Too Young to Kill (22 page)

Moving from Rock Island High School to Black Hawk, Sarah claimed, was a change she had needed in order to
get away from . . . those students [at Rock Island] who were keeping me from focusing on schoolwork.

She planned on going to college, where she would
grasp
her
goals with a strong fist.
Sarah, clearly writing for a specific audience (the teacher), was sure about what she wanted to major in, but
concerned about getting there.
Her aim was to work in a warehouse that sold CDs so she could
talk about music all day long.

California was where Sarah wanted to live:
better weather, more options, more people.

It had not yet been three months since she had written that essay and here she was, consumed really, with the idea that there was another girl, whom she viewed as a slut and whore, trying to take her place inside that clique of Juggalos, where Sarah had been the focus for the past year or more. There was a narcissistic side to Sarah, which screamed out to the world that life needed to be about her, or she wanted no part of it. And anybody who came between Sarah and that spotlight would have to pay a price.

Inside the halls of Black Hawk, Sarah heard Adrianne was “getting around” even more than Sarah thought. Didn’t matter that Sarah had had a hand in spreading these rumors. Some later noted that Sarah, when she first met Adrianne, saw a girl she could begin a long-term relationship with and perhaps love. “Damn, she’s hot” was what Sarah said, according to a friend, on that first day she saw Adrianne enter Black Hawk. But then moments later, “I didn’t mean that,” she said, retracting the statement.

There was one more reason Sarah wanted nothing to do with Cory. It was something she told a friend a day after Christmas—this friend, a boy, knew what she meant.

“He’s bi,” Sarah told her friend. “He’s got a crush on you.”

This scared Sarah. She didn’t want to date a bisexual male. Dating bisexual females was hard enough. Plus, Sarah considered Cory to be crazy. There were far too many demons in his head. Sarah had enough of her own to contend with. She would use Cory, sure. But that’s where the relationship stood.

No more. No less.

Sex for Sarah, according to a former friend, was difficult. Not emotionally, but physically. She told a friend she would rather not have sexual intercourse with a male, because “she has a shallow vagina and it caused her pain.” Another male, who claimed to have had sex with Sarah three times, said she was crazy. Very violent and aggressive.

Sean McKittrick was now dating Sarah. Sean began classes at Black Hawk after the holiday break, and he was seen often cruising the hallways with his buddy Cory Gregory. Sean had that Juggalo look to him, like Cory: baggy clothes, chain wallet, dark, withdrawn and droopy look on his face, hair shortly cropped around the ears, jarhead-like, but straight up like a jagged mountain line or rippling fire on the top, same as one of those Japanese anime characters. Sean was another one who, like Cory, listened to what Sarah said and did.

Sean and Cory passed Adrianne in the hallway.

“Whore!” Sean said.

“Slut,” Cory added.

They laughed.

Adrianne stopped. This was an everyday affair now—insults being shouted from across the hallway. Outside. In class. They were ganging up on her.

Enough was enough.

“Why did you sleep with our friends?” Cory asked, walking closer to Adrianne, Sean behind him.

Cory was so different when around the others, Adrianne thought. One minute, he was calling her and talking about going out and how much Sarah was a pain in the ass and troublemaker. The next, he was calling her names.

Adrianne wouldn’t answer. Instead, she later wrote in her journal, she wondered why they hated her so much for doing what they had asked her to do.

Sarah was not around. “If she was,” said a friend, “Cory and Sean would sit back and let Sarah do the talking.”

This said a lot about the types of kids Sarah kept in her tight circle.

Later that day, Adrianne saw a mutual friend of hers and Sarah’s, Cara Sands (pseudonym).

“They still bothering you?” Cara wondered. She felt bad for Adrianne, who was beginning to bear the brunt of what was now a concerted effort to harass, degrade, and bully her. Cara had watched the entire thing play out.

“Adrianne cut her hair short and started wearing more black-colored clothes. It seemed to me that Adrianne was changing so Sarah would like her more.”

“Yeah . . . Hey, I ever tell you that I’d love to get pregnant and have a child?” Adrianne told Cara.

Cara was surprised by this statement. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Adrianne, Cara later said, had been telling many of the kids in her class the same thing.

“No . . . but why would you want that, Pinkie?”

“A baby would be someone to love, without strings attached.”

43

When Sarah returned to school, she put the focus back on Cory once again. Cory was beginning to withdraw more as the new year went forward. He was smoking more pot than ever. Drinking more heavily than Sarah had ever seen. But even beyond that, Sarah noted in her journal, with Sean McKittrick now attending classes at Black Hawk and trailing along with Sarah, Cory was showing contempt for—as Sarah put it—
this “me & Sean” thing.
Sarah was into Sean, perhaps content in a relationship for the first time in what seemed like a hundred years, she noted.

The following week, January 10, a Monday, Cory was missing from school. Sarah surmised he was still sleeping—probably hungover—or just had “no motivation” to show up anymore. That chronic, recurring social disease of today’s youth, depression, had gotten ahold of Cory, no doubt, and would not let go. Sarah, feeling it herself, saw how miserable and morose Cory was these days; yet she didn’t say anything much about it to him. At one point, Sarah resigned that she couldn’t “do anything” for someone who didn’t want to help himself; and Cory dropping out or getting expelled indefinitely because of his behavior was, Sarah concluded, “his own problem.”

Sean was going to be getting a job at a local car wash. This made Sarah happy. The kid would finally have some money to take her out.

Woo-hoo,
she noted in excitement.

On the opposite side of the hall, in her own way, Adrianne was confronting the problems she had with Sarah. In her journal, Adrianne wrote about going to talk to Jo, her stepmother. She spoke of her willingness to face the issues with Sarah and work through them.

