She said, “In that email, you had two murders. The one from the ’70s and the one from the ’90s. I was thinking I’d do one of those. But—”
I could feel my pulse in my neck. It was like being a child in an audience as the magician asked for volunteers, utterly terrified he’d pick you but also thrilled he might. Whether I could admit it or not, I wanted this girl to look directly at Thalia’s death in a way I myself couldn’t (out of closeness, out of trauma, out of the irrational fear that my former classmates would think me presumptuous—no, that Thalia herself would somehow find me presumptuous); and at the same time, and for some of those same reasons, I wanted to stop her. I regretted putting Thalia on the list. I thought I could maybe steer Britt toward Barbara Crocker and 1975, the boyfriend they found hiding in the woods right near campus, his remarkably light sentence.
But Britt said, “I know you were friends.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You and Thalia Keith. Okay, so I take journalism, and we have access to the Sentinel archives. I got into the story last year, and I read everything from the paper, and I did the deep dive online, all the Reddit boards.”
“You found my name on Reddit?”
“No. I mean—you were quoted in the Sentinel, and I googled everyone quoted there, to see what had happened to them, and you were easy to find. And then they announced you were coming here, and I was like—whoa.” Britt began chewing the cap of her green pen.
I said, “We were assigned as roommates for most of junior year, but we weren’t friends.”
Britt said, “If you’re okay with it—of the two cases, I’d want to do Thalia Keith. It would be easier. I mean, there’s teachers I could interview. And maybe you? But, like, I still wonder how problematic that is.”
I said, “The fact that you’re asking is a sign you’d do this thoughtfully and responsibly.” I was just self-aware enough at this point to clock that I was talking Britt into it, and to wonder why.
She nodded, chewed the pen cap.
I said, “It’s up to you. But remember to consider scope, what you can do in two or three episodes.”
Britt extricated the pen cap and said, “I think the wrong guy is in prison.”
“Interesting.” I nodded, noncommittal. I should have guessed this was where she was headed. I said, “I’m looking forward to this.”
7
Petra had said I could find her at lunch, but I discovered I was neither hungry nor ready to face the dining hall, where I might run into my own awkward ghost—so I opted for another coffee and a few minutes to spend on my own podcast research. In the library, the light sliding yellow through those tall, warped windows to illuminate the circulating dust, I sat doing homework once again. This was the place where I’d looked up vocab words at ten p.m., the place I’d smuggled magazines out from, under my shirt. There were fewer books now and more tables, more kids with laptops and headphones. But a boy near me held a covert bag of chips in his lap; that hadn’t changed.
During World War II, Rita Hayworth was the most popular pinup for GIs. (There’s a reason that’s her poster on the wall in The Shawshank Redemption.) She’d been forced into show business (by her vaudevillian mother, her dancer father), and she was introverted, reluctant, dogged by her public persona. She was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, with dark hair. They turned her into a redhead. They did electrolysis to raise a hairline they considered too ethnic. They posed her in her underwear. She gave good face.
Lance wanted to center each episode on a man in her life—her father, then each of her five husbands. In one sense, it was fitting, since her life was defined by men. Almost always terrible men, ones who took her money or asked her to leave Hollywood or used her children as pawns. Her fourth husband hit her in the face at the Cocoanut Grove. But it seemed unfair to organize her life around the people who controlled it. I said I’d consider it.
Research has always been my happy place. It might be related to my sometime collecting of facts about my peers, an attempt to feel safer by mapping the world. If I can chart everything around me as far as I can see, then I must be in the middle of it all, real and in one piece. You are here.
Rita was a pinball, bounced from one spot to the next. I related; what had my childhood been but a constant ricochet from one place and one disaster to the next? But to be fair, that’s many childhoods. I have to resist the urge to self-mythologize, to paint my own journey as harder than everyone else’s just so I can give myself credit for getting out. I’m allowed to take that credit regardless. So declareth my shrink.
There were kids who came to Granby from housing projects, kids who came as a custody compromise. I wasn’t the only one with a less-than-romantic origin story.
Jerome texted, asking if I’d gotten the email from Leo’s class mom about tomorrow being the hundredth day of second grade. It seemed impossible, but the year had flown by. The kids were to bring one hundred of something, and to dress like old people. Lest any twenty-first-century mother find a moment not devoted to proving maternal devotion through crafts.
Jerome wrote: Leo on his own or you want me going over the top?
I was torn. Teach Leo independence and thereby give the middle finger to a school that demanded this, in addition to Heritage Week and Crazy Hair Day and Historical Figure Day and Cupcake Day and Funky Socks Day—or let Leo’s artist father spectacularly outdo the Pinterest moms. We tended to vacillate between the two responses, our kids sometimes walking masterpieces, sometimes DIY messes.
I wrote back: Your call.
Although Jerome was fully prepared to glue one hundred gummy bears into the shape of the Mona Lisa, he still wanted me directing the show from New Hampshire. From hotel rooms on podcast tours, I was happy to run things. But even one day into Granby, it felt absurd.
I stood to walk around the library at my Fitbit’s insistence, and as I circled I remembered, Mr. Bloch, how you used to nap in the big leather chair by the periodicals, how some of us thought it was funny to leave a magazine in your lap as if you’d fallen asleep reading it. House & Garden or YM or Glamour.
I reached up to check the window above the reference books, just in case its sill had gone undusted and undisturbed for a few decades.
My brother, Ace, died two and a half years before I started Granby. On campus, I’d mark certain spots on certain days (his birthday, the anniversary of his death, the day I wanted him to know the Pacers won the division title) by peeling off a swath of tree bark or stepping a stone hard into dirt—leaving some mark that would be there later. I’d check it weeks or months on. Sometimes I’d carve his initials, but more often I’d just slightly alter the world.
My son, Leo, might call these marks Horcruxes, and he wouldn’t be far off. I was planting a ring of protection around myself. There wasn’t much I wanted to think about from home, but if Ace could be all around me, I wouldn’t have to think of him, wouldn’t feel guilty when I didn’t.
Anyway: One time, I took the broken arch of a plastic coat hanger hook—a perfect half circle—and hid it on that library windowsill.
It was impossible that the coat hanger piece would still be there, but some credulous fragment of my brain still expected it, was still disappointed to find nothing at all.
8
There was so much I never told you about myself, even as you asked, sincerely; even as the entire school played endless get-to-know-you games every August.
I believed people would like me most for being average, an amalgam—so I sanded my history down to the generic. I told them my mother was a dentist (she was really a dental receptionist) and my late father had been a businessman (he’d owned a failing bar). That I had an older brother. That I grew up in southern Indiana.