When Stacy Hamilton finally reached her examination room, a nurse sat her on a steel table and asked her to wait a moment for a Dr. Betkin. Fifteen minutes later Dr. Betkin breezed into the room.
“Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
He gave Stacy the once-over. “You look a little young. Why are you here?”
Stacy responded with all the spontaneity of a war prisoner under interrogation. “I have sex twice a week.”
“Twice a week? How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
The doctor nodded once. He took out a pad. “Uh-huh. Well, I’m going to start you on Norinyl 1 Plus 50s. I’m giving you three months’ worth. Now what I want you to do is please, and this is very important, wait thirty days before you have sex again. Okay? That’s not impossible, is it?”
“No. Thank you, doctor.”
Dr. Betkin paused before he left the room. “Are you a virgin?”
Stacy almost admitted it. “Sort of.”
Dr. Betkin nodded and left the room.
On the way out of the free clinic, Linda and Stacy passed a donation box.
“Do you have any change?”
“No,” said Linda, “we’ll get it next time.”
Linda and Stacy hadn’t been friends in junior high. Stacy was in sixth grade and worked in the attendance office. Linda was a haughty eighth grader who hadn’t had time for the likes of Stacy.
Linda Barrett always had a score of boyfriends. She acted as if she didn’t know why, which only compounded the jealousy of girls like Stacy. Linda was the first girl at Paul Revere Junior High to get tits. Large, full-grown breasts. Even at twelve, she would pull a sweater over her head like she was Ursula Andress.
Linda began dressing out of Vogue, wearing stylish raincoats on sunny days. She developed a distaste for males in the same age group. Linda went out with high school boys then, and she logged long nights out in the parking lot of Town Center Mall. One of her boyfriends turned her on to smoking pot, and Linda pursued it with her typical uninhibited zeal. She began buying and selling whole kilos out of her room. Then she added speed and coke to the trade. The only drugs Linda Barrett, then thirteen, never sold were heroin and LSD.
But it was not as if her activities as a junior high drug kingpin suddenly changed Linda. She was the same freckle-faced Linda. There was just no way she was ever going to save up for her dream car—a red Chevy Ranchero—with household chore money. No way could she buy make-up, food, clothes, and records . . . forget about records. Everything was too expensive. So she sold dope. And she went out with high school boys who paid for everything.
One Saturday night Linda and a gang of Ridgemont High boys planned a visit to the Regal Theatre to see a midnight showing of Jimi Plays Berkeley, the famous Hendrix concert movie. Linda sneaked out of her house and met the boys in the alley behind the Ridgemont Bowl.
Standing in the alley, Linda and the three boys smoked some hash and drank a little tequila from the bottle. A kid named Gary drove to the Regal. They all bought tickets and went inside.
Five minutes into Jimi Hendrix’s first guitar solo of the film, two of Linda’s friends let loose with bloodcurdling war cries. “AAAAHHH-WOOOOOOOOO!!!!! RIGHTEOUS!!!!!”
As their howls continued, paper cups and boxes began to fly at them from all sections of the theatre. Someone threw a bottle. A scuffle broke out around Linda and her friends. They were all kicked out of the Regal.
At ten minutes after twelve there was not much to do around Ridgemont. The kids sat in Gary’s car in the parking lot, and Linda plucked from her purse some finely ground speed. She laid out four lines on a pocket mirror, and each of them snorted it through a Carl’s Jr. straw. Then they finished off the rest of the tequila. It was quite a car party.
Someone got the idea to return to the Town Center Mall parking lot, and Gary fired up the car. Halfway back to the mall, Linda Barrett tapped on Gary’s shoulder. Her voice was soft, shaking. “I think I’m going to get sick.”
“Open the window! Stick your head out and you’ll feel . . .”
Linda had the window down halfway when it hit. It was the most ungracious thing she had ever done. She vomited down the inside of the door of Gary’s car.
“GODDAMN IT!” shouted Gary. “This is gonna stink for days!”
One of the other boys came to Linda’s defense. “Just shut up, asshole, and pull into a gas station. We’ll clean it up.”
“What am I running here,” said Gary. “A Barf Mobile?”
“Just pull into this Arco.”
Through it all, Linda stayed in the back with her head on the side armrest.
Gary and his Ridgemont High buddies were just driving into Town Center Mall when they noticed Linda wasn’t speaking any more. She wasn’t making any sound at all.
They tried to slap her awake, and when that didn’t work the boys started to panic. They tried discreetly walking her around the mall parking lot. They tried cold water on her face. They pressed the nerve in her shoulder. Nothing. Then Linda’s high school friends arrived at their solution. They propped Linda up against a closed jeans store and called Town Center Mall Security, just before tearing ass out of there.
The mall security force referred the call to the Ridgemont Police Department, and when the police arrived, the first thing they did was search Linda Barrett’s purse. The Ridgemont police then called Mr. and Mrs. Barrett at two in the morning and informed them that their daughter was not safely asleep down the hall, but instead on her way to University Hospital to have her stomach pumped, with a charge of amphetamines, crystallized speed, and marijuana possession.
Linda Barrett awoke to a scene out of TV drama. Mrs. Barrett was standing over her daughter’s bed, screaming at the ceiling as if it were the heavens.
“Where did I go wrong? Oh, GOD IN HEAVEN, where did I go wrong with this child?”
Linda looked up feebly. Her first words were, “I don’t know why they pumped my stomach. I already threw up everything.”
Her mother fell silent for a moment. Then she started screaming at the ceiling again. “DEAR JESUS IN HEAVEN . . .”
Linda Barrett told the complete story to her parents. It had happened for the best, she told them. Now she knew how immature boys were, and how immature she had been. Linda took all the blame herself and promised to change.
Amazingly enough, she did.
Linda set about courting the straightest girl she knew, Stacy Hamilton. Stacy, who lived in the same condominium complex, worked in the attendance office of Paul Revere. Linda began dropping by, making conversation. She called Stacy constantly. She wrote Stacy notes. She sat next to her at lunch. And slowly, very slowly, Stacy Hamilton, a somewhat plump and prudish young honor student, came to view Linda Barrett as a friend.
When Linda Barrett moved over to Ridgemont High, many of the same boys she had gone out with before the bust were still attending the school. The same boys who abandoned her in the mall pretended it never happened. They took one look at Linda Barrett, then fifteen and gorgeous, in full bloom, and they began crowding around her. They asked her out. They proposed. They complimented her until, as she told Stacy, they turned blue. Linda Barrett still would not go out with another high school boy. It made her more desirable than ever.
As part of her Juvenile Hall rehabilitation program, Linda Barrett had joined a Christian youth organization called Campus Life. Campus Life met once a week during third period—no Algebra—and on irregular weekends for prayer outings at various sites around the county.