Seated in one of the front booths of the restaurant, peering out at the traffic of downtown Minneapolis, I found myself trying to imagine just small passages of the stories that were the lives of the people driving hither, thither and yon. This exercise was useful for passing the time until my subject arrived, at least, in theory, but turned out to be a lot more enjoyable when applied to the folks walking only a few feet away along the sidewalk fronting the establishment. Whether they were thickly bearded, middle-aged men in windbreakers and baseball caps, refusing to surrender to the very real elements outside, manifested by their own fogged breath and near-slips on the inadequately salted sidewalks, themselves a testament to the eternal power of winter in the American Midwest, or they were potentially pixie-like young ladies of slender frame and bubbly personality, all but hidden away under a poofy jacket and pants thick enough to keep even the direst of mid-winter winds at bay, I found myself trying to assemble just a couple of sentences about each passerby’s life in my head.
The scents of the restaurant’s signature dishes all around me taunted my rumbling stomach and curiously sensitive nostrils. For a smoker, I have retained a decent sense of smell, something for which I am grateful. Thinking on this, I put up a finger to garner a waitress’s attention, informing her that I’ll be right back inside, but I need to step out to feed the nicotine beast before it throws a razorwire lasso around my neck and starts yanking. After all, nobody wants to have to clean up after gouts of arterial bloodspray on the fine carpeting in here, right?
As I got outside and strike alight the cigarette, I wondered if the look of revulsion on her face a few moments ago was born of my smoking habit, or the colorful way by which I opted to explain my pressing need. In either event, I was now being buffeted by the very same arctic breezes that were before causing the subjects of my mental distractions to hunch up their shoulders as a form of silent ‘Fuck you’ to the season we’ve strode into in full here near the end of November. I wholeheartedly empathized with those raised shoulders at the moment, though my own unspoken expletives were chiefly aimed at myself and my seeming lack of willpower to just once and for all give up the habit altogether.
Trust me when I tell you that it’s easier said than done. If I didn’t use a crank operated cigarette stuffing machine and empty tubes, there’s no way I’d be spending my hard-earned dollars to purchase machined cigarettes from the Marlboro Man at nearly $15 a pack.
I briefly checked my phone to see the time and look for any indicator symbols that I’d received any emails, text messages or phone calls while waiting for Miss Crowell. Fourteen minutes to noon, and there had been nothing to report from the phone’s end of things. I grimaced to think of how dependent I was on this palm-sized device to keep me connected to the world, but reality doesn’t care much for one’s personal tastes or neuroses. I stuffed it back into my pocket, gave the sidewalk a once-over in either direction, and headed back inside once I’d determined that none of the few folks out on the street were the subject of my forthcoming interview.
Back inside, and once more the delightful combination of garlic and tomato sauce beckoned to me. This was not the playful teasing of some lover who only wants to giggle a little before indulging in mutual pleasures, no; this was the cruel drag of a smooth finger over the jawline, followed by an empty laugh and immediate stamping away that says in no uncertain terms, ‘Too bad, so sad, none for you buddy boy’.
The polite and professional thing to do would be to wait until my subject arrived before ordering anything more than a drink. Thankfully, the owner of this fine establishment recently procured a fine espresso machine, and when the waitress comes by to ask if there’s anything I’d like while waiting for my prospective date (she clearly has not been informed by the owner, who I spoke to at length this morning, that I am not here for a lunch date, but that I am plying my trade), I immediately asked her if she would be so kind as to bring me an espresso. She nodded and bounced away, much to my thanks.
When Miss Crowell came into my line of sight, I must profess that something happened to me which had not occurred in quite some time. The sharp intake of breath that whistled its way in through my nostrils became hostage to my lungs and diaphragm, which organs conspired to keep it that way until such time as the properly dramatic hold was achieved. To my own sense of physiological aesthetics, Tabitha Crowell was dangerously beautiful, instantly and without need for a secondary, investigatory look. Only an inch shorter than myself and with silken, raven-black hair tied back in a firm and efficient ponytail, eyes the almost cartoonishly green one seldom finds outside of graphic novels or comic books, dressed in a knee-length, puffy white winter coat over knee-high, beige winter boots, I was in danger of forgetting why precisely I had invited this woman to come have lunch with me.
