Too Young to Kill (13 page)

There was also a group of Juggalos prone to hassling people in local parks, walking around and scaring those hanging out with their families, minding their own business. One of the last times Sarah was involved, a group of “JUVS,” dressed down in baggy clothing and black-and-white face paint, stood around a large bonfire, tossing gasoline on the fire and kicking over garbage cans.

And yet even within this setting, which seemed to offer Sarah a way to vent her frustration and introverted feelings of rage, Sarah sought another outlet.

Near this time, not a week after she met Adrianne, Sarah turned to a friend one night while hanging out and expressed how much she liked Adrianne. She could see herself dating her, Sarah said. There was chemistry there between them. Sarah could feel it.

“I’m thinking of getting her name tattooed on my upper arm, near the shoulder,” Sarah explained, pointing to the spot.

24

Beyond her explosive temper, Sarah Kolb also exhibited an almost cruel, evil, and domineering disposition that would emerge from time to time. In her writings and behavior as the fall of 2004 came, Sarah articulated a deep hatred for anyone she saw as a threat, adversary, rival, or beneath her on the food chain. At the same rate, though, Sarah was also very much afraid of sharing her innermost feelings—unless it involved her berating someone—with friends, family, or in a group setting. Her journal writing, however, was another story; this simple exercise that millions of kids do every day in school gave Sarah the opportunity to talk about who she was and what she truly thought of people.

Journaling in general, Sarah noted, was not for the person writing the journal (as in its therapeutic value); it was for “other people,” she believed. As much as we all want to convince ourselves we’re writing our deepest thoughts in some sort of cathartic Freudian analysis, what we’re doing is revealing, Sarah pointed out quite astutely,
secrets [we] don’t want to tell but . . . want everyone to know.

Sarah felt the only “safe place” for a person’s thoughts was inside his or her head. On October 6, 2004, about six weeks before she met Adrianne Reynolds, Sarah wrote that she was afraid people were taking her journal and reading it when she wasn’t around. This—added to a growing list of additional anxieties she was experiencing at the time—bothered Sarah Kolb.

She wrote how she considered the Internet to be
the CB radio of the 90s,
while calling the home PC
the trailor [
sic
] park of the soul,
a
dangerous tool
when
in the hands of idiots.

At times Sarah displayed her paranoia, noting at the end of the same entry that
self-imposed fascism
[would]
destroy man
because he would ultimately convince
himself he doesn’t have to think anymore.

A day after she wrote that rather critical entry, Sarah was back to being angry at the world, wondering if the people around her had been replaced by a group of imbeciles who had been beamed into her life only to irritate her. She felt everyone was driving her crazy. In response to those who were getting in her face and giving her problems, Sarah waxed violently about
slaughter[ing] them like fucking sheep.
She wanted to be left alone when angry. Why couldn’t people stay out of her face? Not speak to her. Not touch her. Not look at her. Breathe on her. Smile at her. Even think about her. She was becoming frustrated because people were asking why she was so pissed off all the time. And all they were doing was shortening the wick burning inside her. She was desperate for some sort of relief from the agony of her mind.

Why?

So I don’t hurt people, or myself....

As Sarah was dealing with the torment inside her own head, Adrianne had just turned sixteen on September 12, 2004. She was still in Texas going through another dark period of her life, depressed and ready to pack it in. As an exercise, Adrianne sketched out her feelings one day. She was tired of the people in her life letting her down.

Why don’t they care?
she asked.
I’m tired of all this. I’m ready to sleep—sleep it all away.

Adrianne hated ignorant people, yet made no mention specifically as to whom she was referring. She was “grieving for darkness.” She was “tired” and in “pain.” She wrote she
hoped for the best
but
longed for the worst.

Part of Adrianne enjoyed the process of expressing her feelings on the page in the form of poetry and lyric writing. Yet, there was a certain tint of gloom—and certainly emotional pain—in everything she wrote.
I’m broken
was a familiar phrase Adrianne leaned on.
I don’t feel right
was another. She missed people immensely, likely because her life had been, up to then, a series of people (whom she loved) being taken away from her, and she being taken away from those same people. This hole in her heart was replaced by the transparent pull of promiscuous sex. Adrianne filled the void with the love that anyone offered, in any form: whether it was genuine or a one-night promise in order to get her into bed, Adrianne thought it would help her feel better about her life and herself.

Near the middle of October, Adrianne penned a poem that was, sadly, a harbinger of what was to come:

Knocking at death’s door,
Entering through hell’s gates,
Better do something now,
Before it’s too late.

Adrianne had a clever way of expressing her feelings: might be a sentence or two, a doodle, or three pages of scattered sentences with no literal meaning or connection. They all tell us something about the person behind the pen. In one, she wrote:
You said you couldn’t stand to see my heart broken.... So when you broke it, did you close your eyes?
Another read,
Breaking my heart . . . ripping my soul.
Most of this centered around the boys who were bedding (and then letting) her down. Adrianne wanted love—and everything that came with it: commitment, respect, friendship, peace. All things, according to her own hand, she had never experienced.

Heading into Black Hawk Outreach that fall, meeting Sarah for the first time, Adrianne soon felt as though she might have just found what she had been looking for all along—that one person who understood how she felt, might one day love her unconditionally, and not let her down.

