what it was about.”

While Marissa cried in his shoulder, Dimitri saw Warren running down there, down the stairs, and he saw Warren kick Reena. Kick her in the head. A girl.
Why is he doing that?
he wondered. He doesn't even know that girl. Dimitri left the frightened girls then, and he bounded down the hill, and he grabbed Warren away from the semicircle, which was beastlike and black, crouching, wailing, shrieking. “Chill out, Warren. It's not your fight.” He wanted Warren away, wanted Warren calm and not part of this at all.

But Warren seemed possessed of a sudden adrenaline, drawn by the Furies, and he did not leave the circle. Willow kicked Reena's feet so Reena slid off the stairs and landed face down in the mud, and as she lay there, she pleaded with the furious girls around her, “Stop! Please! Stop!”

“I'm sorry,” she said, covering her face from the blows and the roars, as she lay in the mud, beneath them all, felled by the force of the Furies.

Tara would later tell the police, “I remember when she was down there, she was sitting with each of her hands over her face and saying, ‘Stop, stop. Stop.' She had her hands over her face. ‘Stop it. Okay, that's enough. Stop it now.'”

It was Laila who became Reena's protector, suddenly. Laila leaned forward, raised her voice. “Next person to touch her,” Laila said, “gets a shot from me.”

“And nobody did it again,” Dusty would explain later, “because Laila is a tough girl, and everybody is afraid of her.”

The girls left Reena alone then, and Marissa looked down, and she saw Reena with her hands on her face, as if she was trying to clean her skin, and she was crying, so it might have been tears, Marissa thought. She was crying so it might have been tears, but it might have been blood.

Dusty walked by Reena scornfully.

“I'm sorry,” Reena said. “I have to go home now.”

Dusty kept on walking, and her fist was sore.

Willow left as well, walking up the stairs past Reena. “When I left,” she would later say, “Reena was sitting down there, going, ‘Stop, stop, stop,' and it was dark so I couldn't even see if she was bruised, but I could still hear her voice when I was going up the stairs.”

They scattered, both the fighters and the fearful. The scattering caused a kind of confusion, a disparate unraveling of the group, and the frenzy that cohered them only five minutes before dissipated, and some of them were ashamed. In this scattering, there was, as it would later turn out, a true confusion as to the whereabouts of all involved.

But they all could agree that Reena walked up from under the bridge, and she passed them, ashamed too, not asking for help, only leaving them, broken, bleeding, heading over the bridge to return to her home and her family.

Marissa looked over onto the bridge, and saw that “Reena was staggering, a little. She looked light-headed. She looked a little dazed.” Marissa wanted to go home as well, for the tough girls must think she was prissy and delicate, and she did not really care, only she did not want them to see her like this, still trembling and horrified. Marissa walked over to say good-night to her friends, who were waiting for their mothers in the parking lot. There was a garish light on the girls; they seemed swept with an orange that was lurid and false, and the real moon
was fading. Someone had taken Reena's knapsack, and Maya was throwing the pajamas into the water, and another girl was ripping the pages out of Reena's diary, and someone threw the diary down into the dark water. Laila held Reena's bottle of Polo Sport, for while the diary and pajamas were unwanted, there was value in an object from Ralph Lauren. Tara was not there, later, when the bottle was finally destroyed as well. The bottle smashed and the perfume evaporated into the concrete, and the shards of glass remained.

As she walked home, Tara worried at the cruel acts that she had seen. She would have to call Syreeta now and tell her that Warren had kicked a girl in the head. Syreeta would not believe it, as Tara did not believe it, for it made really no sense at all, and it was wrong, she thought. Everything she'd seen was wrong, and she bit her cheek hard.

Tara returned home, considered calling Syreeta, but she decided she would tell her in the morning. It did not occur to Tara to tell her parents of the fight she had witnessed, because “that would only worry them, knowing their daughter was around people who could be cruel like that.” Marissa too did not tell her parents when she returned home, fearing the story would worry and upset them, and why would she tell her parents of such a horrible thing? (“What am I going to say? ‘Hey, I just saw a big fight!'”) She lay in bed, thinking of Dimitri and how he'd protected her, and how she hated it—hated seeing those girls scream and kick and turn savage as they had never been.

•   •   •

Josephine and Dusty were signed in by the night supervisor at Seven Oaks. Her notes show their return at 11:03. Nothing unusual was reported in their appearance, and the girls were visually inspected for signs of intoxication or impairment. No such signs were observed.

Josephine lay in bed, and she thought, “Reena's probably gonna go home with a black eye and she'll wake up in the morning and she'll say, I'm not going to talk shit about Josephine Bell anymore.'”

