”I guess you get used to her because it doesn`t seem to affect her.”
No one will call her conceited, of course, but not many will call her tragic either. The sassy confidence, the brightness, the spoiled-rottenness, the status-enhancing wit and cool that earned her the epithet before are her saviors now. And she still manages to rankle some. One of the girls who called Marlo conceited before now says she has a bad attitude:
”The other day, I held the door for her, and she gave me a look that could kill.”
The note of dissent is the exception. Since her return, Marlo has more friends in her covey, new friends made since the accident. She is as popular as ever, still at the center of it all.
Only the kids who know her best, the ones on her memorized phone list, who play tag on the telephone interrupting each other with call-waiting beeps on her private line, only her best friends know that there is still one open wound on Marlo: Because of the accident, Marlo`s heart was broken. Scott was her boyfriend then, and now he`s seeing someone else, someone Marlo was best friends with, someone she now discreetly points out, twice, to a visitor, someone Marlo must see every day in American history class, and it torments her.
Not that Marlo doesn`t understand what happened with her and Scott. She understands. She says all the time how much she respects Scott for waiting a year to date someone else. At first, it seems sweetly adolescent that Marlo considers her lost love more troubling than her physical suffering, that what happened with Scott may foreshadow future loneliness never is mentioned. In her mind, Marlo`s boy troubles begin and end with Scott.
In fact, it is Scott whose future now is tainted, whose own accident on the same stretch of U.S. 1, 1 1/2 years after Marlo`s, has scarred him for life in another sense. Scott was arraigned in July, charged with manslaughter and DUI manslaughter, both of which carry 15-year maximum sentences. In mid-December he pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in exchange for a reduced sentence.
The police record comes together like the macabre lyrics to a `50s teen love song. It was Saturday night, the first night of Christmas vacation, just before midnight, and Scott was driving his brand new red Pontiac Trans-Am. With beer from a convenience store, his new, pretty, blue-eyed girlfriend beside him, and his childhood friend in the back seat, police charge that Scott started racing down U.S. 1 alongside a man in a pickup truck. Suddenly Scott`s car rammed into the rear of another truck, flipping it over onto its cab and bursting the gas tank. Miraculously, no one in Scott`s car was seriously hurt. The truck exploded, a ball of fire in the blackness. So charred was the driver`s body that it had to be identified with dental records.
”I still like him,” says Marlo. ”Unfortunately.” She uses the term in the same generic way that at other times the girls say conceited or neat. Unfortunately, he`s going with someone else now. Unfortunately, she isn`t as pretty as the other girl anymore. Unfortunately, she can`t really expect Scott to still go out with her, but unfortunately, she still likes him. Unfortunately, Scott won`t be dating anyone for a long time.
Scott has been sentenced to serve 75 hours in a hospital emergency room, pay with his own money the costs his case have incurred and live for the next two years under community control, which, will make him ”a prisoner of his home,” in the words of the prosecutor. No drinking, no drugs, no driving, no dates. He is allowed to go to work, to church and to school if he should want to go.
Scott was the kind of guy who kept largely to himself, sort of a loner, but with one main friend. It was Scott`s friend who discovered Marlo almost the moment she moved to town, and for a year she was his. When he decided it was time to move on, to ease the transition he called on his buddy Scott. Ask her out for me, would you?
Marlo meanwhile was not taking the loss of her first boyfriend lightly. She already had slit-or more precisely scratched-her wrists with a pair of scissors while her friend Joy looked on. ”This is the worst thing about Marlo,” says Joy. ”She`s always going, like, `Oh my God, I`ll kill myself.` ”
Marlo herself is reflective now. ”Your first love, you know how that is. I could have died. I look back and I think, `Look what I`ve been through. Then look what I did with him. That`s so stupid. What a waste. Look what I invested.` ”
Nevertheless, she sought revenge when she discovered Scott had been set up to ask her out. Revenge came in turning the tables, and conveniently Marlo and Scott found they really liked each other.