She’s gonna give my dad a call,
Adrianne wrote, meaning Jo,
and they’re going to get me help and I told her what’s going on with Sara and I.

On that same day, Adrianne had a friend over to the house. Writing after the visit, she was proud of herself for not sleeping with the boy, even though he had gone and bragged about having sex with her to the kids at school the following morning:

I showed him my guitar, watched TV, ate and sang, then he left.... That’s all that happened.

The boy had asked Adrianne to go to a party with him that night, but she turned him down, and instead left with another friend and his parents.

Adrianne entered into a penned conversation with Cory Gregory about the boy coming over to her house and what was being said around school about her that day. It seemed Adrianne could do no right. Whether she slept with a boy didn’t matter anymore. The kids in school were going to say she did, anyway.

Why are you making a big deal of it?
Adrianne asked Cory.
Nothing happened! You can ask my brothers—because they were there, baby!

Cory didn’t respond.

Adrianne continued, adding,
What’s your prob? Why are you hatin’ on me? I thought you still liked me but you’re accusing me of shit or, excuse me, thinkin’ I did shit, and I didn’t.

Cory failed to respond to that statement also.

Adrianne wrote again:
What’s wrong?
Beside it, she drew one of her signature sad faces, and then passed the notebook back to Cory for him to respond.

Cory wrote that Adrianne’s “cross words” were pissing him off.

Imagine that! A kid whose language skills consisted of the F-word and a litany of additional vulgarities—not to mention all the sexual innuendo he talked about—was preaching to Adrianne about her use of the actual English language.

But Adrianne was smarter than that.

That’s not all,
she wrote back, sensing Cory was holding back.
I know it isn’t. There’s something else. Talk 2 me, please. Quit flippin’ me off!

Cory didn’t write back. But later that night, he wrote Adrianne a letter, spelling out what was going on, and his place in it all. He addressed Adrianne as “Kid,” a charming nickname he had been calling her. He explained how he had never lied to her about anything. He called himself an honest person.

Adrianne had, in the interim, called Cory on his relationship with Sarah and his role in bullying her. It seemed to Adrianne that whenever Sarah, Nate, or any of the other Jugs were around, Cory acted differently. He went with the crowd. When she was alone with him, he appeared to be her friend. Adrianne asked him which was the real Cory, and what was the purpose for the act?

Cory wrote that he wasn’t involved in the rumor mill or the bullying on the level Adrianne had perceived—but he
had
gone along with that so-called test Sarah had devised back in mid-December.

Sarah wanted to see how you would be . . . ,
Cory wrote.

If Adrianne was wondering why Sarah did it, Cory said he had a theory. He explained that every girl he brought over to the party house (prior to Adrianne) had ended up sleeping with someone who lived there. Sarah was
picky,
Cory clarified,
when it came 2 females,
so she had to test Adrianne in order to see if she was datable. She wasn’t keen on letting just any slut into the group.

Word traveling through the party house lately was that someone had passed around a sexually transmitted disease. Adrianne was infuriated by this, thinking it was another way for them to torment her, true or not.

Cory said that, as far as he knew, only Nate and Jill had it. But there was a chance, he added, that the other Kory had been infected.

Which meant there was a possibility Adrianne might have gotten it.

Cory left a postscript, clearing up something Adrianne had confused in one of her conversations with him earlier that day. Cory had said he didn’t “like Sarah.” Adrianne had it all wrong.

I love her,
Cory spelled out.

No matter what Cory said, it was clear to Adrianne that Sarah Kolb was still pulling his strings.

Sarah had been up all night on January 12, 2005. It wasn’t cocaine, X, or any other illegal substance keeping Sarah from finding some shut-eye; it was her hair.

Yes, hair.

It took seven hours, she wrote in her journal the following morning, most of the previous day, to braid her hair. The tight cornrows had made her head burn and throb. She couldn’t sleep at all because of the pain.

As much as Sarah said she was fed up with Adrianne, she was stringing Cory Gregory along, telling him one thing to his face, while talking “shit” about him behind his back. She told one friend that all Cory and Nate did these days was drugs. They were both lazy. If they weren’t drinking or drugging, they were sleeping. She referred to Cory as “the Jew,” keeping up her bigotry-inspired, I-hate-the-world, Nazi image. She mentioned how Nate and Cory were buying
X . . . like crazy.
This, mind you,
when they have rent to pay.
Cory was basically living at the party house these days. Neither he nor Nate had a job. The little bit of money they managed to scrape up,
they spend on drugs.

Two kids whose lives were going nowhere.

Sarah had zero patience for losers.

That being said, Sarah next wrote about leaving class one day in January to go pick up a friend so they could go buy an ounce of weed. She was excited about this. After they scored, they were going to get high, then sit around and roll joints until they filled a cigarette pack with them.

Apparently, doing drugs was okay for her.

As the week of January 17 began, Sarah had Sean McKittrick and their relationship on her mind. She wrote about how much she liked being with Sean, but was fighting off an ex-boyfriend who had contacted her in a drunken rage one night and mentioned how he wanted to get back together. The reason the ex was pissed off turned out to be because he had seen Sarah with Sean.

At the end of this entry, Sarah noted how Cory pulled Sean aside one day and apologized to him for being in love with her. But there was nothing, Cory told Sean, he could do about his feelings. He loved Sarah. She was everything. He couldn’t change that.

A friend asked Sarah if Cory would ever get over her. She said it would take some time, but ultimately he would. After all, Sarah added,
[I haven’t] slept with [him] in over seven months.