| I wrote this story last year; it's called Epilogue to Chappaqua North.
Monday, January 11
Posted at 10:41 pm
Because I know everything about Brady Stoberson, I am entitled to say that the two most important things about him are that his friends call him Stobe, and he is lactose intolerant. It doesn’t matter as much that his middle name is Marcus, or that he got held back in fourth grade. The way I see it, he’s cool enough to have a sweet nickname; but at the same time, we have something in common that everyone only knows about me.
I used to think people made fun of me so much because I carry around a Pepsi bottle full of soymilk everywhere I go. But maybe people just don’t like me because I still wear tattoo chokers from the 90’s, and I’m 23 pounds overweight. I’m pretty unpopular, but I didn’t start this blog so I could gossip about all the people at Chappaqua North who make fun of me. I needed an easy journaling experience so I could reflect on my senior year of high school, and I thought this would be the perfect place to document what happened to Stobe at Homecoming this year.
I never got why people made fun of me for drinking so much soymilk when Stobe is also lactose intolerant. But I guess sometimes I confuse the things that everyone knows about him, and the things that only I happen to know. I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to learn all about him, though…sure, he’s physically attractive and extremely popular, but there’s something about Stobe that’s just captivating. It’s like he’s perfect at everything.
In tenth grade, Stobe was the first guy in our entire class to beat Halo 3 on the same night that everyone got it. He’s the best lacrosse player Chappaqua North has ever seen, and he still has room to boast about how he stole the ball from Allan Houston at basketball camp at the age of nine. Everyone was amazed by this story, but I wasn’t surprised that Stobe was swifter than one of the leading 3-point shooters in the NBA.
You might wonder if I should be afraid of anyone from Chappaqua North reading this blog and seeing what I’ve said about the students. It seems like a pretty irrelevant question to me, though, because everyone already knows what happened to Stobe at Homecoming. In September, Jimmy Reed got suspended for two days after writing something “disrespectful” about Ms. Beasley, the Biology teacher, on his facebook. I don’t really worry about that kind of stuff, because I’m not trying to pass judgments on anyone. I’m not giving anyone’s secrets away. Anything I put on here I heard from someone else. I see myself as the one brave storyteller in a time when everyone is too shocked and terrified to talk about what happened. The most talk we had from the school was some generic letter going home to parents saying something about how “The administration at Chappaqua North High School, though appalled, has everything under control and blah blah blah the students are fine...please don’t switch schools.” My parents just asked me if I was even semi-close with anyone involved – I said no.
Until Homecoming night, the closest interaction I ever had with Stobe was in the cafeteria in ninth grade. I was coming through the line with my tray of chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese when I tripped over Ricky Adler’s backpack. I don’t know why he thought he could just leave it sitting on the floor in the middle of the line when the cafeteria was so crowded. I started to drop my tray, which would have spilled food and soymilk all over my shoes. Just as this was happening, Stobe, who I didn’t even know was there, caught it! He seemed to come out of nowhere and catch my tray as I was dropping it – it was amazing. For about two whole seconds, we were both holding one end of the tray, and I swear he smiled at me before disappearing to sit with his cool friends. A lot of girls at Chappaqua North will admit that Stobe is really hot, but they don’t dwell on him because they think he’s some kind of asshole. I know it seems that way, but I keep thinking there’s so much more to him that’s just misunderstood. Who can trust the judgments of superficial high schoolers anyway?
Thursday, January 14
Posted at 6:27 pm
Today I was thinking about how blessed I was with having the experience of being there when Stobe’s girlfriend walked out on him at Homecoming. It was the first time he ever looked right at me and spoke. I was standing outside the door of the gymnasium trying to reattach the strap to the cheap clutch that I had purchased the weekend before from Claire’s. I overheat really easily and needed a reason to go outside anyway. Also, escaping to the bathroom meant that I would have had to listen to Paige Morgan cry about how her boy toy danced with Cecilia Murphy to Paige’s favorite song. So without hesitation I retreated past a group of sophomore boys who were high for the first time in their lives and found relief in the breeze outside. I was starting to regret wearing a sparkly dress with pouffy sleeves, but I still felt like there was something to be proud of in being the only girl who looked more like a princess than a prostitute.
It’s weird, but the most relevant thing about that Homecoming dance was that they decided to put strawberry ice cream in the punch. They even decorated it with a little place card that said, “Punch contains strawberry ice cream.” I guess since everyone knows about my compulsive Pepsi bottle carrying, the school didn’t want me to get sick and sue them. Stobe also couldn’t drink the punch, and the water in our school kind of tastes like blood; it reminds me of going to the dentist and having them poke at your gums too hard, or flossing for the first time in a month. Either way, Stobe must have been pretty thirsty. When he ran out the door after his girlfriend, flustered and sweaty, I had no choice but to wait for the perfect opportunity to offer him a sip of my soymilk.
