This is a work in progress, and it's been a challenging story to write. I welcome feedback and reaction.
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CHAPTER ONE
Thirteen seconds. That's how long it took for National Guardsmen to kill four students and wound nine at Kent State University. In the midst of the panic, with students running in all directions, screams and cries bouncing off the building walls in an echoing roar, Stella Kellar stood as if paralyzed. She had heard the crackling of shots, ringing from what seemed like all directions. Bodies, the bodies of the dead and wounded, lay around her like so much trash on the lawn.
Living bodies jostled her as she turned around and around, seeing yet not seeing. Where was Bruce? They'd been separated in the crowd. For all she knew, he lay bleeding somewhere. She didn’t want to leave him if he was nearby, hurt, dying, maybe already dead. He certainly wouldn’t leave her there alone, would he?
"Move it!" Someone cried, shoving her, but she didn't know what to do or where to go. They hadn't planned for this. Someone started to push her along. Dazed, she let herself be carried among the crowd of students, her limbs heavy and unable to move on their own.
At some point her body started working on its own volition again, and she started to run, pushing through the crowd, looking for him Bruce everywhere. "Get out of here!" someone yelled at her. "You want them to kill you, too?" In the tumult, she knew she had to leave, no matter how much she wanted to stay and find him. She would go to her dorm, and he would come to her. If they'd ever talked about what to do, if they’d ever expected to be shot at, she was sure that's what they would have decided. It made sense. God knows, nothing else did.
She returned to the quiet or of her dorm and crawled into the bed, shivering with fear, her breath coming in gasps, and a pillow pulled over her head. Even in the quiet of her room, her ears roared with the sounds of the protests gone horribly wrong. When could she go outside again? Would she ever feel safe at all? What would Bruce want her to do?
Time passed, thick and slow. She thought of the Dali painting, "The Persistence of Memory," with its dripping, melting clocks, and she waited for Bruce, sitting up all night, unable to sleep. She heard other students crying but did not offer to give comfort. It never occurred to her to go into the hallway and seek solace for herself, either. The messages of childhood were too steeped in her veins: Don't ask for help. Bear your burdens in silence, with dignity. Stand on your own two feet, because to do anything else shows weakness. Kellars weren't allowed to be weak. So instead of embracing her fellow students, all of them confused and frightened, she stayed in her room, on her bed, alone.
When she met Bruce the year before, his passion for politics had swept her along much as the Kent State crowd had. He stood for something and believed in it with his whole being. She wished she could feel that kind of passion. All her young life she had drifted. The only real decision she had ever made in her life was to leave Illinois to go to college, and everything else seemed to happen by default, Bruce included.
She didn’t understand what he saw in her. She had served coffee to him and his friends one day, hovering in the background as she heard their heated discussions. Stella was already tired that day, having gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to study before her shift, and she had an evening class ahead of her. In her senior year, she had struggled to make ends meet but had managed with work and small loans. It was the fall of her senior year, and she was tired and ready to graduate. The enthusiasm that had kept her going through the first three years had drained from her, and these days her feet and back complained when she worked, while her brain complained equally when she sat down to study. Soon it would be over. She would walk across the stage, collect her diploma, and then move on to…she didn't know exactly, but she'd figure that out later.
She noticed him first, with his blonde hair swept back and falling to his shoulders, and earnest blue eyes squinting through round John Lennon-style glasses. He was saying something about that other Lenin, the Russian one, though it took her a moment to make that distinction. They were having some sort of debate about the new government that needed to be installed, a government that would put an end to all wars. That perked up her ears.
She came over to the group and filled their coffee with a practiced smile. "Would you like anything else?" she asked.
He looked up at her, and their eyes met. "What do you think about the war?" he asked her.
One of the women at the table, who had come in wearing a miniskirt, a beret, and an attitude, laughed. "Bruce, let's let the poor girl do her job. I'm sure she's not interested in intellectual discussion."
Stella suppressed the urge to dump coffee on the girl's head, but kept on smiling. "We've had some great discussions in my government classes," she said.
