A Thalia-specific bingo card started making the rounds of the boys’ dorm bathrooms—a sheet on which they could initial squares that said things like touched outside clothes, or under clothes above waste (this spelling error gleefully reported to me by Geoff Richler), or asked out, or fucked. The only initials he believed, Geoff said, were the five guys who claimed to have already asked her (in September!) to Homecoming. But I saw what was happening: boys running up to Thalia and poking her arm so they could sign the outside clothes square. Thalia laughed so confidently that she managed to own the joke, laughed so beautifully and so well that it was clear to anyone watching that these boys were her friends, whether or not they’d ever spoken to her. She laughed like someone who’d known them for years. An “Oh, Marco, that’s how you’ve always been” laugh, when—did she even know that was Marco Washington running up to stroke her hair?
You might not remember Marco. He wasn’t exactly signing up for your opera seminar. Do you remember Peewee Walcott and Dorian Culler and Mike Stiles? Don’t worry about it. They were the foundational souls of my adolescence, but to you they were faces passing through. You’ve had a new crop every year since. Thalia meant enough to you that I’m sure you remember the kids right around her—Robbie Serenho, Rachel, Beth—the ones who orbited her like moons.
On-screen, a house fell around Buster Keaton, and he stood there unharmed—bewildered, blessed.
The rumors, in case you never heard them: That she’d been engaged to a boy back home and her parents sent her here to separate them. That she’d had an abortion and everyone at her old school found out. That she was anorexic, and her parents traveled too much to supervise her, so they sent her here where she was subjected to daily weigh-ins with the nurse. That she’d had a nose job, wanted to start over where no one knew her old face.
It isn’t hard to guess how the rumors started—girls angry that their boyfriends and crushes trailed Thalia that first week, drooling after her curls in the August heat. She played tennis, and suddenly tennis practice had spectators.
We weren’t roommates at first. My ninth and tenth grade roommate, a quiet girl named Diamond, dropped out just before the start of the year. My new assigned roommate, Ji-Hyun, spent preseason curled in bed with menstrual cramps that turned out to be appendicitis. She went from infirmary to hospital, and a week after her surgery I returned from class to find her things packed; she was flying home to Seoul. Thalia and her first roommate, a dour Ukrainian girl, never got along. One day in late September, after wondering for days what had happened to her purple bra, Thalia saw a purple strap peeking out at Khristina’s shoulder. Word got around in hours, and we all assumed Khristina would be expelled (a bra thief!), but the student discipline council forgave her. After all, maybe they didn’t have great underwear in Odesa. Thalia requested a room change, though, and after three weeks solo, I had a roommate.
I was under no illusion that Thalia and I would become friends—she had already ascended into the social stratosphere—but I was secretly thrilled to see the other side of the room occupied again, despite my brief and unprecedented luck at having scored a single as a junior. The half-empty room had felt aseptic and haunted.
Thalia brought actual decorations—a string of tiny white lights, an aloe plant, a fuzzy green bean bag chair—and she was friendly enough, joking with me as she dumped onto her bed the clothes and books she carried down the hall one armload at a time. When she found out I was from Indiana, she asked what it was like and I told her it was like hell, but boring. “Don’t worry,” I said, “we have our own bras at least.” She laughed at that.
Before long her friends, her real friends, came to help her move in. Beth Docherty and Rachel Popa stood on her bed to reach the long, high shelf above it, a shelf I used for the books we wouldn’t read till next semester. But Thalia had sweaters. Piles of sweaters, Fair Isle and merino and cashmere. They lined her shelf like flavors in an ice cream shop. I estimated five sweaters to a pile, six piles. She’d brought thirty sweaters to school. I felt a pang of empathy for Khristina, who must have assumed one purple bra couldn’t be missed.
Thalia sprang around decorating, in shorts and a tank top, hair in a ponytail she’d never have worn to class. They put on Janet Jackson, and soon I was forgotten. Puja Sharma showed up with muffins she’d bought in town, and which the four of them ate in little pinches, squealing about the calories. I lay on my own bed, a notebook on my knees, and soon decided it would be better to put my earphones on than risk looking like I hoped to be included. I wasn’t lurking awkwardly, I was studying.
I was always good for a defensive move.
But I’m making this about me, and I was talking about Thalia. And here’s what I wanted to say: One of the rumors that fall was that she’d left her last school after she was caught sleeping with her math teacher. That he, in fact, was the one she was engaged to. That all the rumors were true: He’d gotten her pregnant, paid for her abortion, left his wife for her, helped her through her eating disorder. I’d bought into some stories but dismissed this all-in-one rumor off the bat, coming as it did from Donna Goldbeck, our class gossip and a highly unreliable source.
In the darkened classroom, the memory started to roil, to trouble me. We were so quick to spread lurid gossip, but so void of concern. Perhaps because we believed we were adults. If she’d slept with a teacher, that was on her. We were scandalized or even impressed, but not worried.
On the screen: A narrow cloud crossed the moon; a man slit a woman’s eyeball. The students covered their faces.
10
Alder found me outside Commons on my way to dinner and asked what I thought of his project, if he should stick with the 1930s or do this thing about comparing the dorm rooms of Virgos and Libras. Or he had a third proposal, about how far Black students had to travel for a haircut, waiting for monthly Dragon Wagon runs to Manchester. (In my day, that wasn’t even an option; kids set up in dorm rooms with clippers or in common rooms with bottles of relaxer whose smell made me ask, one humiliating and probably hurtful time, who was using Nair.) Alder struck me as a hugely creative kid who’d gotten the unfortunate message early on that there was always a right answer.
“It’s about committing to something,” I said. Here was Fran, waving at me from inside the doors, where she said we’d meet. “And making the best version of that thing.” Alder nodded. He had a habit of looking up and past you, moving his eyes back and forth as if he were solving equations above your head. “Just—it’s about confidence. If it helps, imagine I’m grading you not on the podcast but on your confidence.”
I gestured vaguely at his chest, which was weird of me, as the Bowie shirt was now covered with a gray parka.
Alder said, “Confidence,” and he laughed, blew out a flat whistle. “I mean. I’m not great at that.”
To me he seemed spectacularly confident, in that he talked all the time and the other kids seemed to love him, but I suppose no eleventh grader has ever felt confident on their wobbly fawn legs. Had any of my classmates? Dorian Culler, maybe, who made his own warped reality, announcing that I was stalking him or that Thalia was his secret fiancée or that poor Blake Oxford had asked to be his prison bitch. Maybe Mike Stiles, our King Arthur, who wore his charisma like a custom-tailored suit.
Alder must have taken my staring into space for the end of the conversation. He thanked me too many times and pawed his way through the door.
Fran swept me past the mailboxes and into the dining hall, just as she’d done a thousand times—and the bandage was off, I was under that unchanged vaulted ceiling in a room that still smelled like bacon and coffee and disinfectant. She shepherded me through the salad bar line and to a table where Anne, the boys, and a bunch of young faculty sat under the Asian batch of international flags. But goddamn it, the whole time she introduced me around, I seethed, thinking for the second time in two days of all the things Dorian Culler had gotten away with. And I seethed at the realization that I had accepted this as normal, that I could only now calculate the full, ugly weight of it.
No more trays in the Granby dining hall, an environmental measure that also made the place classier. It probably meant fewer opportunities for kids to drop their entire meal with a spectacular crash.