Show Off by Melissa Leavitt

THEY LOOK LIKE THEY’RE IN ON IT. That’s how kidnapped girls strike me on the flyers circulated after their abductions. The pictures are usually school photos, which don’t start off as anything special—just an image of a child told to sit in front of a gray paper screen and smile. But when that picture gets taped to a shop window, scanned onto the back of a milk carton, and stamped with the word “Missing!” the kidnapped girl becomes a star, someone we desperately need to see. It’s as if posing for a picture makes her complicit in her own disappearance; if she’d just stayed out of sight, after all, she wouldn’t be missing girl’s final moments, and makes me wonder why she didn’t hide, why she was foolish enough to smile, even though one day soon, as she skipped to school, a man would drive by pointing and say, “That one. The cute one. She’s the one I want.”

That’s what happened to Jaycee Lee Dugard, one of the vanished stars. On June 10, 1991, a man and woman drove up to her while she was waiting at her school bus stop, pulled her into their. car, and sped away. According to the photos on the Missing flyers that soon appeared, Jaycee didn’t see it coming and smile all the way through it. She would stay missing for eighteen years, until she was finally found in 2009.

The story of Jaycee’s kidnapping sounds a lot like another story I heard as a little girl, the story of being seen doing something you do every day, and then being discovered and made a star. Nadia Comaneci was spotted doing cartwheels in her schoolyard and became the first Olympic 10. Cindy Crawford was spotted in a cornfield in Illinois and became a supermodel. Every day as I went to school, went to dance class or went to the grocery store with my mother, I thought about these stories and staged my discovery in my mind, wondering who would see me and when. I didn’t want to be lost exactly, but I wanted desperately to be found.

Michaela Garecht, Amber Swartz-Garcia, and Jaycee were all stars of my youth—girls who were kidnapped in Northern California, where I grew up, when they were more or less my age. They were my best friends the way Jason Priestley was my boyfriend: I stared at their pictures, memorized every detail of their lives, and looked for them everywhere I went. Jaycee’s story struck closest to home. When she was eleven and I was thirteen, she was taken from the same neighborhood in South Lake Tahoe where my grandparents had a vacation home, a neighborhood where A-frame houses in cul-de-sacs are tucked into groves of Jeffrey Pines. My memories of Tahoe are summer memories—visits to the lake during the day to sit on warm sand, read Sweet Valley High books, and float on air mattresses, one hand dangling into the water. The summer after she went missing, Jaycee kept me company all day long.

In the morning, I saw her picture on the front window of the market where my grandfather and I walked to pick up the paper. Along the way, I would count the fire hydrants at the edge of the road. Each fire hydrant was topped with a small flag, so it could be located under the snow. After Jaycee was kidnapped, I imagined her counting the hydrants as she was driven away, a trial of breadcrumbs that would be buried when the seasons changed.

“I heard she doesn’t even look like that anymore,” said a man in the market one day. “I heard that whoever grabbed her cut her hair as soon as she got in the car.”

Every afternoon my family went shopping at Raley’s. where I saw those flyers taped at the entrance. I made sure to have as much fun as I could picking out the special foot I ate only on vacation—jellybeans and Fruit Roll-Ups and Skippy peanut butter—because I felt Jaycee watching me do what she no longer could. Jaycee’s flyers spun around on the casinos’ revolving doors, and on the evenings when my grandparents took us to Harrah’s buffet for dinner. I would turn to get a look at her description—four feet seven inches, eighty pounds, blond hair and blue eyes—as my grandmother hurried my sister and me past the slot machines.

Most of the flyers featured on of two photos. The school photo showed Jaycee with her hair in what I used to call a some-hair-up-some-hair-down ponytail. Her bangs are brushed to either side of her forehead, a bit out of place, as if she’s been running or jumping rope. She’s looking straight at the camera, smiling with her mouth a little open, perhaps laughing at something the photographer said. Our school photographer told us to say, “boys have stinky feet,” and I always started laughing before I could get the words out. The other photo on the flyers looked like a snapshot, more close-up than the school photo, as if there were originally other people in the picture who had been cropped. Jaycee looks mischievous, like she could barely stand still long enough for that picture to be taken. Her smile faces the camera, but her eyes wander off in the direction of her ponytail. These photos didn’t stay where they were supposed to, in the plastic sleeve of her stepfather’s wallet, or taped to a magnet and stuck on her aunt’s fridge. Only people who loved her were supposed to see them.