I regretted that the waitress had been so far removed from the true nature of this meeting.
The smile that Miss Crowell leveled at me as she approached our table served only to enhance my impression of her stunning beauty, at least momentarily. Dazzlingly white, straight teeth were exposed to me, and the hand she put out came as naturally an expression of intent as any I’ve encountered.
Her eyes, however, upon my standing up and accepting the offered handshake, being closer now and available for closer inspection, revealed either a poorly concealed guardedness, or I was imagining that she had suddenly realized just how dangerous this encounter could be for her state of mind. I was, after all, quite clear in my LinkedIn message to her that I intended to go digging around near a fault line in her psyche. The resultant tremors could be avoided quite simply by her having opted to not show up.
“Miss Crowell,” I said with a slight incline of my head and singular pump of her hand.
“Mister Hayes,” she replied cordially. A twinge had shot through my hand; her grip was not too far removed from that of a veteran electrician. This made perfect sense from what I had learned of her family background, since her father had been a professional residential and commercial electrician with his own modestly successful business for some thirty-plus years.
Once we were seated, I reached under my chair and pulled the worn messenger bag I’d brought with me up into my lap. “Do you mind terribly,” I asked, pulling a digital audio recorder from within and wiggling it back and forth for her inspection.
“By all means,” she replied amiably. The waitress swooped back, jotted down quickly Miss Crowell’s drink request, and disappeared like a faerie in the presence of a camera. We made some brief small talk then, largely discussing our professions and career achievements, both confessing to having too much love to give our chosen fields of occupation to offer the foul residual leftovers to some unfortunate fellow human being, before lapsing into a long minute of tense silence, each of us stealing glances at one another until the waitress returned to take our lunch orders.
Once she had jotted down our requests, Miss Crowell let out a sigh and brought her elbows up onto the table, her hands grasping opposing shoulders as she leaned slightly forward. I could see the planting of mental tower shields in her mind through the windows of her eyes, a bracing for what she was about to invite upon herself.
“We should probably get started,” she said evenly.
**
[Technical/formatting note: For the purposes of this next section, which shall largely be transcription of audio recording, ‘MH’ shall stand for Matthew Hayes, which is to say, myself, and ‘TC’ shall stand for Miss Tabitha Crowell, the subject of this interview. Observations and flavor text will be included in brackets as deemed fitting by MH.]
MH: I want to start by thanking you for agreeing to come talk to me. I can’t imagine it’s been easy to avoid reporters, especially right after what happened.
TC: Thankfully, my mom and dad were pretty good at keeping people from the media away from me at the time. It wasn’t hard after this one vulture from some website, I think it might’ve been Buzzfeed or something, do you remember when that was a thing? [Pulls a scrunched, curious expression] But this guy had apparently been camped out in front of the house for a couple of days while I was in the hospital, and when my parents brought me home, my dad saw this guy in his car, and decided to circle the block a couple of times.
MH: You think he knew it was a reporter?
TC: [rolling eyes] Someone who called themselves a reporter, yeah. So after circling a couple of times, my dad calls a buddy of his who owns a tow service, and keeps circling. Finally, he gets a text message, and after that, he finally comes around and pulls the car up into our driveway. We all get out, and I’m tired, I still feel really drained, and so, like, I kind of blink, and when I look up, all I can see is my dad’s back.
And right past him, kind of on the peripheral of my dad, I see this skinny little guy trying to, like, duck and dodge and dart around him to get a good look at me, and he’s got his phone in his hand, and he’s talking into it and calling my name, trying to ask me questions, but there’s my dad, just large as life, not moving a muscle, arms out at his sides like a defenseman trying to keep the other guy from passing the ball downcourt.
MH: Any idea what your mother was doing at the moment?
TC: [snickers and sips at her drink]She was helping Gary across the street get this guy’s car hooked up to the tow truck! I mean, I didn’t see it at first, but after about half a minute, I kind of leaned to the left, you know? Just to get a look? And there she was, this tiny little slip of a woman, hauling drag chains around the side of the guy’s front end! [sustained laughter from both MH and TC]
MH: How did this Buzzfeed guy not realize what was going on behind him?
