She said, “They made Omar out to be a bad person all-around. This one accusation wasn’t enough, they have to say he was dealing drugs, he was a violent man, he was sleeping with students. They paint a whole picture. They talk about him as if he came from nowhere, as if he had no family.”
It was true that the prosecution and the papers made him out as a full-on drug dealer, implied he was selling to students, which was news to me. In fact, he talked a lot about pot, would go on about the difference between indica and sativa, would tell injured athletes who returned from the hospital with narcotic painkillers that they should chuck them all, that pot was healthier. It seemed part of his being into meditation, breathing. He got the football team doing vinyasas. The pot talk never felt like a big deal. And even if it was more than talk: Every other kid on campus had a Ziploc of weed, or at least of oregano they’d been sold as weed. Ronan Murphy, that slick little kid from Bronxville, was the one everyone actually bought from, and he sold much more than pot.
After Omar’s arrest, I certainly believed he was selling to students, if only because everyone else said so. I’d wondered in the years since why he would jeopardize his career that way—but then, why would he jeopardize his career by stalking a student?
“I do think my mother would have lived longer,” Sheila Evans said, “were it not for the stress. She had deep vein thrombosis, and that’s not helped by worry. He was her first grandbaby. She used to get mad if I’d bathed him before she came over, she was so eager to do it.” She swallowed in a way that dimpled her chin; she was holding in so much it was a wonder she didn’t implode, turn to a tiny pebble of grief. “My mother left us in 2008,” she said.
I took my laptop with me into bed.
“My own sister fell out with all of us. She wasn’t sure of Omar’s innocence. We haven’t spoken in years. I started with a family,” she said. Her voice had started cracking, and she paused until she had control. “A healthy, functional family, and—you know, I ended with a shambles. It’s the ruins of a family.”
The dosage of my antidepressant is such that I haven’t cried actual tears in a decade, but there are times when I want so badly to cry that I make all the noises of crying, press my fists into my eyes so I feel something similar. The absence of tears hurts more—or makes whatever hurts hurt more—than if I could just sob. In any case: That’s what I was doing, on my bed. There was a childish bitterness to it all that I only slowly identified beneath the sympathy: Sheila Evans, unlike my own mother, hadn’t abandoned her remaining child.
I hated that I was thinking about myself rather than becoming a pure vessel to absorb Sheila’s grief, but the truth is that while anyone with a heart would have felt it break right then, my heart cracked along familiar fault lines.
Since I shouldn’t be thinking about myself, I stuffed the recognition down into the subterranean, into the dank, loamy places where it might take root.
Instead of working it all out, I went to sleep.
#1: OMAR EVANS
In the morning I couldn’t remember what I dreamed, except that it was troubling, that it was about water, that I dreamed about texting friends about the dream. I didn’t feel rested in the slightest. I knew, as the sun finally came through the blinds, that I couldn’t get up until I’d stayed there with my eyes closed fully picturing the night Thalia died. If I could do that, if I could think it all the way through, I could get up and leave behind me whatever had tangled these sheets into a sweaty mess.
So—may the universe forgive me—that’s what I did.
Thalia changes from her costume, the tulle smelling of sweat and sawdust. She puts on the jeans and sweater that will later be found neatly folded on the pool deck bench. They never found a shirt, just a green cashmere sweater, so let’s assume this is all she has. Hiking boots. No coat; the more foolhardy of us are done with them.
She grabs her backpack (reported contents: hairbrush, lipstick, tampons, calculus book, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Granby-issued weekly planner, assorted pens and scrunchies, mini deodorant, dorm room key), slips past the other changing girls, exits via the backstage fire escape. No one will miss her: All her friends in the cast and a lot of other kids, Robbie among them, are heading to the woods to drink by those two disgusting old mattresses.
Her footprints melt into others’, and in any case, they’re rained away by the next night, the soonest anyone would think to look.
She avoids the floodlights till she’s behind the gym where there’s no light at all, her fingers on the building’s bricks to guide her. At the emergency exit she knocks three times, and Omar disables the alarm. He’s been waiting right there, impatient. They go to his office couch.
Thalia’s still in her stage makeup, the green eyeshadow that matched her dress. Omar says she looks hot.
Or no—he says she looks slutty, and she bats her eyes, pouts.
Maybe he asks if the makeup was for Robbie. He asks why she needs to look trampy for the play, asks if she’s looking for more boyfriends, because he knows she doesn’t care about him, she’s probably fucking Dartmouth guys, too.
Sometimes this is foreplay for them. Sometimes she says, What if I went to a frat party and saw how many guys would screw me?
But he’s not in the mood, and he stands over her, still high on whatever he took while he waited for her, and he grabs her throat and maybe he didn’t mean it till this moment. If her face hadn’t seized with terror, he could still play it off as a joke, but it’s too late; she’s seen what’s in him, and the only way he can fix things is to stop her from seeing him and judging him and remembering this. He slams her head against a new CPR poster taped to the cinder-block wall above the couch. She claws him, makes the deep scratch the police will find nine days later behind his right ear, down to his collarbone, the one he’ll say he got from his neighbor’s dog. There was no skin found under her fingernails, but hours in chlorinated water could account for that. He chokes her harder, and when her arms go limp he steps back.
No. This couldn’t be it.
This was the version we were all handed—this was what he said in his confession (drugs, his office, the couch, the wall, a poster no one ever remembered seeing), but I couldn’t make it work. The movie director who lived in my brain wanted to scrap it, send the actors home for the day.
Omar was someone who noticed the stress in your shoulders before you felt it yourself—not someone who bottled up rage till it exploded.
So maybe instead—maybe there’s someone else there. Maybe Omar has a violent friend, one whose temper erupts. And Omar decides, later, to take the fall for them both.
Maybe Omar has taken tainted drugs, ones that make him hallucinate.
I had to leave it at something happens. Because it did. Because there was no other explanation. Because there was no one else in the gym that night. Something very bad happens, and he can’t call for help.
She’s breathing still. He has enough medical training to know, even in his haze, what he’s done, and also to know she could still survive this. But if she survives this, he won’t.
He checks the hall, carries Thalia over his shoulder the twenty-six feet to the pool.
He strips her rag-doll body on the pool deck, wrangles her into a spare suit from the equipment locker. He’s reminded of dressing his little brother, pushes down the thought. Her breaths: ragged but steady. He rolls her into the water, doesn’t notice till she’s in that there’s blood on the pool deck cement. This must mean there’s blood on his wall, blood on the hallway floor. Her dark curls had been hiding the wound.