In my first school photo, I look like I already know what a frightening thing it is to be seen. I wear a denim jumper, a red gingham blouse, and red barrettes, and I’m frowning. My mother tells me this is because I used to misunderstand what it meant to smile. In candid pictures, taken when I was twirling on a tire swing or running through the sprinklers, I grinned like any kid. But when I was made to smile for the camera, I furrowed my brown, stuck out my lower lip, and turned down the corners of my mouth. As I grew older, though, I figured out what to do, and even enjoyed posing. I began to understand what it took to become a star. After Charles and Diana got married, my parents bought a coffee table book of royal wedding photos. I’d flip through the pages, focusing on the pictures taken of Diana when she was still a schoolteacher, when the world was just beginning to see her. One photo caught her standing in the schoolyard, balancing a child on her hip. She wore a long white skirt, and the sun shone behind her, exposing her legs to view. Maybe because she was aware of this, or maybe because she wasn’t, she lowered her chin and gazed at the camera through her eyelashes. She looks reluctant to be seen, but like she still wants to know who’s watching. She looks like a star.

When I was eleven or twelve, my friends and I took pictures of ourselves pretending to be someone else. We used hot rollers and crimpers and my mother’s free Clinique make-up samples, and we made ourselves up like celebrities. My prettiest friend had long brown hair and large brown eyes, so we would an eye pencil to color in a dark mole on her upper lip and she would pose like Cindy Crawford. One day we went to Glamour Shots, where cranky college-aged girls did our hair and make-up and then took our photos. They teased and curled my hair until it surrounded my head like a halo. They brushed orange eye shadow up to my brows, taped on false eyelashes, and coated my lips in sticky pink gloss. They gave me a red scarf to wear, and draped it over my shoulders so it looked like I wasn’t wearing anything else. I felt gorgeous and mysterious while the camera was clicking, cut when I saw the photos, all those layers of paint and fabric looked like a crow of people piled on top of me, hiding me from view.

When my friend’s mother picked us up from the shop, she bought a few photos of her daughter and the flipped through mine.

“Melissa, don’t you want to buy anything?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“But I think your parent would love these!”

“I don’t think they would,” I said.

That night, my father drove to the mall and bought all the photos. I told him I didn’t think I looked that good in them, and that I didn’t want any. He said that he only got them because he didn’t want anyone else to see me like that. I didn’t look like anyone he recognized.

As time went on and Jaycee stayed missing, photographs of her gave way to fantasies. She was eleven when she was kidnapped, and eleven-year-old girls change quickly. Those Missing flyers were probably outdated before they even went up, if she had her ponytail cut off in those first few minutes. A few summers after she was abducted, I began seeing flyers with images of an older Jaycee, uses age-advancement technology to represent what she might look like now, if she were still alive and attractive and in the habit of sitting for photos. In one, she looks about sixteen, like a high school athlete who’s popular but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. She looks strong and confident, but her smile’s not quite as wide as when she was younger. The other picture looks like it could have been taken when she was younger. The other picture looks like it could have been taken at her first job out of college, maybe working as an office manager or an elementary school teacher. She wears hoop earrings and a denim jacket, and this time her smile is bright, showing off dimples on her cheeks.

Those age-advancement images must be so hard on the parents. After they see that picture, something between a portrait and a police sketch, they have to accept that their daughter is now someone else’s creation. But parents take so many pictures of their children in disguise. I have a picture of myself as a princess, trick-or-treat in a silver gown; I have a picture of myself as a purple crayon, cartwheeling in a matching leotard and triangular felt cap; I have a picture of myself draped in pink pearls, playing dress-up with my great-aunt’s costume jewelry. Jaycee’s age-advancement images don’t seem so different from my snapshots. They made her look like she was happy and safe, enjoying an afternoon of make-believe. I wonder if that’s the reason those images didn’t bring her back home. Apparently, Jaycee was spotted a number of times while she was missing—by a neighborhood boy, by a man at a gas station—but nobody recognized her as a little girl in danger.

