Shrieks of laughter till I opened the door.
In any case: To Thalia’s friends, I was the girl to whom something had happened over freshman summer—or, at best, a girl playacting various roles and never getting it right. To Thalia, though, I was myself, unchanged. A tidy and considerate roommate who was deeply uncool but at least wouldn’t steal her bras.
And I was someone who knew all about you.
RC Cola, I told her, was your favorite soda. I said it because you’d found that six-pack in the greenroom fridge and announced that you hated them. You’d been trying to offload them ever since, offering me one every day until I finally started accepting them just so I could hide them, unopened, around your office. If Thalia gave you an RC Cola, you’d know it was really from me.
19
When Yahav hadn’t answered by Wednesday night, I told myself it was a relief that Britt wanted to meet. It would distract me from thinking about him, and from thinking about you, grasping for tiny moments I’d missed.
I’d given Britt a list of other people to talk to (Fran, and various teachers still around), so I wouldn’t be the only other voice on her show.
We met at seven in an empty study room in Dwyer Hall, a sleek, glassy Upper Campus dorm that hadn’t existed in the ’90s. I sat on a plush couch under a whiteboard, and Britt set her phone on a table in front of me, opened to the recording app I’d had the kids download.
Britt wore a creamy fisherman’s sweater and skinny jeans and what looked like the same Frye boots Fran had in 1994. She said, “I’d love to start with the timeline.”
I went through the basics. Thalia and I were roommates from 1993 to 1994. She died in March of ’95. Omar was arrested that spring, but the details of the case didn’t come out till summer, when we were all spread back out across the country, packing for college. The internet was nascent; I didn’t have my first email account till that September. I told Britt about the snail mail news clippings, feeling ancient. Omar’s trial was ’97, his appeal ’99. After the appeal failed, a lot of nothing. The occasional mention on true crime shows, because, you know, dead white girl at a boarding school. More than that: pretty, rich, dead white girl. If only she’d also been blond. Each story a recap: Remember this gruesome case? The details hazier with each retelling, the verdict more obvious. They caught the guy who did it, thank God. Look at this photo of him after years and years in prison, bulked up and dead in the eyes. Doesn’t he look like a murderer? Then, in 2005, the Dateline special, the occasion for which was the tenth anniversary of Thalia’s death and a growing Free Omar movement online.
Dateline gave some time to his defenders—particularly the actress I remembered for her smallish role in Spider-Man, who’d briefly made it her pet cause—but mostly focused on the pile of evidence: The DNA, his pool access. His confession, even if retracted. That drawing in the directory. Even if he hadn’t been the “older guy” Thalia mentioned to her friends: Three skiers claimed they’d heard Omar joke about a fantasy of tying Thalia to the weight bench.
“Omar was fun,” I told Britt. “He’d blast music in the weight room and then he’d run around holding his fist out like a microphone to get you to solo.” This wasn’t relevant to the timeline, but it felt important. “He didn’t have the same boundaries a teacher would have. I guess when you’re icing people’s groins things get a little personal.”
Britt nodded as I talked. Then she said, “I was actually wondering about the timeline of that night.”
“Oh.” I was relieved, because I hadn’t known what I’d say next. I wasn’t about to mention you—certainly not on the record—but my mental deck was getting shuffled in uncomfortable ways. Why, for instance, had I thought so much about Thalia over the years, but so little about Omar? I wanted to defend myself from the very question.
I said, “Okay. That Friday. I was stage managing, we ended the show, I went back to my dorm, and I learned about everything the next evening. Which was Saturday.”
“Right. But what do you remember? About Saturday?”
One wall of the room we sat in was glass, and girls passed occasionally, still in sports gear or already wrapped in towels to grab the nighttime shower spots. They gazed in with mild curiosity.
I said, “I had a single, senior year, and I would’ve slept in. This isn’t a major part of the story, but the dorm smoke alarm had gone off Friday around midnight, just a microwave incident, so we were all standing outside till pretty late. Are kids still burning popcorn?”
Britt laughed. “Oh my God. I don’t understand why there’s a specific popcorn button on the microwave, when pressing it is, like, nuclear meltdown.”
“Exactly! Okay, so—as you know, a bunch of kids were drinking in the woods Friday night at the mattresses off the Nordic trail. It was warmish for March, so they were taking advantage. I mean, it was probably thirty-three degrees, but you know that first day when the air doesn’t hurt your face?”
Britt said, “I have so many notes on this. It was nineteen students total.”
“I’m pretty sure it was all kids who’d been at the musical,” I said, “or in it. Not Thalia, but most of her friends, and her boyfriend, so it was a little odd she wasn’t there. My point is, a lot of kids were hungover Saturday. Not me—I mean, I wasn’t virtuous, but—that wasn’t my friend group. So between the smoke alarm and the drinking, people were tired, sleeping in. And Thalia had a single, so no one missed her for a while.”
What had happened was that Jenny Osaka, our senior class president, had been invited to the mattress party—she played flute in the pit orchestra—but stayed back for prefect duty in the dorm where Thalia and I both lived. When the Singer-Baird contingent of the mattress crew was late for checkin (11:00 p.m., the weekend curfew), Jenny stalled, did room checks slower than usual. Jenny didn’t drink, would never break curfew, but wasn’t about to rat them out. She knew where they were, she explained later, so she wasn’t worried. Then at five after, a handful of girls poured through Beth Docherty’s ground floor window and scurried to their rooms. Jenny clocked that they were back, quickly checked off the rest of the names, and handed the sheet in to Miss Vogel. Jenny assumed Thalia was among them; those were her friends, so where else would she be? The fire alarm business was after all that. Miss Vogel followed protocol then and went through the dorm to make sure every room was empty—but because we were all standing together in the cold, what looked like forty of us, and no one was left inside, she didn’t take attendance, didn’t bother checking us back into our rooms at 12:30 as she was supposed to.
Jenny had been racked with guilt—maybe still was. She went on to ski in the actual Olympics, the first of our classmates to do something huge. But how do you move on from a mistake like that? After Thalia’s body was discovered, Jenny was the one to go to Miss Vogel and tell her about the mattress party. Not that the others wouldn’t have, soon enough; after all, it was the alibi for everyone there. Jenny resigned as class president, resigned as prefect. I’m sure Miss Vogel faced quieter, more serious repercussions.
I wasn’t about to tell Britt all this. To name poor Jenny Osaka, of all people.
Britt said, “Were you in the same dorm? Singer-Baird?”
“Yep, all four years.”
“Oh my God!” Britt sounded like the cheerleader she might have been in some past era of Granby. “I lived there my first two! I haven’t been able to figure out what room she was in.”
I was glad Thalia’s room wasn’t some haunted shrine. “I don’t remember the number,” I said, “but it’s the single at the left end of the upstairs hall, the one with the window seat.”
Britt shuddered, pleased. “I know who has that room! Should I tell her?”