Under the Bridge (11 page)

On the night of November 14, two occurrences—one natural, the other man-made—enhanced the beauty of the waterway. There was a full moon on November 14, so large and full, the radiance illuminated what was normally hidden and so difficult to see. Another kind of light would break suddenly and wondrously through the dark above. According to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, this phenomenon occurred at precisely 9:12. At 9:12, the sky was silent, and yet it seemed as if fireworks were above, streaming across the sky, like wisps of fire, red and yellow, these lights, which left a glowing trail, shimmering as if in competition with the boldness of the moon.

At 9:12, a Russian rocket fell back to earth and exploded as it fell. The fuel tank and motor, all the mechanics of ascent, collapsed, and jettisoned, slowly, and could not orbit around the earth, and instead burned up as they hit the atmosphere. A scientist could better explain this demise. Debris in the sky turned to a light show and left no hazardous materials on the ground. There was merely an implosion and transformation to fire in the sky. And in this way, the night sky, already so clear and rainless and lit with moon, had never before been so strange and fiery.

*

On the Gorge that night, Patrick O'Connor was in a canoe with friends when he witnessed the sight. “We lucked out,” Patrick O'Connor later recalled. That night, the Gorge seemed possessed of a magical beauty, as idyllic and wondrous as a place could be, and the men paddled. “We were in the right place at the right time,” Patrick O'Connor would later say.

Others in Victoria were frightened by the fire in the sky. The phone rang rapidly, more so than usual, at the police station. Dispatchers received thirty-six emergency calls from people saying, “I heard a gun-shot.” “I saw something weird in the sky.” “I think there's a fire outside.” “There was this noise, this light, I don't know what it is, but something went up somewhere; something lit up and burned.” The dispatcher, Derek Morrison, told the frightened citizens of his city not to worry. “It's a four-stage SL 12 rocket,” he told one particularly interested but skeptical former military man. “That's right, sir, a Russian rocket. Nothing to worry about. Just a little spacecraft debris.”

In the morning, the U.S. National Weather Service's Spokane, Washington, office would further reassure those frightened by the blaze above when they reported that the “space debris landed safely in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington.”

In Victoria, the morning paper would report on the vision with a headline telling the townspeople to relax. “Relax. It was the Russians, not the Martians.”

On the field at Shoreline School, at 9:12, Tara and Dimitri and Warren and Marissa, Jen and Syreeta, Kelly and Josephine, Chelsea, and Tenille and Richie D. and many others gathered for a party, would also look up, at the moment, look up to see the full moon and the rare and bright burning in the sky. Forever after, they would remember this evening, and as the police divers used the words “carefully floated” to perhaps add some poetry to the discovery of a dead girl in the Gorge, the students of Shoreline would, when speaking to police or judges, inadvertently title the evening as if to soften the horror of all that unfolded after the rocket's fall. They would not say, “That was the night of the death,” nor would they say, “The night she got killed.” Instead, they would say, when speaking of that night, “That was the night of the Russian satellite.”

M
ARISSA's GOING TO
meet us down at Shoreline,” Syreeta said to Tara as the two girls locked up Brady—s Fish and Chips and waited outside for Syreeta's mother to arrive.

Brady's was spotless. Both girls were never lazy, nor did they want to leave Diana's parents' restaurant in less than perfect condition. It was a kind of respect. They liked knowing they could walk away and return the next morning, to take down the chairs and refill the ketchup bottles and cash in, with all in order and no disarray.

“Party at Shoreline!” Tara said, imitating a tough boy, drawling her words.

“Party!” Syreeta said, although she wasn't in much of a mood. Sure, she liked to see her friends and walk around the field, and that night seemed as if it would be like all the others, with Warren's arm around her and Diana making her laugh and Tara finding out some gossip she'd sworn not to tell about who all was hooking up in the bushes, and getting a little light-headed and swooning around on the moonlit grass. Yet Syreeta felt a sharp pang. She did not know Josephine or Kelly's plan, and had never heard of an unmarked grave, and yet on that night, as they waited for her mother to arrive outside Brady's, she felt a sudden pain in her stomach.

