Kat
Kathryn McDonough sat in one of the many empty seats in the theater and faced the half-lit stage. Her teenage eyes were upturned, large as saucers, watching the adult actors pace through their blocking. Some were still not off-script, carrying their pages with them as they spun from stage left to stage right, but she knew all the lines in the play and mouthed them along with the actors from her spot in the seventh row.
If this were her life story, as Kat imagined it, it would be a musical that followed the tropes of her favorite Disney movies. This part, where she sat alone watching the grown-ups rehearse, would be the opening number, the “I want” song that every ingénue sings to tell the audience her hopes and desires.
She would rise from her seat and walk blithely through the maze of milling minor characters, prima donnas, and closet queens. There would be a clever cut, and she’d suddenly be backstage skipping past the makeup artists and set designers and dancing around the lighted mirrors. She would harmonize with a chorus of half-costumed actors and stagehands, declaring—as the key shifted ominously from major to minor—that something big was coming her way.
The end of the number would find her alone on the now-empty stage, captured by a spotlight, singing that someday her prince was sure to come. She’d finish by belting out a triumphant high note, pointing back at the audience while the orchestra reached a crescendo and the stage plunged back into darkness.
But this wasn’t a Disney musical. Kat was just sitting there by herself in row seven watching another community theater production come together. Just sitting there with her own copy of the script, her five or six lines highlighted in yellow as if she hadn’t memorized them the same night she got the part. Just sitting there, waiting for her scene. Waiting for her turn in the spotlight.
If it had been a Disney musical, her castmates’ thoughts would have been expressed in rhythm and rhyme, not told in hindsight to police and reporters. They would say Kathryn was indeed a nice girl, but she often seemed lost, like someone waiting to be discovered, waiting to escape.
“I never met anyone,” one fellow actor would later remark about Kat, “so looking for help, or to start her life.”
But Kat wasn’t just waiting for something big to come her way. She was waiting for anything to happen. Anything at all.
—
Kathryn McDonough practically grew up in the auditoriums and amphitheaters dotting New Hampshire’s Seacoast Region. The oldest of three children and the only girl, she would often accompany her mother, Denise, to play rehearsals. She wore the title of “theater brat” proudly.
Denise McDonough was a set builder and a performer, and she had both the artist’s eye and the saint’s patience needed for costuming, which meant the area’s amateur and semiprofessional troupes would often call on her talents. Denise could sing and dance and was an expressive actress. She was the total package, and local producers fought over her time and time again.
There was steady theater work—union work—an hour south in Boston. But Denise didn’t make her living off of costuming or performing. In fact, very few people on the Seacoast can make a career at any of the region’s theater companies; some, despite being high quality, are simply too small, while some of the larger productions only run seasonally, catering to outdoor audiences at city parks. The thespian population in New Hampshire can be divided into two groups: those cutting their teeth before intending to go to Boston or New York or L.A., and those who live in the area and work day jobs in between and during productions. With very few exceptions, the people in the first group eventually migrate into the second.
Denise was one of those in the latter group. Costuming for the Garrison Players or the Seacoast Repertory Theatre was milk money for Kat’s mother, who owned and operated a successful paint-your-own-pottery shop in Portsmouth, where customers selected unfinished ceramic plates, platters, or coffee mugs from shelves, then slathered them in acrylic colors. The staff then fired the work in a kiln and the motley tableware was ready for pickup in a week.
Birthday parties, camps, and grown-up “girls’ nights” were big business at the shop. As a young teenager, Kat would help her mother herd the paint-stained children to the sink to wash their hands or collect the dripping sets of cups, which would never match anything, and line them up for the kiln.
When Kat was growing up, she and Denise were close. But on the evenings when Denise would work late, Kat was outnumbered at home by her father and two younger brothers.
Peter McDonough got along well with his boys. His daughter, on the other hand, was harder for him to decipher. Peter worked in the information technology field and was most at ease in front of a computer screen. A devout Catholic, he was often described as uncomfortable in his own skin, a trait that hampered his ability to express affection for others. Long before the typical teenage awkwardness set in for Kat, the pair was out of step with each other. If her father tried to be helpful or made some sideways comment, Kat would bristle and give it right back to him.
When Peter tried to quarrel with his wife, Denise would brush him off and not engage. But Kat always took the bait. The father and daughter would bicker like little children, neither having the good sense to let anything lie or to concede the last cutting word.