She was finally found in August 2009, shortly after Phillip Garrido went to the police station on the UC Berkeley campus, hoping to get permission to hold an event for a Christian program he had started called “God’s Desire.” He seemed a little odd, so the officer he spoke with asked him to come again the next day. In the meantime, she did a background check, and realized Garrido was a registered sex offender, currently on parole. When he returned to the campus station, he brought along two girls, aged eleven and fourteen, whom he introduced as his daughters. After they left, the police officer called Garrido’s parole officer, who said that Garrido didn’t have any daughters. The parole officer asked Garrido to come in for a meeting. Once again, he obliged, bringing along the two girls, his wife Nancy, and a young woman named Alissa. When police spoke with Alissa separately, they discovered that she was actually Jaycee, and those two little girls were her daughters with Garrido. He was charged with abduction and rape, and Jaycee was reunited with her mother. In June 2011, Garrido was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. His wife, Nancy was also found guilty, and sentenced to thirty-six years to life. Appearing on the cover of People magazine in October 2009, Jaycee looked completely different from what everyone imagined. She was taller, her hair was curly, she was brunette—but there was something else, too. She was a real girl once again.

Just as with pictures of any star, photographs and age-advancement images do not simply represent with girl; they are all we have left of the girl, and perhaps all that they want. After they go missing, kidnapped girls are at our disposal. We see their pictures and make up stories about where they are and who they might become, filling in a few details and making up the rest. In reality, of course, every picture takes us a bit further from the truth. The girl who goes missing loses more of herself every time she is seen, even by those just trying to protect her, trying to imagine her back in the place she should be. I always felt like those pictures made the missing girl look just like me; imagining myself in her pace, her terror became my own.

I grew up surrounded by an elaborate system of safety precautions that should have made me feel protected. The knowledge that someone was always watching out for me, no matter where I was, should have comforted me. But safety drills and neighborhood safe zones only increased my sense of danger, making me feel like every menace was close at hand. Everyone began to look like a threat.

When children in my neighborhood sensed danger—say, if a strange car started following us down the street—we were supposed to knock on the door of the closest Block Parent, identified by a yellow sign in their front window. The presence of Block Parents implied that one or two people in your neighborhood are guaranteed not to hurt you. As for the rest—who knew? Looking at the houses next to the Block Parent homes, I wondered what they were hiding. They weren’t saying they would keep safe. So what were they saying? But then I would look back to the Block Parent sign and wonder if that home hid the real strangers I should fear. Perhaps I shouldn’t trust what I saw. What if Block Parents were actually kidnappers hoping to lure children into their homes, and those yellow signs were like the gumdrops and peppermints that tricked Hansel and Gretel? I knew I wasn’t supposed to enter the home of a stranger. But was it okay if I was only trying to hide from someone worse?

My elementary school frequently held “stranger danger” drills. First, we heard a high, piercing beep, and then we learned what was wrong. Our principal, Sister Elaine, would get on the school loudspeaker and say something like, “There is an unidentified woman by the drinking fountain. All children must stay in the classroom.” That beep always indicated the start of an announcement, and at 8:10 every morning, it was as reassuring as homemade pancakes, signaling a daily ritual of prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. But at any other time of day, it meant something bad had happened, something out of the ordinary. When the Challenger space shuttle broke into two streams of smoke, we heard that beep, followed by Sister’s broken voice leading us in a decade of the rosary.

I was always a little excited to hear that unexpected beep. You knew it couldn’t mean something terrible happened to you personally—student messengers arrived at the classroom door with a note from the secretary when there was a family emergency. And no actual disaster would ever be signaled by a beep. We heard that beep for our fire and earthquake drills, when it was obvious that we weren’t actually having a fire or an earthquake. With those drills, there was nothing to fear.

But stranger drills were different. We had to stay inside, sit where we always sat, and keep doing the work we always did—so we could never really tell whether the threat was real. We couldn’t rely on our senses to help assess the situation. If there were a fire we have smelled it, if there were an earthquake, we would have felt it—in that kind of disaster, your body can help you save yourself. But during a stranger drill, all we could do was stay inside, feel uneasy, and wonder if we were being watched.

