MAGNOLIA - Brittni Pater was buried last month in the new dress she was supposed to wear to the Sweetheart Banquet.
A large corsage, fastened to one wrist, helped hide the many bruises that stained her arms and hands. A short jacket was bought at the last minute to cover her shoulders.
The memory of the ugly marks on Pater's once flawless skin still makes her mother cringe. But Vinita Pater smiles when she remembers that someone - no one knows who - gave her daughter a manicure before the funeral, painting her nails a soft, shimmering pink that matched her dress.
Police say Brittni, 15, was killed because she was pregnant.
Her beaten body was found Feb. 5, just a few hours after she wrote her parents a "don't worry" note and climbed out of her bedroom window. Two boys, one of whom Pater had dated, are accused of plotting her murder. Both have pleaded innocent.
It's been 24 days since Vinita Pater read the letter her daughter left behind.
Twenty days since Brittni's funeral.
Eighteen since the Sweetheart Banquet.
Sometimes, it seems like Brittni Pater's life has become overshadowed by her brutal and much-publicized murder.
The Paters are beginning to accept their daughter's slaying and the secret that she kept, trying to focus instead on memories of the spirited girl they knew. They wish others could do the same.
No one remembers the little girl who loved Peter Pan and Scooby Doo. Or the teen-ager who decorated her bedroom in gingham, daisies and enough candles to make a fireman shudder. Few recall the headstrong girl whose favorite cuss word was the one preferred by the grandpa she never knew.
The Paters do.
This is Brittni's story.
It took a trip to Texarkana and several hours in a dressing room before Brittni Pater found the dress for the Sweetheart Banquet.
"This is it, Mama," she declared triumphantly as she held up the dress for her parents' approval. It was the 10th one she had tried on. Her weary mother was counting.
Brittni hated shopping because she always knew what she wanted, but could never find it. So this maroon dress, this perfect teen-age confection flecked with silver and flowers, was a rarity.
Brittni had always been strongwilled, even as a toddler. Her mother raised her to be that way.
It took Vinita years to overcome her own timidity. So if her daughter was sometimes a little too outspoken or impulsive - well, better that than having to conquer the shyness that plagued her mother.
Brittni wasn't an angel. Often, she was downright ornery.
But just when Vinits was most tempted the scream in frustration, Brittni's blunt sweetness, hidden under layers of teen-age sarcasm and rebellion, would emerge. And Vinita would shake her head, wondering if she gave birth to a misunderstood saint or a hellion.
Brittni didn't take flak from anybody. She was an equally staunch defender of her small circle of friends. They called themselves "the five amigos."
The week before she was killed, Brittni got into trouble at school for intervening in a fight. She took a punch for a friend who was getting picked on. Then she threw a few of her own.
Brittni was ordered to serve out a week of in-school suspension. She cried - not because of the fight or her punishment, but because a favorite teacher might now think poorly of her.
Her mother urged Brittni to go talk to him, to explain what happened.
She never got around to it.
After Brittni's death, Vinita had a talk with Pastor Brad Justice. She had a few instructions for Brittni's eulogy.
Don't make her sound like some helpless victim or a good-two-shoes, Vinita warned. Brittni would really hate that.
Not too long ago, Brittni and her mother attended the funeral of a crotchety relative. As the minister droned on about how sweet and sensitive the woman had been, Brittni shot several sideways glances in her mother's direction.
Finally, she jabbed Vinita in the arm.
"Why do they lie about people when they die?" she whispered.
Vinita shared this story with Pastor Justice. He got the point.
He even used the word "ornery" in his eulogy when describing the girl with the tawny hair and sprightly grin.
The last battle Brittni waged with her parents was over a hardship driver's license. Brittni worked with her mother at a local pharmacy all last year, hoping to put away enough money for car payments.
Her parents had already bought the one she most wanted, a white Pntiac Sunfire. This shiny new temptation had been sitting in the Pater's garage for several months. For Christmas, her dad installed a CD player in it.
Brittni nagged her parents endlessly about getting her license early. "I'll even write the letter for you if you'll just sign it," she pleaded.
The Paters finally relented and Brittni was granted the license. She got to drive to school for three days before she died.
Her father followed her the first time, taking care to stay out of Brittni's sight. Even so, she accused him that night of tagging along.
"Did you follow me?" she demanded, confronting Tommy as soon as he got home from work that afternoon.