Denise tried to act as a translator between her husband and daughter, tried to get Peter to appreciate their daughter’s creative side, but it was a battle in which she could never gain any ground. In virtually every way, Kat reminded Peter of her mother. Denise often told friends her husband wasn’t supportive of her own artistic endeavors, and art was Denise’s life. Their impasse ran so deep that the couple slept in separate bedrooms, but they never discussed a divorce.
When Peter was in charge of the house, Kat would retreat to her room with her cat, Merlin. It was part nervous capitulation, part escape from the blanket of tension she felt smothered by when her mother wasn’t home. It didn’t help that the family’s house, which sat in a tree-lined neighborhood called Elwyn Park, was tiny. The ranch was 1400 square feet and had just one bathroom for the family of five to share and only a basement to which one could escape for any semblance of real privacy.
Kat would pretend her room was a fortress of solitude, though, and would text, chat on Facebook with friends, or watch videos on YouTube in order to escape the inevitable confrontations with her father. At an hour he designated as bedtime, Peter would yell for everyone to turn off the lights and go to sleep, but Kat’s room glowed cool blue as she surfed the web from her bed. More than once, Peter would unplug the family’s router and turn off the Internet connection in the house.
Dinnertime was another battle of wills. Kat was famously picky about her father’s cooking.
“I don’t like this,” she would say at the table, pushing her plate away. “This spaghetti sauce is too salty.”
“Your brothers don’t mind it.”
Now muscular teenagers, Kat’s brothers would wolf down virtually anything that was put in front of them.
“I don’t care. I’m not going to eat this,” she would insist.
Peter refused to be a short-order cook for his kids. Kat was free to make herself a can of soup or heat up leftovers, but he drew the line at making separate entrees for her. When she’d refuse to eat and complain instead of feeding herself, he’d lose it.
“Fine,” Peter would tell her time and time again. “You’ll stay at that table until you clean your plate!”
The boys would finish and ask to be excused, and Peter would follow, clearing the table of everything save Kat’s plate. Different lights would turn on and off, the din of the television swelling from the other room, as Kat remained at the table, staring at the plate but refusing to eat a bite. She would stew, feeling as if she’d been sentenced. She felt there would never be any reprieve from her father, and as she sat there, she fantasized about someday getting out of the house and escaping his control.
One afternoon, Kat and one of her brothers found themselves in a screaming, giggling chase through the house. How it started had been forgotten, only that one sibling had zinged another—a harmless insult tossed like a ball across a room. Kathryn fled first, then the chase reversed itself. Her brother bolted up the basement stairs and vanished before she could make it to the main floor. The bedroom doors were all open, so she assumed he was hiding in the locked bathroom. She began banging her fists on the closed door.
“Come out of there,” she demanded playfully. There was no response from inside, so she kept pounding and pounding. “Come on, you little shit. Come out.”
She only stopped when the knob clicked to spring the bolt and her father whipped open the door. He had been using the bathroom the entire time, choosing to let Kat continue her tantrum while he fumed on the other side of the door. Her eyes widened in surprise and her tongue tripped over an apology. Peter grabbed Kat by the shoulders and shoved his daughter out of the doorway and into the opposite wall, then stomped away.
Denise was upset when she heard about the incident. Later, when she quizzed her family separately, they gave identical stories. Peter admitted to laying hands on Kat. He had never done it before and he never did it again. Kat admitted pounding on the door and swearing at her father. She had a sore back but was otherwise unhurt. Denise scolded them both for acting like children; they apologized to each other and agreed to put the mess behind them.
Kat asked if she could start sleeping in Denise’s bedroom, a place Peter wouldn’t enter. In every way, she felt unloved by her father and felt the absence of his love like a hole in her heart. She didn’t long for him to change, though. She longed for someone else to come along and love her instead.
—
Kat shared the details of her teenage love life with her mother. Her first boyfriend was a typical high school crush. There was handholding and deep kissing, but not much else. The relationship with her second boyfriend was more physical. He convinced her to perform oral sex on him—which she didn’t particularly care for—and she lost her virginity with him. As she grew older, Kat was also learning more about her own desires. She described herself as “bi-curious,” but was primarily drawn to men.
Denise was there to help Kat through the broken hearts, assuring her there was someone special for her—someone worth waiting for. Despite the complications of her own marriage, Denise told her daughter again and again that true love awaited her.
By seventeen, Kat was a petite size three juniors and, if not for her exploding squiggle of curly dark hair, could have been taken for a boy. But on stage, in her impossibly feminine costumes, she became somebody else, somebody bold or sexy or mysterious.
Kat had always had a vivid imagination, and her mother’s many roles all seemed like a fantastic game of make-believe. As a child, Kat’s fantasies flourished from wanting to hold a sword or wear a hat to trying on dresses and playing with makeup as a pre-teen. She loved pirates and princesses, and loved pirate princesses most of all.
