AS: Cave of Faces. I didn’t know it would grow so big.
SKpades: Yeah, last week when they put it up in front of the auditorium, everyone was like, “Errrmerrgaahhd! Whoa! It must be, like, twelve feet high!”
AS: Yeah, I love it. From down the hall, it looks organic, right? Like something from nature. Then as you come closer, your eyes pick out those faces, which makes it more interactive. Not natural, but social.
SKpades: Wow, that is so true! My brain just exploded! Last question—tell us what you did on your summer vacation.
AS: I went to see my grandparents. Oh, and my brain also exploded.
Excerpt from an article in SKpades, courtesy of South Kingstown High School.
LUCY LIM: After Glencoe, Addy quit all her other hobbies. No more theater, no more dance class, no more local modeling for department stores. Even when she came over to my house to watch a movie, she’d be buried in her sketchbook. Her art was showing up everywhere. She did the cover of the yearbook, the Our Town play program. Pretty much anything that the school needed, art-wise, Addy was happy to do.
That fall, it was like Addy singlehandedly rebranded South Kingstown as an art school. It gave her a lot of pleasure to walk down the school halls and see her paintings up there. She was also working so hard to stay sane. She hated her meds, but they focused her. And of course, they kept Ida away.
Our Town theater program, courtesy of South Kingstown High School.
ADDISON STONE: (from a last recorded interview with ARTYOUNITE.com): I’ve had a complicated relationship with my meds ever since high school, when I started them. I know Z throws off the switch of the monster-go-round of my own thoughts, so that my life makes sense to me.
But Z sucks. When I’m off it, I feel so free in my skin. Ropes loosen around my brain. I’m sprung. I’ve got clarity like a rock climber on the summit at daybreak. Everything’s in perfect focus. Then the focus becomes too perfect, too clear, sharp as icicles. (pause) I start to lose my toehold, but still I’m trying to hold on for as long as I can. I never want to ask for the ropes to be retied. So it pretty much has to be an act of capture.
Peacedale Ladies by Addison Stone, courtesy of Nancy Hurley.
IV.
ART ROOM FABLE
JONAH LENOX: I’d seen her, of course. Her art had hijacked South Kingstown. Addison Stone on all the walls. But I met Addison for real her junior year, which was my senior year. Thing is, I feel like I’d always known about her. Like, I knew she’d had these mental issues. Her reputation preceded her by a mile. I’d heard the stories, too. Mostly third- and fourth-hand information.
“You hear she got electric shock for five weeks in the nuthouse?”
“You see how her wrists are all scarred up?”
“Does she look crazy to you?”
That’s what a lot of kids would say to each other. Did she look crazy? Because she didn’t look crazy at all. She was the awesome, cute opposite of crazy.
I’d also seen that clip, the Musketeer girl swinging in the Newport mansion. She never got credit for it back then. But everyone knew. I must have watched that clip a billion times. I was so goddamn ready to meet Addison Stone.
LUCY LIM: True love was not Jonah, a.k.a. The Lenox. True love was Lincoln Reed. Infatuation was Zach Frat. But before Zach, before Lincoln, there was darling Jonah. He and Addy were like two pirates taking down the same ship, or two people stuck on the same broken elevator. They were together because of geography and timing. They both were desperate to be other places and live other lives. As soon as they could get out, they did—Addison to New York and The Lenox to Colorado. But for one year, they were misfits together.
JONAH LENOX: How’d I meet her, as in, how’d it start? So I’ll tell you a secret: going after Addison Stone was one of the hardest things I ever did. Maybe because I was so shy about getting served her rejection. Anyway. All week, my friends had been bugging me. A senior who was shy about a junior—Jay-zus. Also I had to end things with this other girl, and I wanted to give that a couple of weeks. Deal with the fallout. It was the longest two weeks of my life.
Finally, I picked my day. Friday, after school. Addison was alone in the art room as usual, with her music cranked, one of her bands that she loved, I think it was Tricky, and the song was “Overcome” on a loop. Addison could get drunk on music. She was stretching a canvas for one of her Fieldbender studies, the art that would make her famous. She said she liked to draw Fieldbender because he was always busy around the art room. “He’s live in the wild,” as she put it.
I stood in the doorway and watched her for a while. Those ribbed leggings, the long sweatshirts, the chipped, dark nail polish. She was always layered and loose, as close to pajamas as she could get. And long sleeves hid the scars. Addison saw her scars as weakness, a shout-out reminder that her brain had steered her off the cliff. So she hid them.
Addison in the South Kingstown High School lounge, courtesy of Jonah Lenox.
Finally I asked if she needed any help. She waited. Letting me sweat. Then she asked, “Is your company help?”
Ha. I hadn’t expected that. I said, “Yeah, maybe,” and then I ripped the canvas linen with her, stretched and nailed it to the frame, and of course we got talking. She knew my grandma Sugarfoot, who drove her school bus for a while and who once made Addison spit out her gum into her hand. And we talked about Macbeth, which she’d read when she was at Glencoe. It was her favorite play. She could quote a lot of it, like, “Whence is that knocking? How is’t with me, whence every noise appals me?” She said she related to Macbeth’s meltdown, the way he was spiraling into an abyss even as he kept pushing forward.
She was also straight about Glencoe. She didn’t act sensitive. At some point, I went out to the vending machine and got us a Coke to split. We cracked it open and sat, backs against the wall, pouring it all out to each other—music, art, gaming, poetry, politics, comedy, graphic novels, God, goth. You name it. Fuck, I was so electrified by her. I couldn’t even think what I’d have done next if Addison hadn’t wanted to go out with me, after that first Friday afternoon.
LUANNE DENGLER: You want proof Addison Stone hated me? She broke up me and my boyfriend, Jonah Lenox. He was mine, and she stole him. In fact, it’s a great example of the kind of girl she was. If she’d lived, she’d have been that stab-in-the-back bitch who’d try to screw your husband in the bathroom at your own birthday party.
Jonah was the boy trophy of our school. Everyone wanted Jonah. His hotness wasn’t the same hot as Addison’s brother, Charlie, who’s a superjock. Jonah’s different. He’s got a past—his dad’s a drifter, and his mom died a long time ago, so he’s practically an orphan. Plus Jonah’s an outsider. He was raised on a farm in Cumberland by his grandma, who’s part Narragansett Indian and rough as a rhino, even though she’s always dressed like she’s going to Atlantic City in her triple-string fake pearls. She always wore heels and had a cig hanging out of her mouth while she drove the bus. But if you ratted her out for smoking, she’d make you sit right up behind her. So nobody told.