In the parking lot of Marlo Mahne`s parents` Ft. Pierce, Fla., condominium, the charter bus warms its engine while kids dash in and out with more coolers, more potato chips, more umbrellas (it hasn`t rained in weeks, but today, the sky just won`t clear). Everyone is on high alert; after weeks, months of anticipation, they are not about to forget anything now.
Marlo remembers something critical. ”The signs!” They gasp. To think they almost left them behind. Another trip inside, and she comes back holding two sheets of poster board with uneven block letters colored in marker pen:
”Mark Leonard: MTV” one says. ”We love Madonna!” says the other. These are their tickets to stardom, a sure-fire ploy to get on national TV: They have rented all the concert videos and studied them to see which signs get seen in the crowd shots. Concerts are designed for kids like these. They have bought every imaginable souvenir and know all the lyrics to every song. When a beach ball starts making its way up the stands, or a roll of toilet paper gets tossed down, or another wave of arm-raising makes its way toward their section, they are the first to notice, to shriek with glee.
And none louder than Marlo. But since the accident, some people, even her grandparents, don`t think she should go anymore. They`re afraid for her safety, and they`re afraid for her feelings. Marlo shouldn`t have to be subjected to so many stares.
Some people even worry about Marlo going to the mall in her hometown, a smallish town, where most people seem to know who she is, have heard about the accident. Still, little kids say things and point, grown-ups stop her friends-”Is that the girl?”-but Marlo goes to the mall a lot anyway. She never has much minded the stares. She goes there for lunch almost every day now that she`s a senior, and she goes to the Body Shop where her friend works and lets her take clothes home to try on.
She goes out a lot in fact. Just the other weekend: two parties, a football game and a shopping trip. It bothers her that she can`t go to the beach anymore, but there aren`t many other places she won`t go, as long as there`s air conditioning. When she started back to school last fall the air conditioning hadn`t been installed yet. Every afternoon at 3 when she got home she would strip and be drenched with sweat and would itch. Still, she loved being back so much she put up with it.
She goes out dancing, too, to a teen disco, where all the kids know her. Not the Happening. That one closed down. That`s where she was that night two and a half years ago.
They probably had gone to the beach that day, too. She doesn`t remember. They left the disco around 11:30. Then, just before midnight, in a ghastly and freakish car accident, Marlo Mahne caught fire. She was 15, she was adorable. In seconds she lost most of her skin, her hair, her fingers, her ears, her nose and the sight in one eye.
She looks much better than she did right after it happened, and she will look much better still. Reconstructive surgery began last Easter with the beginning of a lower lip, and in July she got a new nose. The rebuilding will go on for years. But she never will look the same. You always will be able to look at Marlo and see the evidence of a horrible accident.
Still, Marlo always will be Marlo, and people who know her use cliches like that. Marlo always will be tenacious, demanding, relentless, always on the edge of impossible. ”One thing about Marlo,” begins Jennifer Emond, 17, a close friend who was with Marlo in the accident, ”When I think about Marlo . . . (Jennifer shakes her head and smiles like a patient parent) if I think about Marlo, I don`t know, even if what she wants, it doesn`t work, she`ll find something, knowing Marlo.”
Before is how Marlo`s friends refer to her life until that instant two years ago. Perfect is how they describe it. ”Her life was just perfect before,” says Jennifer. This, from kids who demand a lot out of life. They are the beautiful kids in a private school who made the football team or the cheerleading squad, who discovered iridescent turquoise mascara before anyone else, who know how $57 jeans should be torn, who get asked out a lot.
Marlo got asked out a lot. Her life was cruising through classes with mostly Bs and, more importantly of course, homecoming courts and tennis courts, boyfriends and liberal parents. She is an only child of parents who were adopted, and the point is made as though it makes a difference. Marlo is her parents` blood, and no one else is. She is spoiled; she is profoundly loved.
A month before the accident, she was a bridesmaid in a wedding. She looked perfect. Her mother couldn`t help asking the photographer, ”Get Marlo for me, would you?” She had extra prints made.
One thing about Marlo: She doesn`t mind getting her picture taken. There are framed photographs sitting on end tables in the living room, and a pastel portrait on the wall. They are from before the accident. But Marlo`s mother still takes pictures, and they are kept in three fat albums stuffed with newspaper clippings and letters from Nancy Reagan and Madonna`s secretary. They show Marlo when she looked her worst, during a dressing change at the Shriner`s Burn Institute in Cincinnati. When the newspapers wanted to take pictures of her it wasn`t Marlo who protested. Photos were taken. It was the editors who chose not to run them.