As a teenager, Kat’s own talents emerged. Like her mother, she could act, sing, and dance, making her a budding triple threat. The theater pulled her in because it gave her the chance to play against type, proving that she wasn’t the unsure and shy kid her mother’s friends thought she was. On stage, Kat finally had the chance to reinvent herself. On stage, she was big and brash and fearless. Everyone in the theater community agreed it would be impossible to keep her from becoming an actress.
She’d been part of shows as long as she could remember. Her first public performance was in the chorus for a teen production of Once Upon a Mattress, the musical comedy inspired by “The Princess and the Pea” that launched the career of Carol Burnett. There were two other girls named Kathryn in the cast, so she’d taken to calling herself “Kat” instead. It started as a stage name, but soon everyone was calling her Kat McDonough.
Kat had been a full two years younger than the rest of the teens in the cast, too young to gossip about the boys. Still, she longed to make an impression on stage. “How do you want to look?” her mother, the show’s seamstress, had asked.
The girl smiled. “Pretty.”
Denise set out to assemble the dress, a pink-and-white flowing number. Topped by a crown of fake flowers, Kat looked every bit the lady-in-waiting.
Her mother’s costume-making forte was medieval/fantasy wear, like that worn by the lords and ladies in Mattress. Kat, running her hands along the racks, developed her own affinity for the aesthetics of the period. While any costume tempted her, it was the fantasy-genre dresses she loved the most.
Theater literally is role-playing, but many stage actors also enjoy games of Live Action Role-Play (LARP). But Kat wasn’t into suiting up between performances just to play a game of medieval capture the flag. Fantasy provided a spiritual rabbit hole for the troubled teen to slide into when things didn’t go her way.
When she was a junior at Portsmouth High School, Kat decided to create an alter ego—a persona she could channel when she needed to be someone else. Born from the avatars and characters she fabricated playing video games online, Kat created an inner character she named “Scarlet.”
Scarlet was stronger than Kat, more self-assured. When faced with adversity, Kat often thought about what Scarlet would do. Scarlet became something of a spirit guide. As she would later discuss in public, sometimes Kat would imagine stepping into Scarlet’s body—the way an actress stepped into a character—and facing her problems head-on. One can imagine Kat at the kitchen table pondering what Scarlet would do, what lengths she’d go to to escape the situation.
To Kat, Scarlet was just a person she would pretend to be. Kat wasn’t hallucinating or hearing voices. She didn’t have a split personality, nor was she living in a Walter Mitty–type alternate reality. Scarlet was not real in that sense. The idea of Scarlet was a coping mechanism, a tool; she wasn’t like an imaginary friend dreamed up by a child.
Kat was a good student, but she only connected with a handful of the teachers. She confided her secret about summoning Scarlet when she needed strength to a science teacher she thought of as a role model. He told her there was no shame in channeling Scarlet when she needed to. In the teacher’s estimation, Kat’s belief in Scarlet’s power was a normal, positive behavior, no different from people believing the Lord walks alongside them in their hours of need.
Kat shared everything with her mother, including the nature of her alter ego, Scarlet. Denise wasn’t surprised. A strong believer in intuition, she’d always felt Kat had her own attuned sense.
Denise’s own love of fairies and fantasy was common knowledge. Medieval costumes had always been her favorite to make, and she frequently posted her own original illustrations of warrior princesses and steampunk heroines on social media. Like her daughter, she was equally as fascinated with fire-breathing dragons as she was with butterflies, sharing art of both the mighty and the delicate on her Facebook page. Denise enjoyed wearing her own creations to Renaissance fairs; her costumed persona was named “Violet.”
At the same time Kat’s Scarlet persona was developing, her interest in otherworldly fantasy began to express itself through her art. She posted her drawings, short stories, and photography on a community website under the username of “vampirate-actress” (vampirate a likely portmanteau of “vampire” and “pirate,” two of her fascinations).
The photographs were often moody self-portraits, some in which she hid behind a drama mask, others treated in oversaturated black-and-white filters to give her a Goth appearance, that of a pale-skinned vampire with curly ebony hair.
Kat was able to transfer her years of experience painting ceramics to computer art and photo manipulation. Some works depicted angelic cherubs bound by iron chains. Others were of dragons and ghosts.
Kat also posted some of her early attempts at poetry and short stories. She began with a piece of Harry Potter fan fiction, a story about a fellow student at Hogwarts named Scarlet whose mother was an infamous witch named Violet. Kat posted her intention to expand the story into a full-length book in which Scarlet might be led down the same nefarious path as her mother. By pulling in her mother’s persona, Kat demonstrated a belief that these “other” personas could coexist.
