Interval: Looking back on the murder of a classmate

On the murder, six years ago, of a former neighbor and classmate, tangentially

by Ashley 'Danger' Meeks

Time stands still when someone dies. They're all still out there, frozen in memory, but we can't touch them anymore. Ashley's former classmate, a cheerleader, was murdered, and in the minds of people who knew her she will always be 20, and always be the same...

I hadn't realized Stacy was 20 when she was killed, because I'm always going to think of her as older. We grew up on opposite sides of the street, a twisty road on a hill in Arizona, and she graduated a year before me.

She had moved into the mostly concrete city, away from her family's brick house, the pool, the picture window that was never open, and all our discarded backyard forts. She was killed years after the last fight, the last hair-pulling, the last fort-siege by her older brother Shane.

I never found out if she still had the Barbie wedding dress my grandma had sewn for me. There are always so many questions when someone dies. That was the only one I could call mine, though.

After she died, she got two paragraphs in our hometown's paper. These two paragraphs said she'd been stabbed, and the neighbors had found her dog barking and her apartment door open. She had been a student at a community college in town studying business. Among other things, the cops confiscated a copy of the movie "Jerry Maguire," and that night went down the street and arrested a man named Anthony. They put him on a million dollar bail. Someone told me there was coke involved in the muder.

Her family sent out thank you cards after they'd received the appropriate condolences; small, ivory, with gold italics and a gold-embossed dove on the front. Their house, always shady and darker bricked than the others, seemed to pull away even more from the curb.

It's almost a cruel R.L. Stine teen-horror cliche that Stacy was a cheerleader. I found her in a yearbook from her freshman year, in the same poses in front of the same river rock background they still use. The girls in the center are grouped together, arms down, holding their pompoms like wedding bouquets. But the girls at the edges, for a varied effect, stand more confidently, hands on their hips, set out from the crowd. They glint with the sexy promise of popularity, two blondes on the left, Stacy on the right, showing her teeth, her dark, painted lips, her thick, wavy brown hair.

There is a reason those two things stay with me as her most striking feature.

Three years after her killing, as the trial was finally starting, the stories in the newspaper brought out new details. Like the number of times she was stabbed: 23. The places she was stabbed: her face, neck, and the back of her head. She was found full of the defendant's sperm. He says it was consensual. The blood stains on his fly tell it differently.

And when they found a tube of her lipstick, it determined that she had fought back with incredible strength. It was found tangled in her long brown hair, and they didn't find it until the autopsy.

She was years younger then, than I am now, but I still feel like she's one year older. I'm sure her brother Shane will carry her along behind him, one year younger, forever. Because, in some way, Stacy will always be 20, and everyone who knew her will thus always be frozen in the relationship they had with her at the time; that distance of age between us, between her and her brother, won't change.

What is age?

It's a rhetorical question for arguments about May-December relationships. It's a rhetorical question for the 45-year-old woman trying to pull off a 17-year-old's fashion statement, or the man trying to use the vernacular of his teen-age children.

It's a question so over-used it gets little play in any other format. But here it is anyway. What is age?

I can look back at a high school yearbook and see friends of mine who were in Stacy's class. They are 15 years old in these photos, but I see them as older because I can not only see their potential, I know where it led. We're in touch. Things didn't stop with them and me.

But I can look back at Stacy, in the same few pages, and do the same thing. I see Stacy in her senior portrait, 18, the last actual picture I have of her, and she is older than me.

What is age if you will always carry someone's entire potential life in your mind? What did her killer take away?

Somehow, it's like she didn't stop fighting back. She was the one to pick the tube of lipstick from her hair and comb out her snarled tresses, glaring and wincing in front of the mirror. She was the one who hushed her dog and limped over to close the front door so the neighbors wouldn't worry. And then, she went away.

But it's not like she's gone.

Being dead and being gone are two different things. This is why I will always be younger than the girl who grew up across the street from me. Because she's still out there, set into unstoppable motion by all of our collective knowledge.

The human spirit is a myth, a legend, after death, which keeps going until everyone forgets it.

I can still hear her voice on the telephone, or over the splashing of the pool, or yelling at her brother, or trying to sell me her old red tape recorder with the handle at a long-ago garage sale. I could show you the exact darkness of her lips and the weight of her hair. She is out there as long as we remember her.

They are all out there. We just can't touch them anymore.

About the author

Ptiza Odelay was created in a factory by Nazi scientists during World War II. She was to be the ultimate weapon against the Allies, but before she grew into maturity in her birthing tank, the war ended and the project was scrapped. Years later, she was found still in her tank in a hidden sub-basement of a warehouse in Berlin and inadvertently shipped to the United States. During transit the casing of the tank was ruptured and she was born seemingly in her early twenties with all of the knowledge of mankind programmed into her brain. She speaks eighty languages and has been known to crush diamonds with her bare hands. She is wanted in twenty countries and was last seen diving into an active volcano somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In her spare time, she writes popular children's fiction, erotica and groundbreaking journalism under the name Ashley "Danger" Meeks.
Read her 'Confessions of a Recovering Teenager' column

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