KATE ORTEGA: There wasn’t a child in my first-grade classroom more gifted than Allison Stone, and I don’t expect there ever will be. That first month, I sent an email blast to all the other teachers with attached images of her art. I wanted to give everyone a heads-up that this girl was extraordinary. Her cutout collages and her pencil drawings, even her watercolors were far beyond her years. There were hers, and then there were every other child’s. Her mind was always a fresh bouquet of observations and conclusions. I needed the other educators to know that. Honestly, I felt it was my duty. Why? Well, because genius is such a rare animal. You want to acknowledge its presence, but you don’t want to scare it off.
LUANNE DENGLER: Look, don’t file me under school friend! I was never her friend. Addison was a bitch, and it wasn’t just me who felt that way about her—lots of people thought she was selfish and a user. I know she’s dead, but that’s the reality.
Me and Addison didn’t go to school together till seventh grade, when South Road School and Matunuck Elementary merged into South Kingstown Junior High. But back in first through fifth grade, she took ballet with me at Stage Door Dance.
Considering what Addison became, and the things she got famous for after she moved to New York, you’d think not being friends with her seems like a mistake, right? Like, she could have introduced me to actors and cool bands and got me into clubs and stuff, the way she did with Lucy Lim. Thing is, I didn’t want to be a suck-up like Lucy. Because Lucy made it her job to take care of Addison, to be the full-time manager of Addison World. Sorry if I have too much self-esteem for that.
Besides, Addison was jealous of me. Sometimes I think Addison’s negativity came down to how she didn’t ever have any of the right things. For ballet, she had one old black Danskin and one pair of tights and a pair of too-small ballet slippers with the ties pulled off.
That first Sunday, I walk into the studio, and she’s in my spot. Front and center. Anyone can see she’s good but has no experience, ballet-wise. Worse than this, Madame Kuznetov has decided that this girl is her new pet. Suddenly it’s “Miss Stone” this and “Miss Stone” that and “Miss Stone, you have flair” and “Look, girls, look at how Miss Stone is tucking in her derriere and how she’s positioning her feet.”
I wouldn’t have cared, I swear, but Addison herself was always chafing me. “Dengler-berry,” she got kids to call me—even Lucy. Addison could bring out Lucy’s worst, especially when she turned into Addison’s puppy dog.
Addison’s mom got her lessons at Stage Door free, because she traded out Addison to do modeling for their website. Addison was pretty in a trendy way, I guess, and her mom wasn’t shy about pimping out her looks. She’d do anything if it meant free crap. Look, I’ve got a baby of my own now. I get it that money doesn’t grow on trees. People’ve got to provide for their kids. You play your cards. But Addison’s mom didn’t even try to be classy about it.
JENNIFER O’HARE MEYERS: Addison never called me Aunt Jen.
“Jen,” she’d say.
“Aunt Jen,” I’d correct.
“Right,” she’d say. But she never made the change.
“Hey, Jen,” she’d say, five minutes later.
My girls always called my sister Aunt Maureen. Charlie calls me Aunt Jen. But Addison never. She said Jen, on purpose and always.
When it came to parenting, Roy was the weak one. I say this on the record because Charlie’s grown, and Addison’s gone, and Maureen and Roy are separated now. You want to know the truth about Roy Stone? He was chased out of Bristol because he was seeing so many other women on the sly. He’s a drunk and a deadbeat. Mostly a cheat. He’s a disgrace to this family. I was always ashamed to call him my brother-in-law.
Maureen used to phone me in tears. “I found lipstick smudges on Roy’s clothes,” she’d say.
“Throw the bum out,” I’d answer.
Then another time she called. “I found a lace bra in the glove compartment.”
“Put a PI on that rat,” I’d say. “When you divorce him, he’ll need to pay through his cheating nose.”
Finally Maureen got smart and listened to my advice, and spent the few hundred bucks she’d scraped to save on her own to have Roy followed. Turned out he was driving night after night to the same seedy Holiday Inn to meet his little honey. Maureen almost left him right then and there. But being that Charlie was a toddler and Addison not much older, it was a vulnerable time for Maureen. Roy never gave up seeing other women. Plus the money troubles got harder every year.
Of course, Len and I tried to help out Maureen and the kids. But my sister was too proud to take a dime. That’s why she sent Addison out for those modeling jobs, and without an agent, some of that print work was pretty sleazy, in my opinion. But when it came to the ways of the world, Maureen could be awfully naïve.
LUCY LIM: In third grade, our school principal, Mr. Hemple, asked us to bring in food for the neediest. We all carted in jars and cans and sacks of potatoes, and this one kid, Jeremy Sullivan, he lugged in a whole case of GuS’s ginger ale that was on overstock since his brother worked at Costco. A few days later I was playing at Addy’s, and I saw that very same case out in their mudroom. It was the first time I’d thought of the Stone family as “neediest.” Poor, sure. There were never any extras at Addy’s house. No treats, no cable TV, no milk in the fridge, and sometimes the heat was turned down so low I didn’t want to take off my winter parka. But neediest?
I never brought up the GuS’s ginger ale case to Addy. She’d have walloped me.
MADDY MEYERS: I’m Addison’s cousin, the one who was closest to her in age, but we weren’t that close. I grew up in Princeton, and now I go to UVA. My dad’s a cosmetic surgeon. I’m not trying to brag about having a comfortable life, except Addison had such a chip on her shoulder about it.
One of my earliest memories of Addison’s issues with my family was when she was about eight years old, and I was nine. It was the middle of summer, and Aunt Maureen had come out to Princeton with Allison and Charlie for a week’s vacation. We’d always gotten along okay, but on that morning I came upstairs from breakfast to find her standing in the middle of my bedroom, wearing one of my Lilly Pulitzer sundresses. Her hands were on her hips, and she had a mean, harsh smile on her face. In her braids, with that smile, she reminded me of, like, crazy Pocahontas. To be honest, she scared me.