After a half hour or so, the principal would come on the loudspeaker to give us the all clear, and tell us it had only been pretend. Someone always had to run to the bathroom then, having barely held it throughout the drill. But the rest of us just went back to doing what we were doing during the drill, which made it seem like we were always surrounded by strangers and could never know when we were safe. If you don’t burn, you’ve avoided a fire; if you regain your balance, you’ve survived an earthquake; but if you stick to your same routine—leaving your house at the same time every morning, walking to the same corner where the carpool mom picks you up, drinking from the same drinking fountain at recess—you can’t be reassured because everything’s back to normal. It’s the predictability of these routines that puts us in danger, that makes us able to be spotted, and maybe stolen.

One day when I was in third grade, two child safety experts visited our classroom, teaching us what to do if anyone tried to steal us. The women put each child through a simulated abduction attempt. They started by describing a few scenarios in which we could be kidnapped. Let’s say you live close to school, and it’s a Saturday, and you want to play on the monkey bars without all those bigger kids around stealing your turn. You go to school by yourself, where you’re used to feeling safe, and a strange man grabs you from behind while you’re hanging off the bars, drags you to the parking lot, stuffs you in a waiting car, and you’re off. Or, let’s say your tap dancing class is over, and you’re waiting outside for your mother to pick you up. It’s November, just starting to get cold, and you have a sweatshirt, but even though you zip it up, it only goes down to your waist, and your tights aren’t really keeping you warm. Pretty soon a woman about your mother’s age pulls up next to you and says she’s there to take you home, says she’s your new neighbor, doing a favor for your mother. You’ve never seen her before, but maybe you have; a lot of the neighborhood ladies look alike. She seems nice, she drives a station wagon, so you get in and you’re off.

“You have to remember all of the weapons you carry around with you every day,” one of the women said. She scanned the room as she spoke, bobbing her head in line with each row of desks. “Like your fingers! Like your fingernails!” She raised her arms about her head and clamped her hands open and shut like a cartoon lobster. “Don’t forget your pinchers!”

The pinching technique fit in with the being-grabbed-from-behind scenario. You were supposed to pinch your abductor’s arms and hands to make them release you. When it was my turn to demonstrate the technique, I looked at my feet, clenching my stomach muscles the way I would when my sister tickled me. When the woman grabbed me from behind, I started to giggle.

The other child safety expert, standing at the back of the room, shouted, “Go, go! Come on! Time’s running out!”

I tried to pinch, but my fingernails were ragged, chewed to my skin, and I couldn’t get a good grip.

“I’m dragging you to my car,” the woman said. “We’re about to drive away.”

My classmates started to laugh.

“I can’t do it, I can’t,” I said, blushing and out of breath. After a minute or so, my teacher told me I could head back to my seat.

“All right, everybody,” the safety expert said. “Something just happened that you have to make never happens in a real situation. Melissa didn’t pinch me because she didn’t want to be mean. She knows she’s not supposed to to mean to grown-ups, so she didn’t want to hurt me. But that won’t help you in a real situation.”

She was wrong. I didn’t pinch because I was afraid to drawn any more attention to myself. I felt so exposed already. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t forget what it felt like to be grabbed from behind, to pinch the person grabbing you and know you couldn’t pinch hard enough to save yourself. Trying to practice my pinching, I dug the nail of each index finger into the tops of my thumbs. But I had a habit of scratching my thumbs when I felt anxious, so pinching myself only added to my anxiety, as if the repeated act of keeping myself safe was an expression of fear, and nothing more. Any precaution I might take, anything I might do to protect myself, seemed beside the point. Practicing what I was supposed to do in a “real situation” made me feel like I was rehearsing my part as the kidnapped child in every abduction story I’d ever heard. I pulled the covers up to my chin and looked at the crack of light under my bedroom door, watching for the shadows of a stranger’s feet. Recalling those two strangers in my classroom, grabbing and shouting at me, I could see how my abduction story would end.