TC: Well, it was kind of an unconscious thing. I hadn’t even realized we were doing it, but both my dad and I were taking these measured little steps backward, toward the porch, while this guy was rattling questions at me, and the thing is, with people like that, unless you respond in some way, they’re just going to keep flapping their lips, you know? And finally, I feel my heel hit the bottom step up onto the porch, and I tap my father’s shoulder and I says, “Daddy.” He looks back, nods, and then turns to the guy and just finally moves one big hand forward to point behind the guy, and he says, “I think you got a problem, buddy.” And this guy just freezes, watching the tow truck pull away with his car hitched up to it. It was halfway down the street before he took off after it, hollering about ‘Don’t tow my car, hey!’
MH: I suppose it’s a good thing I took an Uber to come here today, then.
TC: Yeah, well, my dad’s not here to call Bobby and Steve’s Auto. [Note: For my non-Minnesota readers, Bobby and Steve’s is pretty much the primary tow service company that comes to mind for folks who live here.]
MH: True enough. [MH opens Onenote tablet and grabs stylus to make notes for later insertion to transcript]. Miss Crowell, you are a member of the ‘Delta 26’, the handful of students and staff members who survived the Delta Heights High Massacre back in 2021. The assault was committed by Aaron Sitanski and Brandon Norris, both of them seventeen-year-old seniors at the school. How familiar with the boys were you, if at all, before the incident?
TC: Well, I knew of them, but I didn’t really, like, know them, you know? [narrows eyes and looks aside, lips pulled in thoughtfully] I think just about everybody at the school knew of them like that at least. It’s kind of a universal thing, guys like that.
MH: What do you mean, ‘guys like that’?
TC: Well, I think every high school has those two or three people who are just, I don’t know, outside of all the cliques and groups. They don’t belong in any of the classical classifications, like the jocks, the tech geeks, the pop culture afficianados, the burnouts, or the super smart, nigh-genius types. They might tick off a couple of boxes from each group, like Brandon did.
MH: How do you mean?
TC: Brandon was pretty athletic, you know? Like, he did great in gym classes, but he wasn’t on any of the school’s teams for anything. And Aaron was great with computers, but he didn’t belong to any of the clubs or anything like that. He was always on the Honor Roll list, right near the bottom, but he was on it, so he was smart enough, but not, like, enough to have a reputation for it. Does that make sense?
MH: He was on the lower rung of the top part of the ladder.
TC: [snaps fingers and points at MH] Exactly, like that. But nobody really liked them, and they both had a habit of saying things that, like, seemed really weird to everybody else.
MH: It’s been my understanding, looking back at older profiles on these two, that Aaron was actually pretty quiet most of the time, that he didn’t really say much of anything very publicly. [MH consults pocket notebook with some notes about each offender]
TC: That may be, but I remember people saying that when he did participate in classes, in like, group discussion exercises? He almost always had these kind of dreary, obscure references to make, said some absurd stuff. Apparently, it worked really well for him in a creative writing class in his junior year. He had a piece in the annual literary anthology.
MH: ‘Squaring the Circle’, you’re referring to.
TC: Yeah. [Takes a measured breath] I remember thinking, at the time, that his story was really freakin’ good, even by, like, professional standards.
MH: Back to your premise, ‘guys like that’…
TC: Right, sorry. I guess another thing that makes people like them so universal, at least here in the States, is that, like, I think all they really needed was someone to let them in, you know? Someone to make them feel like maybe, just maybe, they had a place to speak their minds, to put their ideas out there and get some feedback. And that’s exactly what they didn’t get, anywhere.
MH: You almost sound like you feel sorry for them, in a way.
TC: That’s because I do, kind of. I mean, at the time, of course, I thought they were just monsters. Vicious, horrible, evil cretins just trying to make everybody around them hurt as much as they did inside. Part of me still thinks that; I’m never going to be able to get rid of that. But part of me, now, knowing what I know about those two, and what their lives were like on a day-to-day basis? Part of me can see how they decided to do what they did.
