I stewed over this quietly and let my so-called friends continue to talk about my voice sounding like that of a country-western singer.
After a couple of minutes of good natured ribbing, Lynette touched Kristen’s arm and then nodded at me. Kristen and the others got Lynette’s message and the subject was mercifully changed.
Later that day, after the three cheerleaders had left to go to pick up my sister on the way to practice, Kristen joined me in the music studio.
Kristen was strumming her guitar as she watched me play with the patch cords that led to the open reel and the cassette tape decks.
“You need a mixer,” Kristen said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’ve never seen good ones in the second hand shops, though.”
Kristen put down her guitar and left the studio for a moment. She returned less than a minute later.
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“I needed to fetch something.”
I looked at Kristen, and only saw a guitar pick in her hand. “A pick?”
Kristen smiled. “Nah. A surprise.” She picked up her guitar and started picking a song, stopping a few times to tighten or loosen her strings slightly to get her guitar in perfect tune. I soon recognized the song as Don MacLean’s Vincent, which I remembered Kristen playing at the music store in Indiana.
“You played that at the store,” I pointed out.
“I use it to warm up. It was the first song I ever picked out on my own, and I like to play it.”
I listened to Kristen play that song. After she played the chorus, she started to repeat the verse. I started singing along.
My lovely blonde Goddess smiled as she realized that I knew the words to that song. Heck, I had just about memorized that entire album when American Pie came out. Based on what people told me about the title track, I even started looking into Buddy Holly records at the time.
I continued to sing, and Kristen joined me by singing a harmony line on the second chorus:
Kristen stopped playing at this point. “Do you ever feel like that, Jim?”
“Like what?” To me, Vincent was simply a song. A very pretty one, but it was just a song.
“Like people are sometimes too stupid to listen to you?”
“No.”
“You don’t feel like you’re misunderstood?”
“When I was younger,” I admitted. “My father was a bully, but I always had my mother. I don’t feel like that so much nowadays.”
Kristen shook her head. “When I first heard that song, I asked Daddy if he could get me a reproduction of that picture.”
“What picture?” I asked, completely confused.
“Starry, Starry, Night. The picture mentioned in the song.”
“The song’s about a picture?” I asked. This was news to me.
Kristen looked at me, surprised. “Do you know anything about that song?”
“Somebody once told me it was about Vincent Van Gogh… a painter, right?”
Kristen shook her head. “It’s pronounced ‘Van Gogh.’” Kristen pronounced the last part the way it would be pronounced in Dutch, with a back-of-the-throat guttural sound at the end. “You don’t know what the song’s about?”
I decided to admit my stupidity. “I originally thought that he was singing about a friend. Then somebody told me it was about an artist, which sort of explained all the color visualizations in the song. I was never sure what to make about the song, actually.”
“It’s a short song but it is all about the life of Vincent Van Gogh. How he was misunderstood his entire life. He was broke when he died, and nowadays his paintings sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars—money the painter never saw.”
“Starry, Starry Night was the name of one of his pictures?”
“You’ve been in my room. The picture is on the wall.”
I tried to remember the picture that Kristen had hanging over one of her dressers. I remembered a picture with a lot of swirls on it. “The one with the yellow circles?”
Kristen shook her head at me. “Yeah. That’s the picture that the song is about.”
I decided it wasn’t a good idea for me to admit that I had thought that particular picture was one that Kristen might have painted herself when she was younger. It never occurred to me that it was a reproduction of a painting by a famous artist!
“I’ll have to check it out the next time I’m in the main house.”
Kristen again shook her head at my naiveté. “I used to lay in my bed strumming that song on my guitar and sing that song over and over. Nobody except Will ever understood me. Daddy and Mommy try, but they never really know what goes on inside my head. That picture and that song seemed to describe my own life.”
This was a revelation from Kristen that I never heard before. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Oh,” I finally uttered.
Kristen closed her eyes. “I felt that way most of my life. The only time I felt differently was when I was with my parents or when I was upstairs in the apartment playing games with Will. I really felt that nobody liked me… not even the people that I hung out with.”
I remembered Kristen’s circle of bitchy friends that, if memory served correctly, included Patrice and even Lynette. Had it just been a year ago that Kristen was such a different person?
“Do you still feel that way, Kris?” I asked, softly.
Kristen started to shake her head, but stopped.
“It was after I met you… and what you did to me. Patty came over to my house. I was so embarrassed at what happened over Wendy’s house that I didn’t want to talk with her, but she was insistent. I decided to let her come over, and we talked. I think we talked for a couple of hours. I showed her my play room, and she took one look and told me how lonely it was in here. It was as if she could just feel the loneliness that I felt. Then she told me about her past, and somehow, the subject got changed to you.”
Somehow, I knew that this had happened, but neither Patty nor Kristen had told me anything about it up until now.
After a few moments, Kristen continued. She wasn’t looking at me, though. “I told Patty how much I hated you, and that I wanted to kill you. I told her what really happened after I left Wendy’s house that first day… about how I couldn’t contact my brother, which was a first for us. Somehow, I felt that I could tell Patty everything. I even told her that I wanted to kill you, but I couldn’t.”
“You wanted to kill me?” I asked. This was news to me.
“I wanted to cut your balls off with a butter knife and force feed them down your fucking throat, Jim.”
The vehemence in Kristen’s voice startled me. I could see a look of pure hatred in her eyes.
“You were the personification of every person in the world that I ever hated. I told this to Patty… and more! I played out scenes of killing you that I thought would scare Patty, but she didn’t get scared. She just listened.”