When I saw them, his girlfriend was storming out the door with Stobe running after her. She didn’t stop walking the whole time he yelled something at her about not doing anything stupid that night. As soon as she had taken off her Christian Lacroix stilettos and was out of sight, Stobe turned around and saw me standing next to the garbage bin. I was more than ready to ask him if he wanted some soymilk and follow up by explaining that we’re both lactose intolerant and ‘how weird is that,’ when Stobe narrowed his eyes at me and grunted, “Fuck off.”
In fifth grade, Stobe called Mrs. Thurman a bitch on the playground. He didn’t say it to her face, but he was explaining to his friends how he almost got suspended for bringing a slingshot to school. It would have been expected that she would confiscate the slingshot and send Stobe to the principal’s office. Mrs. Thurman, however, who took in all the troublemakers of each grade, let Stobe keep the slingshot. Instead of taking it, she threatened him with suspension and forced him to call both his parents, explaining that he still had the slingshot in his desk and could very well have gotten suspended. After referring to Thurman as a bitch at recess, Stobe was one of the first people in our grade to swear publicly, and was therefore pretty cool.
When he told me to fuck off, he was angry but was still keeping his cool as a tough guy who owns the school. If anyone else had been there, they would have admired and approved of Stobe’s choice of words. His swearing at me didn’t really bother me as much as you may expect. He wasn’t trying to be mean; Stobe was just acting on his impeccable confidence. He seemed to know that even though his girlfriend/Homecoming date just stormed out on him, he was still on top of our Chappaqua North world and had no reason not to go back in and dominate the entire gymnasium. He swung open the door effortlessly and disappeared behind it. He would go on to joke with his friends about how his girlfriend was probably on her period, and no one could have guessed that she was actually going home to kill herself.
Saturday, January 16
Posted at 1:13 am
Stobe’s girlfriend was named in a hurry. Her parents expected her to be a boy and had chosen the name Adam. But when they gave birth to a girl, they scrambled to choose another name. The night before her birth, her parents had watched Meet Me in St. Louis, and could only come up with the name Esther, who was the main character of the movie, played by Judy Garland. The name was not exactly beautiful or even slightly contemporary, but it was all her parents could come up with. I heard her telling this whole story to some of her friends in the locker room before gym class in seventh grade. After that, her friends started calling her Es for short, and everyone else picked up on it.
Es’s parents ended up being distracted like that for her whole life. They made quick decisions and put in last minute effort, later acting like they just didn’t have time to think about her earlier. It’s kind of like when you get in trouble at school, and then you tell the principal that you didn’t know you were breaking a rule. Then the principal says something about how you were supposed to read the school manual and ignorance is not an excuse. Well it never should have been an excuse for Es’s parents.
Of course, I was always somewhat jealous of Es. She’s quintessentially pretty and popular, and I think there is some kind of respect to be held toward the person who can grab Stobe’s attention for more than a week at a time. We even sort of used to be friends in like sixth grade. When we got to middle school, everyone was so excited about being able to join clubs that Es was actually in the book club for an entire two months. We started with The Giver, but by the time we got to Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants she told us she didn’t have time to go to meetings anymore. Everyone knew that she had just realized how embarrassing it was to be in the book club.
Before she had this epiphany, she said hi to me a couple times in the hallway. My mom even drove her home after our club meetings a few times when Es’s mom didn’t come to pick her up. When we dropped her off at her house on Stockbridge, my mom wanted to talk to hers, but Es always quickly said “I guess my mom’s not home” and then shut the car door. I remember thinking it was weird that she had her own key to the house. Once I even noticed her mom’s car in the driveway.
Es was new to Chappaqua at the start of middle school, and she was the only sixth grader who didn’t have a locker. The teachers put our names on our lockers with cute little nametags, and Es simply didn’t have one. She seemed to take it personally that her locker was given to her last minute, and that it was at the end of a row of seventh grade lockers. Her nametag was constructed in a hurry, just like her name itself had been. I felt a little bad for her, but unlike me, at least she got to eat pizza and ice cream at lunch that day.
Es and Stobe kissed for the first time in eighth grade, and for the first three years of high school, there was always a picture of them kissing somewhere in the yearbook. Their outfits consistently seemed to match very nicely, and Stobe was the only guy in school who bought a dozen red roses in order to ask out his Homecoming date this year. They were both superbly photogenic, and they did everything together – except drink milk, of course.