"You're a student?" Bruce asked. He looked surprised, and she felt the usual shame, the feeling that she didn't belong. She had been underestimated most of her life, and she was used to it, but somehow, coming from him, the words stung.
"Senior," she said.
"Sorry, I didn't know," Beret Girl said. "I guess I figured…"
"This is how I pay my way through school," Stella said. She had seen students like that often, students who came in on Daddy's dime and then complained about how bourgoise they were. They could pontificate about the world because they had time to do so. Stella, on the other hand, had to work.
When the group rose to leave, he came over and introduced himself. From then on, they had been inseparable. She thought he had fallen in love with her. She didn't know at the time that she would become one of his projects, he the rich intelligentsia there to explain to the poor machinist's daughter how the world worked.
"Revolution is a full-time job," he said often, but she just wanted to go to school, to find work, to fall in love, to marry and have children. He said that it was wrong to bring children into a world where they would have to fight and die – not that he would ever have to. He had a student deferment, so as long as he stayed in school, he didn't have to worry about that. She didn't point this fact out to him, though. She was just happy that someone like Bruce showed an interest in her, and she figured that with time, he would want the same life that she did. Wasn't that what people did, after all?
Lying in her bed, praying for sleep to come, she saw their relationship as if for the first time. He didn't love her and never would. She remembered fights she had barely noticed, fights about how they never did anything for fun, like go to the movies. Fights about other women, including Beret Girl, who always seemed to tag along when they got together. "We're just friends," Bruce would insist, but Stella knew better. Stella was his trophy to show that he cared about the working class, nothing more.
He had left her alone that day, doing her duty to him by protesting, with no notion of what to do when everything went horribly wrong. As she finally fell into a fitful sleep, muscles tense, she felt that she was about to be swept away yet again like an autumn leaf, headed off in no particular direction, waiting once more for life to begin.
The next morning, the sun rose as it always had, and the world continued to turn on its axis. Many time zones away, the war continued, while the war at home held its collective breath in shock at what would come to be known as the Kent State Massacre. Later, many would blame the students for their actions, but for now, a nation mourned the deaths of four fresh-faced young people, sons and daughters, who wanted only peace.
Stepping out into the morning after, Stella braved going outside, her eyes darting this way and that, wary of guns and snipers. The trauma had left her with a stiff neck and muscles tight as a rubber band pulled to its limit. She made her way to his Bruce’s dorm, only to find him gone, along with all of his possessions. He had vanished like a drop of water in an ocean, just as she knew he would. She tried his family, but no one had heard from him – or wanted to.
With nothing else left to do, Stella returned to her dorm. Graduation was canceled, and just like that, her dreams of crossing to get her degree vanished as quickly as Bruce had. The school shut its doors for the summer and sent the students away, promising to send diplomas in the mail. No matter, she thought. No one would have come to the ceremony anyway.
She gathered what she could carry, including a few items of clothing, flimsy granny dresses that she had adopted in order to fit in with Bruce’s crowd. She left behind books and notebooks, and even ignored the sheets on the bed. She had worked hard as a waitress to buy those items, and she hated leaving them behind, but there was no time to sell them. Students were leaving like rats from a sinking ship.
She envied the students whose parents came to get them. With her few belongings in a sack, she watched as tearful families came to rescue their children, wishing she’d had a family to come rescue her. She set out on foot, not wanting to impose on anyone.
Where could she go, anyway? She couldn't face home – not yet. She could only wander from town to town, heading in the general direction toward of Illinois, but knowing the fate that awaited her there. She had fought her father about the war from the moment he had come came home from his service. How could she explain what had happened here?
In May of 1970, it wasn't unusual for young people to wander cross-country, whether for a rock concert or a new life. Hitchhiking had become the preferred mode of getting around for broke kids seeking adventure. The war was killing all of them – why not live for today? They sought freedom from the bourgeois existence of their parents, sometimes disappearing for months on end. It was time to break all the rules. Stella didn’t care about any of that, though. She just wanted to get away from the war.