[Brief pause in interview while MH and TC eat their lunch. I observed that Miss Crowell is extremely orderly about how she approaches her food, focusing on a single item on her plate and consuming all of it before moving on to the next item. I wondered if this pattern of behavior had been lifelong, or developed as a kind of coping mechanism, a way of enforcing order on an aspect of her life over which she had some manner of control.]
MH: You mentioned about ten minutes ago that you’d looked back, implied that you had done some research on Sitanski and Norris.
TC: Yes, I did.
MH: Do you remember when you first decided to do that?
TC: It was probably my junior year of college. The anniversary was coming up, and even though hardly anybody on campus knew who I was, that I was one of the Delta 26, I started feeling this pressure to try and look back, to try to understand how something like that could happen. I had already sort of come to understand and accept that it was because of what happened, the incident, that I ended up going into medicine.
MH: Really? I’m not entirely sure I follow. [Note: I understood full well, at least from my own perspective, why Miss Crowell ended up pursuing medicine as a career. Even as I said I didn’t follow, I had already reasoned in my mind that she felt pulled to a calling wherein she could help her fellow human beings, help save them from the kind of devastating wounds that so many of her classmates suffered in the incident. But I did learn something from her response, something I hadn’t known previously, as I’ll note in the transcript of her response.]
TC: It wasn’t immediate, I can say that. The immediate thought was, I think for everybody who didn’t get killed in those first blasts, what the hell just happened? Why can’t I hear anything? God, that hurts, you know? Everything was just pain, and heat, and screaming, all around me, screaming. I can vaguely remember moving, away from where the blast had originated from, and turning around, and thinking that I was hallucinating.
MH: How so?
TC: [Here, I saw a kind of loss of focus in her eyes, as if she were not looking at the spot some two or three inches over my forehead, but rather, that she was peering at that moment into her own past, to see more clearly once more the confused, concussion-birthed horror that she went on to describe.] I saw this smoking, smouldering hole in the ground, ringed with flames, and all around it, charred piles of bloody meat, singed clothing, and jagged, gore-soaked bones. There were people staggering away in every direction, weeping tears and blood, and there was so much smoke in the air and around all of us, that they looked like phantoms, you know? The souls of the condemned, having somehow dragged themselves up out of Perdition, but now just wandering around with no sense of direction or order.
And then, staring at these things, these people who weren’t really people at the moment, I remember seeing these imps, imps with long, low wings that they didn’t flap, and they had these pitchforks in their hands, held at the hip like they were going to pivot to stab people, you know? Only they didn’t pivot, and after the first couple of, like, muffled handclap sounds, and a couple of people falling over and going still, I realized that they weren’t imps at all, that they were two kids from the school, guys with rifles, and they were strafing those of us who didn’t get killed right away.
[Pause for several minutes while both MH and TC step outside of the eatery to smoke a much-needed cigarette. It is during this pause in the conversation, out in the freezing cold but away from prying eyes within the restaurant, that she pulls an arm out of her puffy coat and rolls up the left sleeve of her blouse to a spot just above the elbow. There, I see a puckered divot of scar tissue, pale pink against the natural caramel color of her skin. I don’t ask, and for the moment, she doesn’t explain.]
MH: As an almost aside, were you burned at all, by the explosives?
TC: Only a little, my clothes and hair got the worst of it.
MH: That spot on your arm, it didn’t look like a bullet scar. What was it from?
TC: Well, at first, I thought it must have been from, like, shrapnel or something, from whatever it was they put in the ground. But on my second day in the hospital, I had some kind of reaction to it, and later on, my mom told me that the doctors explained to her and my dad that a part of someone’s bone had been thrown with such force from the blast that it literally cut through my arm. A tiny fragment of the bone had lodged itself near my elbow, and my body was trying so hard to reject it and push it out that my whole system almost shut down.
MH: That’s, I just can’t imagine…
TC: I was fascinated, though. The nurses and doctors at the hospital, when I finally started kind of coming out of the fog of it all, they were so good to me. And they didn’t have it very good; Ridgepoint Regional was this tiny little hospital, and they were just, you know, deluged.