25

Sarah Kolb viewed any attention taken away from her as a personal attack and blow to her ego. Her girlfriend had just broken it off and was now seeing someone else, a rival Sarah viewed, in her words, as “my replacement.” It was that insecurity and low self-esteem directing how Sarah felt, how she thought, with whom she socialized on a particular day, and on whom she would take out her repressed feelings of contentiousness. In Sarah’s skewed view of her life, her girlfriend had left her because Sarah was worthless. Not because there was no love or she had no feelings for Sarah. This was just another in a series of bad things Sarah saw happening in her life, all of which she viewed as entirely her own fault. Sarah saw herself as worthless.

By October 18, 2004, Sarah had been put on a new set of medications to manage her feelings of suicide and fury. She was, truly, out of control. Her high-school life, for no apparent reason, had been consumed up to this point by chronic drug use, abusive lesbian relationships, aggressive and near-violent sex with males—“She liked to bite my neck while we had sex,” said one male, “until it was bruised”—booze, cutting herself, fighting, and more anger than her delicate emotional state could handle. Still, all that being said, the medication they were now trying on Sarah had turned her into a “zombie,” she described.

“I feel weird.”

The drugs made her lazy and lethargic, as though she could sleep for “three . . . days.” She questioned that maybe she
should
sleep more. Or, in a burst of inspiration and clarity, simply solve her
problems and move on with my life,
she wrote.

In one brief journal entry, Sarah talked about how her previous girlfriend had just up and decided one day to break up with her. She asked herself why she even bothered to care so much. She wondered what “happy” actually was and how she wasn’t accomplishing anything in life. She had no job and no friends. What she had was
a shitty car with shitty grades.
All of it, she wrote, was an obvious indication of her life in general, which she referred to as
shitty shit.

On October 20, Sarah was feeling a bit better about herself. It was her baby sister’s one month birthday—something she took a bit of pride in, now being a big sister. Yet, as soon as she seemed to teeter on the verge of happiness, clinging to a modicum of light, Sarah was back in the darkness, chastising and blaming herself for the breakup with her last girlfriend, whom she could not seem to let go of. The breakup, she concluded, was the impetus for her being in such a traumatic psychotic state and on the periphery of suicide. She said she wanted to find her ex-girlfriend, run up, and kiss her. But she realized that if she did that, the girl would probably slap her across the face. Sarah mentioned how she couldn’t seem to get over this particular girl, as though the former lover had some sort of magnetic pull on her emotions Sarah couldn’t break free from. It was strange, too, Sarah thought. The girl wasn’t pretty. On top of that, she had bad breath and was a drunk, not to mention she nagged Sarah about everything. On the other hand, Sarah thought, she did
make me laugh
and
feel good about myself.

This was the type of lifestyle that mainly drove (or fed) Sarah’s anger: any self-esteem she acquired from another human being became like a drug; she craved attention and love as much as Adrianne Reynolds did. Yet, the moment it was taken away from her, Sarah went into withdrawal, so to speak, and dealt with it vis-à-vis that internal, explosive rage that exposed itself every once in awhile.

Two weeks later, as Adrianne was making preparations to move back to East Moline, Sarah was dreading the time she had spent at Black Hawk. She had been a student there since December 9, 2003. It was the beginning of November 2004, a dreary month of cold rain and sharply falling temperatures. A few days before, Sarah mentioned how she had gone out for Halloween and got blasted drunk on Bacardi Hurricane, Skyy Blue (vodka), Smirnoff Twisted (a hard tea), Bud Light, and Captain Morgan. What a mixture! It must have been some night with all those different liquors and—at the least—some morning after. Sarah was “cold and tired” as she wrote—and no wonder. She was missing her gal pal again and still having trouble getting over the demise of the relationship. The failure of the love was all her fault, she told herself again and again. She had cursed the relationship and scared her girl away, she now had herself convinced. Her “broken heart” was only half of what troubled her—because she also believed she had a “broken spirit,” before asking herself if she would ever be totally over this chick, all coupled with a constant feeling of being “alone and empty.”

A day later, Sarah was preparing to celebrate Cory Gregory’s birthday, but she didn’t know what to get him. Sarah’s mother had said she was going out to get Cory a present, but didn’t mention what. This thought—that her mother was spending money on one of her friends—sent Sarah down that slippery slope that was her self-esteem once again, crying out for a hand to hold. She was discouraged because she couldn’t pay her mother back right away for all the money she had spent on her and now a gift for Cory. This made Sarah’s soul recoil; she spiraled down into another level of darkness. Sarah pleaded with herself not to quit her job, which was something she generally did the moment somebody pissed her off, she wrote, or she didn’t get what she wanted. She hoped she could get a raise “or employee of the month.” Not for herself. But because she wanted to make her mother proud. She said she loved her mom, and needed to “do good” because that was one way she could at least prove to her mother that she cared about her.

Here was a girl dying a slow death on the inside, filling the void with abusive relationships, drugs, booze, and rage.

An emotional jack-in-the-box.

Seven days later, November 9, Sarah was again looking to lie down somewhere and sleep her life away. She penned the word “sleep” in her journal sixteen times in a row, only to interrupt the repetitiveness by saying how
irritated
she was by
these fucking niggers
who were
singing, actually rapping.
She hated these kids. The music. And found it all annoying.

After the bitchy rant about the music, Sarah went back to repeating the word “sleep,” ending the half-page entry on an entirely different subject:
I hate my job.

As the Thanksgiving break neared, Cory Gregory had not yet shown up at Black Hawk. He was supposed to start attending classes months ago. But on November 22, Sarah noted, Cory—that “stupid fuck”—finally walked into the school as a student.