September 1993

September 1993 is the temporal anchor for Jessica’s encounter with a stranger who seemed to connect her small world to the Manson Family Murders. The date places her at twelve years old, three weeks before Polly Klaas was abducted from a sleepover in Petaluma, and gives the later convergence of the two girls’ stories its force: Jessica’s private fear precedes the public emergency, but does not cause it.

A Date in Historical Context

The novel situates Jessica’s twelfth year among a series of recent and impending events: the Manson Family Murders had occurred twenty-four years earlier, Hillel Slovak had died of a heroin overdose five years earlier, and Kurt Cobain’s suicide was still seven months in the future. Three weeks after the September marker, an armed man would abduct Polly Klaas during a sleepover in Petaluma, California. These references make the date more than background; they place an adolescent’s experience within a culture already saturated with violent celebrity and news of real danger.

Jessica’s Ordinary September

By this time Jessica’s family had moved from San Jose to Santa Rosa. In San Jose, she had been the most popular girl in her sixth-grade class; in Santa Rosa, she struggled to find a place among several groups. The popular girls ignored her, the girls in the band were kind but dull to her, and the girls she privately considered the bad crowd were magnetic but hurtful. She could spend time with them only in brief, exhilarating stretches before feeling worn down and retreating to the calmer company of the band girls.

Her daily habits give the period a particular, unexceptional texture. After field-hockey practice, Jessica emptied her backpack on her bed, then packed a CD player, a black CD case, library books, an apple, and three slices of cheese. She ran three hundred meters from her family’s bright-yellow Victorian house in Lomita Heights to the skaters’ park, where she sat at the bottom of a spiral slide to read and listen to music. Though she owned seventeen CDs, she returned to just three: Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Use Your Illusion I, and Nevermind. Her battered science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks often featured boys discovering that they had special powers, a detail that quietly contrasts her ordinary routine with the extraordinary significance she would later attach to what happened to her.

The Approaching Crisis

The abduction of Polly, a girl Jessica’s age with the same hair and freckles, transformed the atmosphere around Jessica’s earlier encounter. When Jessica’s family saw the first television report the evening after she had stayed awake watching over them, the wanted poster showed a face she found frighteningly familiar. Her parents took nearly an hour to draw the story from her, then called the police; reaching someone at the station took another two hours because calls about Polly’s case were already overwhelming the authorities.

Forty-eight hours later, two policewomen interviewed Jessica. She could not give them the stranger’s real name, but she had kept the cassette he had given her, still in her school backpack. He had handled it with dirty hands and placed it in a plastic case. The officers returned to their car for gloves, tweezers, and an evidence bag, then took the cassette and told her parents they would follow up. The object made Jessica’s uncertain recollection tangible, while the surrounding investigation made her fear that she might be blamed for having encountered the abductor first.

Retrospective Meaning

The search for Polly grew to involve more than four thousand people combing Sonoma County, while a black-and-white school photograph appeared on walls, trees, and telephone poles across California. When Polly was found in a shallow grave behind Highway 101, investigators established that her killer was an older man; his resemblance to the figure on the poster had been an effect of imagination or light, not evidence that Jessica’s stranger had taken her.

Nearly a year after the events, an padded envelope arrived for Jessica from the Petaluma police station. She thought it contained the cassette, but her parents took the envelope before she could check, and she never saw either it or the tape again. At fourteen, she understood that the stranger had not been looking for her and had taken Polly instead, and that the two encounters had coincided by chance. Yet for the remainder of her childhood she continued to feel that Polly’s fate and her own experience were connected by an unseen force. September 1993 therefore marks both the beginning of a mistaken personal explanation and the moment from which Jessica would struggle to separate coincidence from the deeper pattern she sensed beneath events.