Cameras are clicking as the kids get ready for the 2 1/2-hour drive to Miami. Marlo directs the group shots, snaps at the other kids in double-time teenage commands, the clipped chatter that her friends also have adopted, as though their mouths are straining to keep up with their brains, their lives. Nothing happens today without tension, excitement. This is a day Marlo has been awaiting for three years, since before the accident.
The 23 teenagers are the studied result of months of indoctrination into things Madonna-esque. Single earrings, silver crosses, lacy bows clipped into gelled hair getting stringy in the drizzle. Stretch pants, lots of black, worn denim. There are Guess? jeans and Gotcha jams, Esprit sweats and Swatch watches, three on a wrist. They apologize for the effort. ”We want you to know this isn`t how we normally dress,” they say, giggling. ”To school, we`re, like, normal.”
To school, Marlo is not, like, normal. But she is not in a wheelchair as she was last year when she visited. There have been operations, surgical releases that have slit the healed grafts of skin to allow movement in her knees and ankles and in her neck. With each release, her movements become more fluid. Her elbows must wait until her body stops growing. For now her arms are permanently bent.
Marlo flits nevertheless, her stiffness hardly a hindrance except when she tries to stand in the aisle and the bus hits a bump. A boy knocks her leg somehow, the tender scarred skin begins to bleed and will not stop for half an hour. The kids mobilize; Marlo plops into a girlfriend`s lap while another grabs a wet paper towel. They pat, they dab, they cradle the leg, reddened, ridged, on their own pretty knees, smooth and tanned. ”Who`s That Girl”
comes on the blaster. Marlo starts bouncing on her friend`s lap.
`You`ve lost your mind,” snarls Marlo`s father, Herb, passing his daughter on a trip to the john. ”It`s no big deal,” Marlo snaps back. ”Look at this one. I tripped on a root.” She laughs, showing her friends another gash. ”I wasn`t even drinking.”
”It`s not you I`m worried about,” her father retorts. ”It`s that lap you`re bouncing on.”
The kids all know this is Herb`s way of being funny, this feigned irritation. They`re always fighting; he`s always sort of sneering at her. But really he loves her; he loves her more than anything. She`s all he talks about, people say, never mind his own chronic illness.
Marlo plays along. She lets her father pass, then she perches the high-top Reebok of the wounded leg on a seat back like a blockade, and as the kids pass to get to the ice chest, they lift the leg out of their way like a gate. No one flinches at having to touch the gruesome scars. Marlo`s pink beanie is growing dingy from wear; it covers the hairless tissue on her head and its Velcro rim serves as an anchor for the ever-present clear plastic mask. Her father is anxious for her to start wearing makeup. He wishes she would at least wear a wig. Her mother sympathizes; wigs are hot, she says. Her father thinks there may be a deeper reason: that Marlo must make a statement, that she has nothing to hide.
But she is very careful in her dress, very cool still. Today, she has gamely fashioned her own Madonna look. One thin strand of brown hair sprouting from a precious patch of unaffected scalp winds a few inches down her back; to this, she has clipped a broad silver metallic bow; it droops with so little to hold it in place. Her white Guess? shorts-overalls are loose and shapeless except where she has slung a silver chain belt. In the brief moment she has spent running from condo to bus, her skin has become irritated from the heat and humidity. The skin around her midriff is most sensitive. That area, the backs of her legs and her toes were the only parts of her body not burned in the accident. They served as donor sites for the 40 skin grafts that saved her life.
She doesn`t remember it, the endless pain after the accident. Nature has spared her the literal recollection; she only recalls it intellectually, but she remembers that the donor sites hurt more than the burns.
It is 5:30, and the concert won`t begin until 8. They wait in the rain, taking turns holding the umbrellas, bemoaning their collapsing hair, all except Marlo. She does not mind the rain. She complains about nothing.
Marlo always is breathless; things come out of her at twice the rate of normal speech, almost superhuman. Incessant, unpredictable, the chatter captivates her adolescent friends. They cluster, rapt, intent on hearing everything. Marlo talks so fast that her friends, even new friends, are hardly given time to notice what she looks like. Not that any of them seem to mind the way she looks. Eventually it seems to endear her to them, in the way a tattered rag doll claims the affection of a child.