They found amazing links between them, like their birthdays were exactly one month apart and like they both had started seventh-grade late. One night they were out as a threesome with another guy, an older guy who had a car, and Marlo and Scott ended up holding hands.
So for a year, they were a steady thing, talking on the phone for hours.
”Scott loves to talk,” says Marlo, from a clearly distorted perspective. Scott, the quiet type, never could keep up his end without Marlo`s patter.
”We used to talk on the phone, like, all the time. All night long. We`d fall asleep and wake up on the phone. We`d go to school and we`d be so tired. Our parents? Our parents never knew.”
Marlo`s parents did know that she was out that August night two years ago to a liquor-free dancing spot for teenagers. Marlo remembers exactly what she wore: gray Esprit pants and black flats, a pink and gray Esprit shirt over a white tank top. She and her two girlfriends had taken turns doing each other`s hair. ”It looked great,” remembers Marlo. ”I tied a pink bandanna in my hair.” On her wrists were a mix of rubber and silver Madonna bracelets, and she wore new earrings that had just come out, mismatched the way Madonna was wearing them on the Virgin tour.
She and Scott had just had a fight and she was going out that night without him, but she`d bought a card for him in the mall. One of those sentimental ones with a poem on the front. It was there on her desk with the date on it-Aug. 17-waiting to be mailed when she left with her friends that night. It was there on her desk when she got home four months later.
Marlo`s parents knew she wasn`t sure how she would get home from the Happening, but there already had been one confrontation. Marlo`s mother, Chris, didn`t feel like making the 30-minute drive to Stuart on a Friday night, and Marlo had called her a bitch.
Chris didn`t get mad. She ended up driving them anyway, and Marlo found her own ride home, just as her parents knew she would.
Todd Grossman`s `67 Mustang wasn`t exactly what you would call souped-up. In fact, it was sort of a bomb, but that didn`t matter to his friend Tommy Lassiter or to Marlo or her two friends. Wheels were what mattered that night. But when the headlights started dimming, then flickering on and off, the kids inside groaned, thinking they were still a long way from home and, of all places, on the darkest stretch of U.S. 1. The fast food places had put out their lights not a half-hour or so before, and only the neon signs of a tacky motel or two lit the road. When the engine started sputtering and died, there, on the edge of the shoulder, they started to panic. Not Marlo, so much. Her parents were cool. But her friend Jennifer had to lie to get to go out, and now her alibi was about to fall apart.
In the front seat, Jennifer felt her heart sink. She turned to Marlo in the back seat for sympathy, and a pair of headlights in the distance caught her eye. ”I think we should probably get out of the car,” she said. Jennifer opened her door, stepped out, and held the back of the seat forward for Marlo. An instant later, Jennifer was lying on the pavement, her hip and both arms broken. She smelled a horrible acrid smoke and opened her eyes. Over her stood Marlo, her body on fire. Jennifer`s memory has erased the vision, but she remembers the words. ”Help me!” pleaded Marlo. ”Help me!”
The headlights suddenly had materialized, and the car, a Pontiac, slammed into the rear of the Mustang, which flipped and exploded, spinning twice across the highway. Todd, in the driver`s seat, climbed out the window, burned on his face and parts of his body. No one knows how Marlo got out.
Marlo`s long recovery at the Shriner`s Burn Institute had its high points. Getting Madonna`s autographed poster was one. Nancy Reagan`s letter was another. The 20-minute video from her friends was another. But, of course, it was Scott`s visit that really meant the most to her. He came up with his family, who knew the center well. His little brother had been badly burned in a boating accident years before, and he still was coming to the institute for surgery.
Scott and his brother pushed Marlo`s gurney into the operating room that day. Scott had an idea what she would look like, having lived through his brother`s ordeal.