•   •   •

On this same evening, around 11:30, Syreeta awoke, though hours earlier she had brushed her teeth, undressed, put on her pajamas, and drifted, suddenly, unexpectedly, to sleep. Sometimes the events of her day would coalesce in her mind, not for examination so much as for appreciation.
She thought of the careful way she had closed up Brady's. Yes, she had locked the cash register and brought down all the blinds. Her white shirt, yes, she had checked in her closet to see if it was clean and pressed to wear tomorrow to the mall. She thought of Warren's face as she hopped on the bus and how he'd offered to walk her home—wanted her to be safe and accompanied on the dark roads. She wondered who the girl was on the field, whom she had never seen before, with the scared smile and the broad shoulders and who was the girl on the field with the Cleopatra eyes. All of this, she thought, and then she just felt odd. She slept, but she woke. She felt the oddness once more. She wanted to be out of her bed, as if her bed created the sensation she'd felt earlier, felt even before she was on the field with all her friends, watching the satellite fall through the sky.

“I put my pillow on the bedroom floor. I felt really funny.”

The phone rang, and it was Warren. His voice was gentle and apologetic. Perhaps he said something about a fight, but she wasn't listening, and she said, “Warren, I'm sleeping. Call me tomorrow.” She returned to the floor and clutched her knees. She felt as if she was being submerged, as if her breath was being pulled out of her, replaced by a rope with tiny blades.
What is this bad feeling,
she wondered,
when I have not hurt anyone and no one has hurt me?
The night went on, darkening and star filled, with the full moon above, and the police noticing they had not received the usual calls about teenagers partying, only calls of concern about “something in the sky.” All over View Royal, her friends slept. Diana, and Felicity and Marissa and Tara, they slept in their rooms with the posters of Snoop Dogg and Michael Jordan and Leonardo DiCaprio, slept with their childhood dolls and their normal dreams, but Syreeta could not sleep and she lay on her bedroom floor, overtaken by what may, in fact, have been dread, instinct, or empathy, but which, she in her youth, at fourteen, could only describe as “a really bad feeling.”

O
N SATURDAY MORNING,
after the sun had risen over the Gorge, a man by the name of Gerald Morris set off to visit his son. Every weekend, Gerald, a dark-haired man of thirty, would get on his mountain bike and head down to Gorge Park. He biked slowly that day, appreciating the calm beauty of the waterway. Canada geese floated on the surface, soon rising to the rainless sky.

As he approached the hill where the quaint white schoolhouse stood, Gerald Morris lifted his body slightly to add pressure to the bicycle pedals, so he could make it up the slope. He rode over the fallen copper leaves, past the tall oak tree with branches outstretched and empty. And near the white schoolhouse, something caught his eye, and he braked, very suddenly.

He did not notice the blood right away.

He got off his bike and looked down at the grass where the objects lay. An Adidas jacket. A pair of girl's black shoes. The jacket and the shoes, he would later testify, “were pretty soaked from the morning dew. From the morning mist, they were pretty wet.”

It was strange, the haphazard position of the shoes, for as he noticed, “They weren't together like somebody took them off in one spot. They looked like they'd just been dropped there.” The shoes were black platform shoes. (“I don't know how you'd describe them, but they were a thick pair of shoes.”) He thought again that it was strange the way “they were separated, maybe two feet apart from each other.”

In the grass, also wet, was the Adidas jacket. He lifted the jacket from the grass, and as he did so, he saw it then—“a trickle of blood.” On the inside of the jacket on the white fabric, Gerald Morris saw “four or five drops … it didn't look like much blood.”

He picked up the shoes, and placed them together, side by side, on the steps of the old white schoolhouse.

He placed the jacket on the white picket fence.

Murder or violence did not occur to him as he touched the clothes of a girl. Instead, he thought of being young, of his former nights of abandon when he was a student at Shoreline and would go to this very place for revelry. (“I used to party in that park.”) Lying on the hill, looking at the stars, the dizzy stars…. Gerald Morris did not think of beatings or lonely girls, only of parties and crowds, and he thus came to the conclusion that a teenager had lost their coat and thrown about her shoes in the midst of a good time. He himself had “lost a lot of jackets the same way” when he was young. And so, kindly, he placed the jacket on the fence, “figuring the teenager would come back and look for it.”

As he biked away, he thought of wild youth and tossed shoes and those years when there were no worries of taxes and car payments and alimony. He thought to himself, “That must have been some party!”

•   •   •

Ernestine Anderson, a woman in her fifties, saw the Adidas jacket on the fence as she was driving to work at Thrifty's Foods.

“That's Robby's coat!” she screamed to her boyfriend, Tim. It was a strange coincidence, for as she explains, “The night before, Tim and I were at my friend's, and she told us that her grandson Robby had his black and white Adidas jacket stolen from school, and that had been his
third
jacket stolen.”