Last year, in eleventh grade, everyone found out when Es gave her virginity to Stobe. She thought she loved him, and he thought she loved him, so she gave it away like in all the movies when the girl ends up regretting it later. It spread in half a day after she told all her friends that he pressured her, is an asshole, and she’ll never love him again. I saw Es crying in Home Ec and for the first time that year, her mascara wasn’t flattering.
I never realized until now how often Es cried in public. She probably doesn’t cry more than most people do, but for some reason, I can distinctly remember her crying at school more than anyone else: there was the time in Home Ec that messed up her mascara, and she cried before that at the eighth grade Daddy Daughter Dance. She probably knew her Dad wasn’t going to show up, but her friends had made her go anyway. And she even cried when one of Stobe’s friends called her a slut because he saw her flirting with Brent Gibson during dodgeball in gym class.
Since the beginning of high school, Stobe and Es have broken up and gotten back together four times – but whenever they were together, they had the perfect relationship. They held hands on the way to their lockers and had all the same friends. Es went to Stobe’s lacrosse games and called any girl a whore who expressed interest in him. Their friends were the first group to experiment with drinking, and they never got in trouble. Es’s parents even noticed Stobe’s presence enough to eventually remember his name. And they ate lunch together every single day, Es with her small bought carton of milk, and Stobe with his Sierra Mist.
As usual, Es’s parents made last-minute decisions – excuses, really – during the week before Homecoming. Es asked them if she could have the after party at her house, and her parents agreed knowing there would be drinking. They ignored the fact that they had a dinner party that night and weren’t even going to be around. Instead of trying to keep things under control, they just went to their party and didn’t come back until the police called them after 1 am. Everyone knows they were planning to stay out all night and pretend to be ignorant of what was going on at their house. They may have even been expecting that phone call from Officer Samson, but they didn’t know he’d say their daughter was found dead and that it was clearly not an accident.
No one really knows why Es killed herself. No one even knows what she and Stobe were fighting about at Homecoming, and he always used to shrug that off as if it were irrelevant. Everyone has their own theory, and I tried piecing together all the different opinions. Kenneth Nelson, who was lab partners with Es, thinks that she was crazy all along and just hid behind her Mac nude lipstick and Aussie hairspray. Jenny Andersen sold Es mocha frappuccinos every morning in the bookstore, and she thinks that anyone who has to worry about being perfect enough for Stobe would kill herself. Victor Gonzalez, who doesn’t really know anything about anything, said that Es’s parents neglected her emotionally, and she kept getting left behind her whole life. Maybe I should sit with him in Chem on Monday.
Tuesday, January 19
11:15 pm
Es must have used the spare key her parents leave at the back door to get into her house on Homecoming night, because she had forgotten her purse in the gym at Chappaqua North. They kept the key in a small container that was made to look like a rock. Es’s family didn’t have a rock garden or a pile of rocks anywhere near the back door, so it just sat there by itself on a shelf, visible and obvious. I would have expected a burglar to sooner find the key than a crazed suicidal milk-drinker. But anyway, Stobe wasn’t about to let his moody girlfriend ruin a night of partying with all his friends and no parents, so he grabbed her purse out of the gym and everyone got in the limo to head over to Es’s house.
The limo and a couple other cars showed up at 3290 Stockbridge Road probably not long after 12:30 am. Stockbridge is a dead end road on the north side of Chappaqua that comes off of Bedford and is no more than a five or six minute drive from our school. At about this time, I was home taking off my sparkly drug store makeup getting ready for bed. I can only imagine what happened next: Stobe’s friends probably let him walk up to the front door first, and he opened it with Es’s key that he found in her purse. Es probably would have been in her room either getting ready for the party or still pouting about their stupid fight. It was her fault that she walked home, anyway. Stobe knew how emotional she could be, so he may have asked everyone to wait outside for a minute while he took the liberty of checking out the house and Es’s parents’ collection of alcohol. It was an unusually warm October night, so people would have been willing to hang around outside the house for a bit.
The foyer of Es’s house is grand and beautiful, but I’ve heard it has one flaw. One time I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the stall of a bathroom next to one of the Spanish classrooms when Es’s friend, Lizzie Burns, was telling someone about it. Apparently there is a small knick on one of the tall white columns immediately inside the house on the left. On a Tuesday night in ninth grade, Es’s father almost lost his job. Apparently, he came home drunk that night and continued to drink. When Es got dropped off after a late Chappaqua North soccer game, she walked in to find her father disheveled and angry. I didn’t think he was the violent type, but I guess you never know who someone will be after a certain amount of alcohol. When Es stepped inside the house, he swung a Grey Goose bottle at her and hit the column when she ran.