"Did you see me?" he shot back.
"No."
"Then let's just leave it at that."
The next day a tearful Brittni pulled up to the hospital where Vinita works. Someone had nearly hit the car head-on, and it scared Brittni.
She wanted her mom to follow her home.
Brittni was born at 11:55 p.m. on July 29, 1984. She was an only child with dozens of relatives who doted her.
Despite this - or maybe because of it - Brittni never really sought to be the center of attention. She just was.
An unselfish child, she never hesitated to share with her playmates. But her temper tantrums, carefully orchestrated for mazimum effect, were the stuff of family legend.
When Brittni was in grade school, Vinita became a parents volunteer, helping out in the cafeteria during the noon hour. A few days into the job, she found out her daughter was sharing her lunch each day with a little girl who never had her own.
The streak of generosity survived the teen-age onslaught of hormones and obstinacy.
After she got her car, Brittni quickly realized just how much her father loved driving it. She bought him a couple of classic rock CDs - his type of music, she joked - and taught him how to roll down the windows just far enough for optimum cruising.
"Mama, he thinks he looks cool," she giggled.
When she was 10, Brittni made her first memorable stand against her parents. She wanted a computer for her birthday, but Tommy and Vinita got her a CD player instead. Brittni threw a fit in front of the guests at her party.
Vinita figured there was a difference between being decisive and being spoiled. She took the stereo back and it was several years before Brittni got her computer.
No punishment, however, kept Brittni from being her own person. When she found out her mother had played the flute in high school, Brittni promptly chose the clarinet.
A few days before she died, Brittni and Vinita made appointments to get their hair cut. They always did it together. This time, Brittni told her mother, she wanted to dye her shoulder-length hair orange.
Horrified, Vinita wondered how on earth she would ever talk her out of it.
She never had to try.
That Saturday morning, Feb. 5, the day Brittni would be found dead, Vinita walked into the bedroom her daughter had so carefully designed when the Paters had their brick home built two years ago.
Brittni was gone.
In the note she left behind, Brittni made ambiguous references to something she had to do and told her parents not to worry - she'd be home later.
They called all of her friends. The last one on the list was 16-year-old Matthew Elliot, a longtime chum of Brittni "went with" back in seventh grade.
"Let's just pray that she's with Matthew," Tommy told Vinita. "He'll take care of her."
The Paters liked Elliot a lot. Vinita considered him perfect son-in-law material, and opinion she once shared with the kids over hamburgers.
In seventh grade, Elliot left a dozen roses on Brittni's doorstep. They eventually broke up, but remained friends. In weeks before Brittni's death, Vinita began to suspect the two had reunited.
The Pater were still makin frantic phone calls that Saturday morning when investigators arrived to tell them Brittni's body had been found in a lonely clearing several miles outside town. About a half-mile away from where the teen-ager lay was an open grave that appeared to have been dug ahead of time.
In the chaotic hours that followed, the Paters would also learn that the lead suspect in their daughter's death was Elliot. Also charged was 17-year-old William Davis, a good friend of Elliott's. Police say the boys claim Brittni's pregnancy was the reason she had to die. Statements from the boys and other witnesses suggest Elliott may have been the father, but he has insisted to authorities that he is still a virgin. It appears Brittni thought she was sneaking away with Elliott to get an abortion, police told her parents.
The Paters were stunned.
By the time they were told that an autopsy revealed that Brittni had indeed been pregnant, they were shattered.
Within 48 hours, their daughter was no longer the Brittni they remembered. She was a pregnant teen-ager. A murder victim. A girl on the run.
This kind of thing just doesn't happen in Vinita Pater's world.
Vinita wishes Brittni could have found the nerve to confide in her about the pregnancy. There was no need for sneaking away in the middle of the night.
Her mother would have done everything in her power to help her.
On the day of Brittni's funeral, Vinita walked over to three of her nieces and handed them the keys to the Pontiac Sunfire. Then she gave them Brittni's favorite CD, a collection of songs that had most annoyed her parents.
Brittni's cousins rolled down the windows the way Brittni liked them - low enough so that people in other cars could hear the music, but not so far that the rushing wind would drown it out for those inside.
The left the front passenger seat empty.
Then the three girls drove off to the cemetery for Brittni's burial, music blaring and the wind whispering their hair. Vinita smiles through her tears.
Brittni would have approved.
BY: CATHY FRYE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