Marlo`s burns were worse. Scott`s mother is the one who told Marlo`s mother to start keeping a diary for Marlo. That`s what she`d done for her son. The mothers figured one day the kids would want to know. The Mahnes took pictures, too, right from the start. They`re in the albums now; stuffed in along with newspaper stories and letters. In one of the pictures she is swathed like a mummy, and her doctors are dressed up in Halloween costumes; in others she`s with other burn victims who already had reconstructive surgery. The doctor brings them by to show them off.
Last winter, when Scott was mad at his new girlfriend, he called Marlo one night at 9 and they talked until 3 in the morning. Last winter . . . but to Marlo, it was yesterday. The letter he sent her afterward, a tender letter that she clearly treasures, she paraphrases in an inadvertent cadence of cliches: ” . . . that he still cared about me, and how I was always there for him, like I wanted you to know how I really feel, and it`s hard for me to say the words, and how you`re my best friend and everything . . . .”
It is a moment of sentimentality she cherishes, relives. It is a break from the boyish belligerence, the silence charged with a budding machismo that makes a shy boy seem stoic, and the girl who gets the glimpse feels more of a woman. ”I don`t really know anyone he has ever opened up to.”
They haven`t talked much since, but he asks about her, and her friends tell her when he does. Like Chris, Scott`s good friend. Chris went to the Madonna concert, too, and afterward, Scott wanted to know if people stared at her real bad; he hates that.
”When I came home,” Marlo says, ”I knew we couldn`t go out.”
Marlo must be pressed to explain. The only times she needs encouragement to talk are when she must say something pitiful.
”I needed a lot of care then,” she explains. ”But he never really started going out with anyone until like, a year later. I really thank him for not going out with anybody right when I got back, because that would have really hurt.”
It hurt when kids stopped coming over, right around then, right around a year after the accident, when the reporters were doing follow-ups and Scott started dating someone else and Marlo was better and the worst of the drama was over and her friends stopped coming over as much. ”When I first came home, it was like almost every day, all my friends came over. Then it sort of eased off as I got better. That`s when I changed friends. That`s when I started getting to know people for now, not just for before.”
Now Marlo is back to the normal exchange of forever-feuding teenagers, making each other angry for divulging a secret, for breaking a date, for talking to an enemy. Rarely does the loss of a friend interest her for long. Only Scott`s loss will not fade. ”It took a lot more to get over Scott,”
says Marlo. ”I get more upset about him than I do about the accident in general. When I get down or depressed or anything, a lot of times, it isn`t really the accident. It`s Scott.”
–
Although the burn institute takes in only burn victims who are children, it sees them through until the end of their treatment, and will pay for Marlo`s operations in full as long as she needs them. Marlo hopes the trips to Cincinnati will be over by the time she ends her lawsuit against Ford Motor Co., makers of the Mustang she was burned in; she thinks before she`s 21.
”Marlo`s planning a trip around the world,” says Herb. ”She`s already spending the money before it comes in.”
”I am not,” contradicts Marlo.
Marlo`s gregarious nature is unusual for an adolescent who has suffered such severe injuries. It prompts some to caution that in such cases apparent adjustment can be misleading.
”Marlo is not going to look very good no matter what happens,” says Marlo`s doctor, Dr. Glenn Warden, chief of staff at the Shriners` Burn Institute. ”She will never have hair, There is no hair with which to do a transplant. She`s probably going to look better in individual areas. Her nose looks better and we`re working on her lower lip. But she will always look like a burn victim.
”I don`t think Marlo has reached the point where she has sat and thought about her life where she says, `How am I going to get a man? Am I going to get married? Am I going to have children?` ”
Connie Ragiel, a psychiatric nursing consultant at the Shriners`
Institute as well as an associate professor of psychiatric nursing and family therapy at the University of Cincinnati, probably has spent more time than anyone assessing Marlo`s state of mind. ”Generally, kids face the reality of their injury at least around a year after they get out of the hospital. Marlo is a year and three months . . . so she`ll be coming around to it soon.”