Three years later, Es’s parents had failed to have that column repainted, and I can only imagine that it met Stobe’s shoulder as he brushed past it. No one can tell me what happened while he was inside, but I’m sure he wasn’t gone for long. He probably checked Es’s room, the kitchen, and maybe a couple bathrooms. I can picture Stobe walking around their house calling out Es’s name, but not really being concerned about her. I don’t blame him; she seemed so temperamental at the dance. Maybe he had the booze cabinet in the back of his mind the whole time and didn’t notice that the basement light was on until four minutes later. That’s where he found her, and the first thing he saw were her new Christian Lacroix shoes dangling from the ceiling. She must have put them back on somewhere along her walk up Bedford Road, down Heathcote Drive, and then to her house on Stockbridge. I saw her take them off with my own eyes, and Stobe mentioned them in an interview for a local newspaper as the first thing he saw. That paper is mostly just gossip, so these details about finding Es’s body were gold to them.
I wonder why she had her shoes on in the house. She probably liked hearing the clicking sound they made on her marble floors. That sound can make the wearer of any stilettos feel sexy and important, even if they’re the Target brand. She probably clicked around her house for a minute to gather confidence before marching down the basement stairs with a rope. And who knows? Maybe she even did it on Homecoming night because she wanted to look beautiful when someone found her. The first thing Stobe saw were these shoes, and he probably looked right at them for a while before he could bring himself to look up. When he finally did, he saw Es’s red lips, stained not from lipstick but from drinking too much strawberry ice cream punch.
In tenth grade history class, we all had to watch one of those documentaries on the Holocaust. You basically see a million dead bodies in 45 minutes, and the shock hits you even if you’ve seen it many times before. You forget about trying to learn, you forget about Hitler’s motives, and you even forget about how Kyle Douglas came in late and had to sit next to you. You just sort of end up with this permanently shocked face that you wear for the rest of the morning until you can finally go to lunch and get distracted by the fact that they made tater tots again. But from 2nd period until then, your eyes are wide open and your lips are always a little bit apart. You look like you would be jumpy and easily startled, but really you feel like you’re moving in slow motion. You don’t really look anyone in the eye but just gaze past them. Nothing can happen that would scare you or stop you from floating around aimlessly.
Stobe wandered out of Es’s house looking just like that, lost and speechless. He looked like that for the rest of our senior year at Chappaqua North.
Friday, January 22
1:24 am
I had to post this story on my blog because it is unlike anything that has ever happened to us. The funny thing is that even though people were shocked at Es’s suicide, no one could seem to draw their attention away from Stobe. It seems like the most important thing that happened was not that Es killed herself, but that Stobe saw her. Stobe was the one who walked around the entire house, where death was present. He was the one who walked down the basement stairs and looked it in the eye. It was less about experiencing death than it was about holding hands with it. From the second she kicked away the chair, Es didn’t matter anymore. Since that second, she’s been gone, and there’s no use in dwelling on her. Maybe it sounds harsh, but Stobe and I are still here; there is something left to be said about Stobe as a high schooler, about his dumbfounded and mysteriously distant facial expression, and about the rest of his life. There is nothing, though, left to be said about Es.
By the time the police and the ambulance arrived, the world of Chappaqua North – the world that Stobe was on top of – had already become like a mosh pit, and he was lost in it. Stobe spent every day for the rest of the year being pushed around in a massive, fluid crowd of hundreds of high school students who were thinking about videogames and making out; Stobe was the only one with an adult face. He wasn’t like this because his girlfriend died young or because he lost someone who was close to him. It was simply because he had faced death, when in reality he was decades away from it.
Wednesday, February 10
3:38 pm
Last Monday, I swear I saw Stobe drinking milk in the cafeteria. He wasn’t even sitting with his friends. I saw him buy a carton, take a few long sips from it, and then throw it in the trash. It wasn’t like a big deal or anything, and he’s probably not as intolerant as I am, but there was something about the way he drank maybe half of it and then dropped it in the garbage can like he was trying to show himself that he didn’t give a shit about finishing the fucking drink he just bought. It was like he thought the only way to get around that barrier in his life was by forcing himself to give in. Instead of surmounting the obstacle, he just let it run over him, crush him, and then disappear.
I couldn’t understand what he was doing, and I felt like our one connection had been ripped out of my hands. Stobe obviously didn’t care that he shouldn’t have been drinking milk. He was almost like a different person. It was the first time anyone saw his face looking like something other than the disturbed victim that he was on Homecoming night. And I’m the only one who saw it. I glanced down at my notebook for a second wondering if I should write what I had just witnessed. When I looked up, Stobe had walked right out of the cafeteria, alone for the first time, his backpack weighing him down on one side. |
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