Lola forked fingers through their purple hair and said, “The guy who killed that Spanish teacher in the ’70s, he was out of prison by then. There’s this whole thing about how he might’ve been living in the woods. Just hanging out by campus. And they never look into him?”
“That was only something we said to freak each other out.” The rumor must have come from an alum, someone who’d heard four years of tall tales—how an old jacket found hung on a branch clearly belonged to Barbara Crocker’s estranged boyfriend, who now lived in an old lacrosse goal he’d tied blankets over, or maybe he lived in the clock tower, watched us all with binoculars. “There’s no substance to that.”
Jamila said, “Those mattresses in the woods? I read he was supposed to live there.”
“Oh, God no. It was where students went to drink. That was where Thalia’s friends were that night.”
And then they wanted to hear about the mattresses instead, and whether I used to go there, but I wasn’t falling for the distraction.
“My friends and I smoked more than we drank,” I said. “It was all pretty regrettable.”
In any case, I never attended an actual mattress party. But I passed the mattresses many times, and once you knew they were there, you couldn’t miss them, just a few yards off the Nordic trail that the cross-country skiers used in winter and the cross-country runners used in fall. The media took the presence of mattresses to be a sex thing, when really it was just two disgusting old dorm mattresses that marked a meeting spot, and anyone having sex there would risk tetanus and fleas. Senior spring, when I dropped crew and smoked half a pack a day, Geoff Richler and I would walk there during our empty third and fourth periods, stepping over broken bottles to sit not on the mattresses, which were always wet, but on the logs people had dragged into the clearing. I’d smoke, and Geoff would entertain me. Sometimes Carlotta would ditch her unsupervised studio art time to join us and smoke half a cigarette, and Geoff would watch like that was his actual cock she was putting to her lips.
Half an hour sounded right for the walk—that’s what I’d seen quoted online, as people questioned whether someone could have left the party, killed Thalia, and returned—but it took longer in snow and ice, longer in the mud. I can tell you with certainty that we couldn’t have walked to the mattresses and back in one class period. The mattresses were, as we now all know, 1.4 miles from both the theater and the gym. It was a bit farther than that from the darkroom in Quincy, which was where Geoff and I would start our trek.
I tuned back in to Britt, preaching to her choir. “Plus,” she was saying, “the only evidence that Omar ever even talked to her was student gossip. She’d told a few friends she was having trouble with some older dude. And her friends look around for someone older and creepy, and they settle on the Black guy.”
“That’s not quite how it happened,” I said.
There was chatter in the room, but it only swam around me. It was the word creepy, an echo of something just out of reach.
And then—I wonder if I actually sat there slack-jawed, or if I managed to keep my face composed—it was as if the hemispheres of my brain jolted out of decades-long disconnection.
The time the two of you stayed behind and missed the firefly show. The days I’d waited endlessly outside your door while Thalia’s convocation coaching ran overtime. Low rumbling when you talked, the sound of Thalia projecting her voice across the room, long periods of silence. I’d seen her turn red, junior year, when she talked about you. I’d seen you sitting too close. I’d seen her stay late after Follies practice.
We had talked about it, me and Fran and Carlotta and Geoff. We joked that she was obsessed with you, we joked that you were sleeping with her. Wasn’t it a joke? Or, it was something we only believed for fun. The same way we chose to believe in dormitory ghosts.
And what if—
You didn’t even seem that shaken up after Thalia died, at least not more than other teachers. You asked again and again at our convocation practice if I was okay, talked about how your kids, who’d known her as a babysitter, were so shaken. By then, I must have abandoned any notion that something illicit was going on.
Back in ’95, I’d learned first that there were rumors about Omar, then that he’d confessed, then—after we graduated—that he’d been convicted, and only then that part of the evidence against him was Thalia’s alleged statements about some older guy.
It had thickened the air in the classroom: Thalia having trouble with an older guy.
Not that you would hurt her; this wasn’t what I was thinking. Your hands were so thin. You were scared of bees. I couldn’t imagine you bashing someone’s head. I reminded myself of the DNA evidence against Omar. And you had an alibi: You’d stayed behind at the theater, making sure instruments and sheet music got packed up, wheeling the timpani back into the closet. I was your alibi, for Christ’s sake. I told the police how we’d chatted about Braveheart. And then you went home to your wife and kids.
But still: How disconcerting that this one piece of information, these rumors about Thalia and someone older, had been what started the police looking at Omar to begin with.
It hit me with the weight of twenty-three years.
The older guy was you.
If Thalia was having trouble with an older guy, the older guy was you.
17
Here’s what I thought about as I climbed uphill through the wind to my guesthouse, skipping lunch:
Opera class, and New York City, and Bethesda Fountain.
There were only six of us in your opera seminar, fall of senior year: three who’d squeeze onto your couch and three who pulled over padded orchestra chairs. It was me, Thalia and her boyfriend Robbie, Beth Docherty, Kwan Li—who went and became an actual opera singer—and Robbie’s friend Kellan TenEyck, the one who drank himself to the bottom of a lake twenty years later. It’s hard to look back and see us as we were, rather than who we would become, hard not to see text bubbles floating above our heads: “Murdered Girl” and “Opera Star!” and “Sad Drunk.”
I wonder if they let you add the class to the elective schedule just so it’d sit, forever, in the list of courses sometimes offered at Granby. “Wow!” the moms of bored eighth graders have said every year since, leafing through the viewbook in the admissions office. “History of opera! That’s like a college course!”
Robbie Serenho was only there because Thalia was, and Kellan was only there because Robbie was. A ski star, Robbie oozed privilege. And he had swagger: the way he wore shorts even in snow, his floppy hair, the way he’d show up late to class, chewing gum, and no teacher called him out. Dating Thalia certainly bolstered his status. I hadn’t had class with Robbie since ninth grade English, and was mildly surprised now to find him insightful. He’d be picking at a hole in his khakis like he wasn’t listening, then pop in with “Beethoven was the Miles Davis of his time. Like, constant reinvention.” Robbie might not have come in an opera fan, but he was at least a casual music geek, knowledgeable about anything he deemed cool enough; he’d go on about laser tag or World Cup soccer in the same way. He’d sit with his arm slung around the back of Thalia’s seat, keeping her anchored to the floor of the classroom.
I’ll forever remember the operas we saw that October at the Met. Three operas in three days, missing our other classes. Le Nozze di Figaro, La Bohème, Tosca. I owe you that: A girl from southern Indiana got to see three operas at the Met. It was exhausting, but it rewired my brain.