They may notice, but they don`t seem to. They may notice, at Gate 8 at the Orange Bowl, when Marlo and her friends are charging around, yacking and asking strangers for directions to Section Q, ”Where`s the Coke machine? How much is that shirt? I want the black one.” But it is all happening so fast that even the gawkers barely can catch a glimpse. It barely registers what they see.
And there is her father, Herb, trying to slow her down, having to pull her to one side and away from the crowd making its way toward the ramp.
”Marlo,” says Herb. ”I want you to do something for me.” The tone is too somber. Herb hands Marlo a long letter, handwritten on a yellow legal pad on the bus ride down, painstakingly proofread; a letter to Madonna asking her to mention Marlo in the concert. This has been discussed by the family for weeks. Madonna`s secretary has been called repeatedly. It is Marlo`s dream. But now, Marlo glares at the letter, understanding what`s coming next. ”See that policeman over there?” Herb continues. ”I want you to give this to him. I want you to do it.”
He wants her to do it so the policeman will see her with his own eyes and be shocked and filled with pity and be moved to deliver the message, and his witness will have an impact on Marlo`s beautiful idol, wherever she is, and Marlo`s dream, and her parents` dream -for she is all they dream about-will come true.
”Forget it!” shrieks Marlo, blowing off the request with the practiced arrogance of a spoiled teenager, never bothering to raise her eyes from the paper. ”Take it yourself!”
But that scene is just a pause, and soon the fast-forwarding resumes, on to the souvenir stand, out with the wallets, on with the Madonna T-shirts and the perusal of the $10 program. Life is short.
And from an adult`s perspective and a desire for delicacy that does not exist in a teenager`s world they should notice that looking through the program`s glossy portraits, huddled in the drizzle, someone mentions Madonna`s crucifix earrings and Marlo has no ears. That someone gawks at Madonna`s close-cropped hair-”Look at her. This is what we`re going to see, no hair!”-and Marlo has even less. That later someone offers Marlo a bite of hot dog, and Marlo can manage only to pinch a piece of bun. That when someone asks for lip gloss and someone else a brush, Marlo in her mask remains mute.
And it seems they should notice that people are staring in the stadium, and that a woman to the left of them is speaking like a puppeteer, her lips not moving, positioning her date so that he can see Marlo. That someone should spare Marlo all of this. All of this.
But grown-ups see her differently. They see her featureless mask, they see her stiff gait and her unbending arms, they see her body so abused, and they see Marlo as the doll dragging behind the child, and they think how loyal, how unbiased the child; how pathetic the doll, and wish that, for her sake, she were left at home.
When the ”Mark Leonard” sign is bandied among a row of friends, Marlo grabs it in the space created surgically between the places where her finger and thumb were, shouting with the rest of the crowd, jockeying for position above the live-remote video jock. It will not occur to her or her friends to wonder what director is thinking twice about punching up that shot.
Marlo is not on this earth to think about what people will think of her. She barges past them, beyond the disturbance she causes in them, beyond the complaints she herself should have. When the rain doesn`t stop, when the warm- up band cancels, when the seats aren`t good enough, there are no complaints, no hesitations.
Moments before the goddess comes on stage, Marlo bolts to a better seat, without a word of explanation, confident she will get away with it, confident that her parents will not punish her, even though it takes them, with binoculars, half an hour to find her.
Before the accident Marlo had charisma and cuteness and savvy in surrounding herself with the right things, the right tastes, the right friends. Words of criticism came mostly in the sorts of generic accusation (or confession of envy) that disappears from the vernacular of teenage girls at about 15: ”She`s so-o conceited!”
When Marlo first went back to school part-time last year, her very presence and the reaction it caused was something for which the staff and students had to be braced. Teachers had a meeting with administrators to prepare for any disturbance, and the students had to force themselves not to stare. ”I think most of them were shocked,” said one girl, outside of Marlo`s circle of friends who already had seen her and knew what to expect.
”The first day she came to school, their chins just kind of dropped. But not anymore. You get used to seeing her. You`re not shocked anymore. I try not to look at her, I don`t mean to look over at her, to see her hands and her skin, but it`s hard not to. You just have a tendency.
