Jessica

Jessica’s brief encounter with a man she privately calls Charlie links the ordinary solitude of a twelve-year-old in a park to the kidnapping of Polly Klaas. She escapes direct physical harm, but the later knowledge that the stranger resembles a wanted kidnapper unsettles her confidence that the incident was small, distant, and safely over. Decades later, she is still awake at midnight, wondering whether he is waiting where she first saw him.

Identity and Background

Jessica is twelve in September 1993, a moment the narrative places against a stark historical calendar: twenty-four years after the Manson Family murders, five years after Hillel Slovak’s death from a heroin overdose, seven months before Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and three weeks before Polly Klaas is abducted from a sleepover in Petaluma, California. These dates locate Jessica’s childhood in a world where notorious violence is both part of public memory and close to becoming immediate danger.

Her family has moved from San Jose to Santa Rosa. In San Jose, Jessica was the most popular girl in her sixth-grade class; in her new surroundings, she struggles to belong. She moves among three groups without feeling at home: popular girls who neglect her, bandmates she finds kind but dull, and girls she privately considers the most fascinating as well as the cruelest. Their jokes sting, and the excitement of their company quickly leaves her exhausted. She retreats to the band girls for calm, making her social life a repeated movement between attraction and refuge.

The family lives in a bright yellow Victorian house in Lomita Heights. After field-hockey practice, Jessica empties her schoolbag and repacks it with a CD player, a black CD case, library books, an apple, and three slices of cheese. She runs three hundred meters to the skateboard park, where she sits at the bottom of a spiral slide and chooses music and a book. Although she owns seventeen CDs, she listens to only three: Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Use Your Illusion I, and Nevermind. Her worn paperbacks, mostly science fiction and fantasy, feature boys discovering their powers. The private rituals of music, reading, and watching give shape to afternoons in which the older skaters never speak to her.

The Stranger in the Park

The skaters are thirteen or fourteen, loudly riding the concrete rail and sometimes falling hard enough to leave bright red streaks on the pavement. Jessica watches them for an hour, pretending to read while listening to music, then goes home. Her position is close enough to observe the park’s small dramas but separate from its older teenagers—a solitude that makes the stranger’s attention stand out.

She first sees him while unwrapping a new Guns N’ Roses CD. At first she takes him for one of the skaters: he is about their height and has a lean build. His long hair, falling to his back, distinguishes him; when he moves out of the late-afternoon backlight, she realizes that he is an adult, perhaps twenty years old. Once he notices her looking, he winks, makes a finger-gun gesture, and pretends to shoot. Three days later, while she is listening to the album, he appears and sits cross-legged on the gravel in front of the slide. He asks what she is listening to, and Jessica, too surprised to answer, opens her player and shows him the CD.

The familiarity he assumes becomes threatening. In her mind Jessica keeps calling him Charlie, although she knows that is not his name. She cannot stop recalling his dirty, bony thumb and the scrape it leaves where her throat meets her palate. She repeatedly checks her mouth in the bathroom to see whether it is bleeding. Her imagined alternative is violent and physical: she wishes she had bitten off his thumb, leaving him wounded in the park. The encounter therefore persists not only as fear but as a replayed scene in which she imagines reversing who has power.

Polly Klaas and the Police Inquiry

Jessica insists to the stranger that she will not meet him at midnight: she is twelve and considers the suggestion crazy. He accepts the time anyway and pats her under the chin before leaving. She tells herself she will not go. Yet when her band friends invite her to a sleepover to watch Dirty Dancing, she declines, claiming a stomachache. The thought of their games irritates her, and staying home with her parents and younger brother over lasagna does not make her feel better. Her refusal leaves her alone with the fear she has not yet explained to them.

That evening she asks her parents whether they have ever heard of Charles Manson. Later, while the family watches a film, her parents and brother fall asleep on the sofa as they often do. This time the familiar scene nearly makes her cry. She imagines their anger and fear if they knew about the man who approached her, put his dirty thumb in her mouth, and admired the Manson murders. Instead of waking them when the film ends, she brings her pillow and blanket to the sofa and keeps watch over her parents, brother, and herself until midnight has passed. Her private vigil ends with a repeated curse directed at Charlie.

The following evening, a television report shows that Polly Klaas, a girl the same age as Jessica, with the same hair and freckles, has been taken from her room during a sleepover by a knife-wielding man. The wanted poster shows a face that Jessica recognizes as frighteningly familiar. Her parents take nearly an hour to draw out the story and distinguish what happened from Jessica’s sobbing, disjointed references to Axl Rose and Charles Manson. When they understand the connection she is trying to describe—a man, the park, and the sleepover—they call the police. Reaching someone at the station takes another two hours amid the flood of calls surrounding Polly’s rapidly infamous abduction in Sonoma County.

Forty-eight hours later, two policewomen interview Jessica. She cannot give the stranger’s real name, but tells them about a cassette he gave her. It remains in her schoolbag, in a plastic case, and she says that he handled it with dirty hands before passing it to her. The officers fetch rubber gloves, tweezers, and an evidence bag, take the cassette, and thank her solemnly. The evidence establishes that the encounter has become part of a police inquiry; it does not resolve, in Jessica’s account, what the cassette ultimately proves.

Retrospective Meaning and Lasting Fear

After leaving for college, Jessica decides that her first impulse to connect her experience with Polly’s arose from childish egocentrism: the wish to imagine herself at the center of the universe. She distinguishes the killer who abducted Polly, whom she sees as a destructive supernova, from Charlie, an insignificant dwarf star. From the perspective of a child, she thinks, what was small and close might briefly have seemed as bright as what was immense and far away. She recasts the similarity as an illusion of perspective rather than evidence that the two men were equivalent.

Jessica also minimizes the injury. She tells herself that she got off easily and that Charlie caused only a small scratch on her throat, which she may have imagined. Against what happened to Polly, and against the countless terrible things in the universe, her contact with danger becomes an almost imperceptible point of light. The comparison gives her a way to measure and contain the event, but it does not erase it.

Long after marrying, having children, and moving far from California, Jessica still struggles to fall asleep before midnight. While her twin daughters sleep in the next room, she stands at the window looking into the immense, frightening, star-strewn night and wonders whether Charlie is still at the park waiting for her. The ending returns her adult consciousness to the appointment she refused as a child. She can explain the encounter away as a tiny mark beside a much greater crime, yet the repeated midnight wakefulness shows that its threat has not become merely past. The distance between the small event she assigns to Charlie and the enduring place he occupies in her imagination is the story’s central contradiction.