Tara, pink cheeked and unharmed, was looking up at the sky.

Syreeta looked up too, and saw the moon, immense and complete.

•   •   •

Someone screamed. Everyone seemed to scream around her. All Syreeta's friends were looking up at the sky. The lights came quickly, burst out of the darkness, rapid and beautiful, red tumbling before turning to yellow, a bright red she'd never seen in the sky before. The
red slashed through the blackness, like a tear of silk, followed by a pale gold flame that dangled and disappeared, leaving the sky black again.

Someone said it was a meteor shower. No, it was a satellite. It was from Russia. What was it? They didn't know, only that they all watched it together, here and then gone, and Syreeta was glad she had seen it, with all her friends around. Before she left that night, they'd all seen the lights in the sky.

Warren poured a little bit of vodka into a Macs cup filled with Coke. He watched Willow's face as the thing fell through the sky. Willow was with her best friend, Maya, and she was sharing a mickey of vodka with Eve, the pretty girlfriend of Erik Cash. Everyone said Eve should be a model. She was tall and black and her cheekbones were so high. On the field there were only a few girls whom Warren did not know. He'd never seen Dusty before, and she seemed like a big and noisy presence. Kelly and Dusty were standing beside Josephine, and there was a fourth girl who Warren did not know—the fourth girl was Reena Virk. There were so many girls on the field that night. All of the Crips were up at Brandon's house for his birthday party. Warren hadn't gone because he wanted to spend the night with Syreeta. He was getting tired of the Crips as well. He'd even asked to be jumped out—to take another beating in order to officially renounce his membership.
You'll either end up dead or in jail.
“You really want to leave the family, 'bro?” Erik had asked, and Warren had mumbled something about his girlfriend and being in love.

On the field, Warren looked at Maya and thought of the rumors he'd heard—that something really bad had happened to Maya, really bad, like worse than you could ever imagine. He thought of this mystery now, observing the way Willow stood so protectively beside Maya. Willow's kind face was rapturous, there, in the brief second, tilted upward, with her lips parted as if she was still stunned by the moon, lasting and full, while the pieces of the rocket burned up and looked like falling stars. She saw him sitting there, worrying, and she smiled at him, while the last light of what he thought was a spaceship fell somewhere to the earth in Seattle or Oregon. Looking at her sudden smile, he willed himself to forget it, stop worrying, forget about the fact that he was totally fucking unloved and unwanted.
Just forget that,
he told himself.
Forget that you don't have a home.

*

Soon after the satellite fell from the sky, Syreeta knocked on the front door of Shoreline. She wanted to call her mother to come pick her up because she just wasn't feeling very well. The school was locked, so Syreeta set off in search of Warren so she could tell him she wanted to go home.

Soon after the falling lights left the sky, Laila, a girl with rings on each of her fingers, walked purposefully onto the field. Her hair was long and black and she was trained in martial arts, with a particular skill at kickboxing. She wore heavy black eyeliner, and this, and her regal bearing, had earned her the nickname of Cleopatra. “I'm here to fight a girl,” Laila announced to no one in particular. “Her name starts with an R or S.”

Hearing this, Reena began to run.

Soon after the debris burned through the darkness, a boy named Nate hurled a rock at the window of Shoreline School.

Nate couldn't have known that the simple act of throwing a rock would change the night forever, and later, he could not even recall why he had thrown the rock. Just something in him—boredom, or being fourteen. He just picked it up and chucked it, and then the window broke and with it, the Friday night idyll of the kids on the field under the full moon.

The janitor inside the school called the police at 9:25 to report an act of vandalism by a large gathering of youth. Constable Basanti and his partner, Hodginson, arrived at the school, as they often did, for the youths of View Royal gathered there almost every Friday and Saturday evening. Arriving at the school, Constable Basanti saw, as he would later testify, “a large number of youths, maybe fifty or sixty.” He and his partner told the kids to move along. Leave the premises. Go home.