The nurse stops and rethinks the chronology: It has been two years and three months since Marlo`s accident.
Has she come to grips with the life ahead of her? Ragiel takes a moment to reconsider: ”Sometimes I think yes, and sometimes I think no, and that leaves me to question whether people reach it (the reality of their situation, their looks, their future) and stay there, or reach it and put it behind them. I think Marlo has a good working personality, both at home and with the kids at school. She had all the right things going at the right time. If I had to design a scenario around a kid before she got injured, I would design it fairly close to what she had going, to give them the best chance of making it. The kids with no friends, no social structure, who are shunned by the community when they go back home, those kids` chances would be near miraculous. And we still don`t know if Marlo`s going to make it. She`s going to determine that, and her family is going to determine that.”
–
It was friends of friends who confirmed for Marlo that her dream had come true-her one dream that had nothing to do with Scott, that is. Her own friends had said it, too, but they were friends, and friends tell you things to make you feel good. Friends of friends have no reason to: They tell the truth. It was the day after the Madonna concert and Marlo was in the mall taking her film to the one-hour developing place, when a group of girls came up to the friend with Marlo. She is breathless retelling it: ”I didn`t even know them, and they just, like, came up to me, and they go, `Marlo, congratulations!` and I go, `What?` and they go, `We hear Madonna dedicated ”Live to Tell” to you.` ”
”I wasn`t going to say anything until I knew for sure,” says Marlo. ”I mean, I didn`t even hear it. They heard it. I don`t know. But these girls heard it, too, so now I know it`s true.”
To Marlo, that is confirmation enough. She hadn`t believed it the night of the concert, when her friends around her grabbed her and shrieked and even the people sitting behind them whom they`d told about the note to Madonna asking her to mention Marlo, even those people were congratulating her. But Marlo hadn`t heard it herself, so she wasn`t sure just what it was Madonna said in that most dramatic moment, when a bath of red light tinged her mother- of-pearl skin, and she leaned off the stage just as the first notes of her most beautiful song were beginning to sound. She was a little to the right of center stage-but of course she couldn`t have known where Marlo was sitting because Marlo had changed seats at the last minute-and holding the mike in one hand, she had reached out a hand there, down front, and said, ”This one`s for you . . . ” Her voice was distorted after that. She`d said something, but Marlo didn`t think it sounded like her name. But here were all these people hugging her and clapping with happiness for her, and by the end of the song, when Madonna struck her familiar pose in the resonating fade out of a stunning chord, Marlo felt tears behind her mask. ”How do I know? I didn`t hear it. What if she didn`t?”
She begged for affirmation-the tears were panic-that this dream might not be real. But then, those girls in the mall, that did it. Marlo has written to Madonna to thank her and is hoping her idol will reply. It means so much to her. ”And when the concert video comes out, I`m having a party!”
If Marlo was not, in her mind, a legend in this town, she is now. She is the girl who was burned in the car accident who everyone has seen at the movies, in the mall, at a football game. She is through no admitted discipline or inner power or practiced skill, the one who defies pity, who rightly takes the stares of the world as admiration, who is proudest of having beaten the odds, ready to take on another round. For Marlo, it all goes without saying.
But now the title no one can claim, no girlfriend of Scott`s, no homecoming queen-she is the girl a random hairdresser is talking about to a random customer: ”Marlo. I know about Marlo. She`s the one Madonna dedicated a song to, right?”
And Marlo hesitates to ask: ”Have you listened to the words, `Live to Tell`? It`s about courage, it`s about courage and survival. I think that`s what Madonna said, anyway.”
Sweet Madonna, to have chosen that particular song, God, what a coincidence:
I know where beauty lives.
I`ve seen it once
The light that you could never see.
It shines inside.
You can`t take that from me.
–
Postscript: Herb Mahne, Marlo`s father, died in October, a week before his 38th birthday, after a long illness.