Harry Potter was one of the greatest influences on Kat’s adolescence. From a young age she loved the books and the movies, which were full of witches, wizards, and dragons. She imagined being like Harry, rescued from the home in which he was unwanted only to discover he was no ordinary person.
Harry wasn’t the only character in the Potter universe she could identify with. For a midnight release of the sixth Harry Potter movie, Kat and her friends—and her mother—arrived at five P.M., all wearing costumes inspired by the books. Kat dressed as one of the book’s villainous witches. When the seventh Harry Potter movie premiered, Kat arrived at three P.M. for the midnight showing dressed as a different witch and carrying an official-looking magic wand.
Kat next tried her hand at original fiction. Her longest story was about a girl—again named Scarlet—trapped in a stalled elevator with a mysterious, handsome man named James. While “Scarlet” was usually the imaginary version of a braver Kat, this story’s Scarlet sounded more like the real teen. In the story, Scarlet’s parents nagged her about the smallest things, but she didn’t have the strength to stand up for herself.
“Most people saw her as the sweet, shy little girl . . . now all she wanted to do was live, and live her life to the fullest.”
As more short stories were written, “James” appeared again and again as Scarlet’s partner. It seemed, as with Scarlet, the idea of a “James” was important to Kat’s coping mechanisms.
More darkly, Kat wrote a poem in which she described a fight between a husband and wife.
“From behind his back, silver appears, propelling itself through my chest.”
Kat described blood on the tile floor, red drops piled like rubies.
“This is how you will find us,” it ended. “Till death do us part.”
—
For all of her darker interests, Kat had a paradoxical infatuation with Disney. As a child she watched all of the studio’s movies, all of the princess cartoons. She grew up singing the songs from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Full of costumes, music, and fantastical endings, the Disney films dovetailed with her love of theater. In fact, Kat hoped that after high school she could move to Florida and get a job as a performer at Walt Disney World. Her plan was to work there for a year and then to go to college in New York City to study drama. She hoped this would lead to a career in acting or costuming on Broadway.
Eager to beef up her theater resumé, Kat wanted to get into as many community theater productions as she could. Summer shows were the easiest, but she had to work rehearsals around her part-time job at Target and the two-week theater camp she attended.
The summer between her sophomore and junior years, Kat landed a part in the chorus for Oliver! at the Rochester Opera House. The following summer she got a speaking role in a dark comedy called Last Rites at the Players’ Ring. The play was essentially a one-man show about a burned-out psychologist looking back at his chaotic life, but four other characters moved in and out of the action during the protagonist’s alcohol-fueled rant.
The play’s supporting cast comprised two men and two women. The other actors were in their late twenties and thirties, and—though age-appropriate for her role—the addition of seventeen-year-old Kat was in stark contrast to the more seasoned actors in the show.
Rehearsals revolved around the lead actor, so the other four clustered in different combinations waiting for their scenes. Unlike the mammoth production of a musical, in which it’s easy for people to be drawn into cliques or to wander off alone and unnoticed, downtime with the tiny cast was much more intimate. The supporting players had no mutual scenes, so they had no lines to run with one another. Instead they would chat about past theater experiences, news of the day, and eventually, their love lives.
Leading up to the July performances, Kat and one of the men started breaking away from the pack. His name was Lex, and he was not only an actor but also a fight choreographer who was originally drawn into the show to craft a stage fight. Lex had black hair and an intense face. Though he was around twenty-eight, there was something about him that made him seem younger.
The other actors found Lex to be a bit odd—and these were folks who were used to the quirky personalities of “theater people.” While trying to make small talk, Lex would practice his fight choreography in an exaggerated slow motion that made him seem awkward, almost comical. He also revealed that “Lex” was a stage name, something almost no one used in the Seacoast theater scene. His real name was Seth.
—
Kat began looking forward to rehearsal so she could spend time with Seth. She told him about her mother’s costume designs and hobby of making outfits for renaissance fairs. Seth said he enjoyed dressing up for LARPing, acting as a knight or wizard in “reenactments” of magic-infused medieval wars. He confessed that when play acting he felt as if he embodied other people, spirit versions of himself.
Kat found herself telling Seth about Scarlet, her alter ego. Seth said he could sense the presence of another being within Kat. He said he too had a psychic alter ego named Card, short for “Wild Card.” Seth told Kat that Card was the bold one, just like Scarlet.
For Kat, it seemed her prince had finally come.