“Have a safe night,” Constable Hodginson said to some of the kids before they walked away.

Warren was not on the field when the police arrived, for he'd walked Syreeta to the bus stop.

“I'll walk you home,” he offered.

“No, that's fine,” she said, a choice she would later often reflect on.

He gave her money for the bus, and as he did so, he thought that the only time he really felt peace and comfort was when he was beside Syreeta. He would have to find a way to stay in View Royal, to stay with
her always. She left him that evening, kissing him on the cheek. He gave her money for the bus because he did not want her walking home alone.

The girls Syreeta did not know—Dusty and Laila—and the girls she didn't really admire—Josephine and Kelly—had caught up with Reena. Syreeta was on the bus as the girls surrounded Reena on the street.

Reena was surrounded now, and all she wanted was to go home.

“We're not going to fight you,” Dusty promised. “We want you to party with us.”

Reena's face was pale, and she looked up at Laila.

“It's true,” Laila promised. “I was talking about another girl, and she's not here.”

But Reena was not convinced. Why had they all come running after her so suddenly? She turned and went into the pay phone, ignoring Dusty, who pressed her blunt face against the glass and kicked at the door.

“I'm coming home,” Reena said to Aman. “Can you tell Mom? I'll be home soon.”

The thought of her little brother bolstered her, and since he could tell she was crying and frightened, he encouraged her as best as he could.

“Come home,” he said.

Dusty's face was still pressed against the glass, glaring. Laila, kickboxing champion, lifted a long strand of black hair from her face, lit a cigarette, and looked up at the sky.

Syreeta was not yet home. The bus moved through View Royal, past the Four Mile Pub and the firemen's hall.

Reena, in the safety of the phone booth, was afraid to emerge, and when she did, Dusty grabbed her arm roughly.

“I'm going home,” Reena said. “Let me—”

“You're being a bitch,” Dusty said.

“Why are you being such a bitch?” Josephine yelled.

“I'm not—”

“We don't want to beat you up,” Josephine said. “Come on.”

Come on.

“Come on, Reena.”

“Stay with us.”

“Stay with us and party.”

“I want to catch the bus,” Reena said. “I have to go home.”

Dusty was blocking her way; the girth of the girl was wide and obstinate. “Give me your bus pass,” Dusty snarled.

“No,” Reena said, unsure once more. There was nowhere to go.

Dusty said again, “Give me your bus pass, and I'll let you go home.”

Reena fumbled in her knapsack, found the yellow laminated paper, and handed it to Dusty, who ripped it up.

Dusty and Josephine now moved to either side of Reena and linked her arms through their own. “They both walked on either side of Reena, arm in arm, like locked,” Kelly would later testify, “like friends would walk.”

Pieces of Reena's bus pass floated off the concrete.

Maya and Laila were sharing a joint when someone said, “There's cops around. We shouldn't smoke this here. Let's go under the bridge.”

T
HIS PLACE WAS NOT
a teen hangout, and they had never been there. A girl named Jen wasn't sure why she went under there, with Dimitri and Marissa and Tara and Warren. Later she tried to explain to police this movement, which occurred twenty minutes after the fall of the rocket. “We went under the bridge. We didn't know where to go 'cause we were asked to leave Shoreline. And I'm not sure why we went there. It was just some people started going under there.”

Under the bridge, right under the bridge, there was a dark wall, covered in graffiti, and the area was like a dirty cave. Uneven, the land sloped down to the water's edge, pebbled and with well-trodden grass. There was a wooden stairwell leading down with a railing that looked slightly rusty and precarious. You could hear the cars rumbling as they clattered overhead, the drivers unaware of the cavern beneath.

Under the bridge, there was barely room for the fourteen girls and two boys. Marissa thought of sitting on the stairs, but the stairs seemed so grimy and damp. She stared down at the dark water where moonlight lay, broken by the wooden beams of the bridge. She did not like being under there, where there was little light and the ground was worn and rough, and the grass that remained was brown and flecked with shards of bottles, broken and small.