Like anything else that anyone ever wrote, Anastasia’s Midnight Song solves an inner wound—specifically, a lingering sense of guilt that has afflicted me ever since high school.
To make a long story short, before transferring there, a murder had happened at my California alma mater. The commission of the crime had transpired a few years before attending said high school for my senior year.
Oddly, when the murder had first happened, the thought never once occurred that someday the grace of circumstance might take me to that very school. At the time of the murder, I knew nothing about it. Only after the fact did I happen to read an article about it in Rolling Stone.
And a year later, there I was—living in that very community and preparing for orientation day at that very high school. And as the days and weeks and months of my senior year passed by, gradually my sense of curiosity competed with my guilt—until the compulsion to bring up the subject of the murder proved too much. One afternoon after Spanish class, the question just slipped out. I asked an especially wise and sensitive classmate whether anyone at the school stayed in contact with the girl who had been convicted of the other girl’s murder. Without considering the wounds that a question like that would open, the dumb question just came out.
A silence followed the question, of course. No one wanted to talk about it. The wise, sensitive classmate did answer, though. Eventually. She alluded to a girl who still regularly visited the girl convicted of the murder. Then the conversation died out. Thankfully, I proved to be mature enough to not press things.
Later that year, while on a road trip to Santa Barbara, the compulsion to ask about the crime came over me a second time. At which point yet another classmate spoke of the murders. He was a snob, and he had a mean streak—and he had no compunction about sharing several disturbing rumors and gratuitous details. He liked talking about it. But that’s the funny thing about high school. Say what you will about a confused, desperate girl who murders her friend in a fit of temper, but high school is also filled with wildly hateful, even misanthropic people.
At that high school, we had skinheads who wore S.S. rings. And we had a classmate who idolized Adolf Hitler. There was also a chap who built bombs in his garage and passed out neo-Nazi flyers. (He went on to U.C. Berkeley and presently heads up a successful energy-management firm.)
All of which leads me to think that the reason why I’ve always felt guilty about not minding my own business is that deep down I’ve always known that the girl who went away for the murder was no worse than anyone else—and we were no better than her. Adolescence is a maddening time—a time when almost everyone tends to be temporarily insane. It is an aspect of the human condition. That’s why there is no reason to judge too pridefully. We are all imperfect.
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. Anastasia’s Midnight Song is his second release with AIA Publishing.
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