MH: I remember. [TC turns her head slightly to the side and narrows her eyes suspiciously at me.] I grew up in Deertrack. I graduated a couple of years before the incident.
TC: Oh. So, you know what I’m talking about.
MH: Indeed I do. [pause to consult notes] With the ten-year anniversary coming up, I imagine someone has reached out to you about the memorial, haven’t they?
TC: Yeah, a couple of weeks ago. That’s sort of why I wasn’t surprised to get your message, I figured somebody would eventually find a way to track me down outside of my family. My mom still lives there.
MH: And your father?
TC: Daddy passed two years back. No, don’t apologize, it’s fine. I still miss him [wipes away single tear, sniffles], but it was his time. So yeah, my mom called me a couple of weeks ago to tell me that the town board had reached out to her, asked her if she could get in touch with me about coming for the ceremony to deliver some comments.
MH: Have you given any thoughts to what you’ll say?
TC: Not yet, no. I have some time, though, I’ll get something worked out.
MH: Speaking of getting in touch, though, you rightly point out, here, that you are not an easy woman to get in touch with, despite the proliferation of various social media networks and how easy it is, nowadays, to pretty much track down anybody you want to and say ‘hello’. Is there any particular reason why you’ve avoided leaving any kind of digital footprint?
[There comes to this question another lengthy pause, one which sees Miss Crowell looking out into the street through the window to my left. I am struck with the sense that she is searching for a very precise set of words to use for her response, and for the psychic control dial for her own tone of delivery. Anyone who has spent as much time attaining an education as she has, especially someone who has survived a traumatic experience within the last third of the total years they’ve been on this planet and managed not to completely lose their shit, is going to utilize this technique of word choice and tonal control, in unison, to the best effect without causing the other participant in the conversation to run screaming for their lives]
TC: If you look back at those years, the year it happened, and the ten or so years leading up to that, you can see this overwhelming focus, in the national dialogue, surrounding bullying in schools across the country. There were all of these ‘Zero Tolerance’ policies that different schools tried, and they, well, didn’t always work out so great. They didn’t allow for any kind of nuance, or discussion, or examination. And then you look at cyberbullying, which really dominated the conversation from about 2016 to just a couple of years ago. Back then, it was always Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that people were bringing up in those conversations, and sometimes, they’d mention, like, Reddit, or 4Chan, you know? Like, those were kind of there, but at the same time, they weren’t really the main focus.
And if you were on some other message board, or website, like, nobody in school really gave a shit, you know? Nobody you knew in your everyday, real life, would likely know what you were talking about or care. So there was this major disconnect for people my age if you weren’t on the main social networks. And those are the places where, well, the kind of shit that those guys put up with every day, in the school itself? It followed them home, there. There was no getting away.
And afterwards, I didn’t want to have anything to do with things like that, so I just went scorched earth and deleted all of my accounts. I never went back, never really put myself out there like that again. I can’t say as I’ve been any worse off without them.
Post-Interview
1930h. I returned to my humble abode here a few hours ago, and set right in to listening back to the recorded audio of my time with Miss Crowell. Given that I hadn’t precisely done anything all that physically taxing, I was slightly surprised to find myself feeling so drained. It wasn’t like I’d spent the middle of the day hiking or lifting weights, but the exhaustion that tends to accompany such activities announced itself in my bone and muscle tissue with all the subtlety of a high school marching band striking up the start of a piece.
I don’t doubt for a moment that this fatigue was brought on by the kind of empathetic drain that sometimes afflicts members of my profession when they speak to someone who is talking about a horrific experience. Tabitha Crowell didn’t get into a great deal of specifics regarding the massacre itself, and I suspect this was managed, on her part, with a great deal of effort. I felt that effort, in my own way, and being around someone who carries that much pain and terror, and who has come out the other side as a fully functional and contributing member of society, is exhausting.
With the audio transcribed and my observation notes transferred from my OneNote, I’m going to spend the rest of the evening here relaxing. In the morning, I’ll take a second look at what I have, and determine if this project has legs, or if it ends here.
**
November 21st, 2030. 0900h. It has legs.