I always thought it would happen to me. I grew up blue-eyed and blond, just like Amber and Michaela and Jaycee. “They’re killing Kennedys,” Jackie supposedly said after Bobby was assassinated. “They’re killing blonds,” I though to myself, every time I felt in danger. I know it’s absurd to think of hair color as an affliction. I know how ridiculous it sounds, how sorely y fear lacked perspective. It isn’t just blond girls who are kidnapped; boys go missing too, and so often we focus on the abductions of white children while ignoring the children of color who disappear from their homes and fade from public memory all too quickly. But I’m not the only one worried about blonds. In September 2009, amidst the flurry of interest in Jaycee’s reappearance, the New York Times ran a story questioning whether parents should allow their children to walk to school by themselves. The author of the article, Jan Hoffman, wrote that her friends warned her not to let her daughter walk alone, saying things like, “‘She’s just so pretty. She’s just so . . . blond.'”

On morning when I was thirteen, my mother turned on the news as my sister and I got ready for school. The night before, a thirty-one-year-old man carrying three guns had walked into a bar in Berkeley and taken everyone hostage, killing a UC Berkeley student and wounding several other people. Mehrdad Dashti shot out the lights in the room. Then he made the blond women strip from the waist down, and had the men violate them with carrots. I remember seeing the news reports that morning live from the scene, eating my Cheerios and watching half-naked blonds run out of the bar. They didn’t scream or cry; they just stared straight ahead, avoiding the cameras and each other, and ran like hell. I wondered if, by watching these women, I was violating them myself—violating them in the same way that all those Missing flyers violate kidnapped girls. The missing disappear because they’ve been exposed, but they can only be discovered when they are exposed again. This is the dilemma of visibility. This is what it means to be lost, and then found.

I’ve got my own story of being lost and found. I always think of it as the day I was almost kidnapped on my way home from kindergarten. My mother waited at the bus stop for me one afternoon, and kept waiting as the other children filed out. When the driver pulled away, and I still hadn’t appeared, she got in her station wagon and drove to my school. I imagine her rushing into the classroom, where my teacher was putting away tubs of paste left over from that day’s art project. He told my mother that he definitely saw me get on the bus. What must have happened, he said, was that he somehow walked me to the wrong bus, and that I was probably still on the wrong bus. He gave her maps of the routes that the other buses took, and my mother got back in the car to drive around town.

Three kindergarten buses lined up at the school curb every afternoon. I always took the third in line, the one marked “C.” But on that day, the buses were out of order, and the one marked “C” was second in line. I didn’t know what to do, so I got on the third bus, which that day was marked “B.” When the bus turned left at the corner instead of right, I realized my mistake and panicked. I started crying, and at the first stop I rushed up to tell the driver that I was on the wrong bus. She said I would have to stay on the bus until she finished her route and then she would bring me back to school. Despite what she said, I though I would have to stay on the bus until someone discovered me, cold and hungry and stinking like vinyl from sleeping on the seats all night.

I ran back to the last seat and cried, until I heard a car honking behind us. My mother told me later that when I turned around, she saw the tiniest face crying, the tiniest hand waving back at her. I remember that moment of turning and waving as if seeing myself through my mother’s eyes. I knelt on the backseat and propped my chin on the bottom ledge of the rear window. My bangs dropped almost into my eyes and my face took up so little space. I felt small and lost and scared, and even though I could see my mother, I worried I could so easily be missed, so easily miss my chance to be found. The time Melissa got on the wrong bus, as the story is known in my family, wasn’t really a close call. I thought I was going to live at the bus depot, and the thought made me cry, but I knew I wasn’t being kidnapped. Yet I remember it as my almost-abduction because it was the only time I ever experienced the thrill of being discovered. And so it is the only story I can offer to claim my place among the stars of my youth, those girls who were lost and those girls who were found.

So many of their stories start to sound the same after a while, stories of a certain girl who was spotted by a certain person, singled out, and made a star. And once you realized that, there’s nothing those kidnapped girls can teach you. There’s no lesson to be learned from any of their stories—no place to be avoided, no person to be ignored, no special attention to be plaid. If anything, it’s the happy stories, the ones about being in the right place at the right time, that are the real cautionary tales. They warn you that to have a chance at becoming a star, you can’t very well stay hidden. To be visible—to make oneself vulnerable to discovery—is to be in a constant state of peril. But to be invisible, you may as well be dead.