Britt nodded. “That’s all still there.”
“So the kids had gone to bed, but it was still light out, and I was on their back porch doing homework. I looked up and Thalia was by the dumpsters, wearing pajamas. I mean, bare feet, boxers, a T-shirt. She didn’t see me. There were shrubs between us.” I hadn’t wanted to be seen, didn’t want Thalia to feel obliged to make patronizing small talk. “She started circling this one dumpster. Just walking around and around it, but like something was wrong. Every once in a while she’d jump up, trying to see in. It was weird.”
Britt looked confused. I wasn’t telling it right.
“What I’m saying is, something was off. At first I thought she was sleepwalking, and then I’m like, it’s eight thirty p.m. I wondered if she was on drugs. I mean, something serious. Something that made the world not totally real.”
Britt was excited now, leaning forward. “Something that could make you try to jump into the pool from the observation deck!”
I said, “But they did toxicology on her, and she was only a little drunk, right?”
“What’s weird,” Britt said, “is there was some alcohol in her bloodstream, but there was lots in her stomach that hadn’t been absorbed yet. So, like, she drank a lot but she died before she was drunk.”
I said, “Oh, right.” I had known this at one point—it was probably in one of the articles Fran had sent—but I hadn’t put it together with—with what? There was a word-on-my-tongue feeling, some Jungian breakthrough that wouldn’t break through.
Britt said, “You know they used that in the trial? Like, if she was drinking right before she died, but she wasn’t in the woods with those kids, she somehow got alcohol at the gym. So the prosecution decides it must have come from Omar. How na?ve is that? Like only an adult would have booze?”
The flask. The flask in the video, in Beth Docherty’s hand.
I didn’t say anything. Because I was still piecing it together, and because I was being recorded.
They’d probably passed the flask backstage as the show wound down, as they pre-gamed for the mattresses.
There were kids who, if they’d been asked the right question soon enough, if they’d been honest enough, might have said they saw Thalia drink. They might have seen her come back after her last scene and gulp down whatever was left.
I said, “Could they tell what kind of alcohol it was?” and Britt shrugged.
It would have been vodka in that flask, for sure. Beth always drank vodka and still sprayed her mouth with Binaca after, would breathe in your face and ask if you could smell anything. Or rather, she’d do it to boys she liked, an excuse to breathe on them.
If it was vodka in Thalia’s stomach—well, that wouldn’t prove anything. But it might suggest she died soon after the end of the show.
And what would that mean? That she went straight to Omar’s, that he killed her almost immediately? That he was waiting backstage, even, and whatever she mouthed into the wings was to him?
It certainly wasn’t to you; you were down in the pit.
Britt said, “Do you think?”
“I’m sorry?”
“That the police got it from you?”
I looked at her, baffled; I’d missed a few sentences.
“The idea that she was on drugs. That was what the prosecution argued, that she’d been sleeping with Omar in exchange for drugs. Do you think they based that on the story you told them?”
My mind pinwheeled, and then my guts did. That couldn’t be it, couldn’t be the only reason.
They had to know I wasn’t even in that crowd. But did they? Were they actually tuned in to the fact that my too-old J.Crew skirt meant I wasn’t really friends with Thalia?
I could see how dots would get connected, how the detectives would write the word DRUGS on their yellow pad, circle it, how they’d start asking where Granby kids got drugs, how they’d form a theory that looped in Omar—the same guy Thalia’s friends were saying had followed her around, the same guy who’d been in the building. I could see how this theory would get handed to prosecutors as gospel. Thalia was on drugs; Omar sold the drugs. Thalia had romantic trouble with an older man; Omar was an older man. Thalia was sleeping with Omar, an older man, in exchange for drugs.
But other people must have said similar things. Because if her friends had insisted that she never touched a joint, the police would have listened, wouldn’t they?
“It’s possible,” I said, and I hated how my voice sounded. Like a trapped animal.
“Anyway,” Britt said, “I don’t believe the toxicology report. It sounds like she was on something. Maybe she thought she could fly.”
#2: THALIA
The products of that night’s insomnia:
Half-dreams about you and Thalia, you looking into the dumpster, you keeping Thalia hidden in your house all these years. You morphing into the guy who assaulted me in college. Me trying to put my contacts in, but they were the size of dinner plates, stiff, wouldn’t fit in my eyes.
An itching on my thighs that worsened the harder I scratched, an itch that arranged itself in long, hot welts.
Another story, another film reel I made myself watch all the way:
Thalia takes off alone.
She wants to get away from Rachel and Beth, who pretend to be her friends but aren’t, and from Robbie, who’s bound to be drunk and insufferable in the woods. She wants to get away from you, wants to make sure you don’t find an excuse to keep her back as everyone leaves, that you don’t look at her with puppy eyes and tell her she’s the one with all the power, she’s the one who has your heart in her fist. So she changes quickly, slips out the back.
Earlier, she took a few tokes off Max Krammen’s joint, a soggy thing he kept in the pocket of his Merlin robes. And late in the second act she sipped from Beth’s flask—but she isn’t wasted, just lighter, full with her own ideas.
She floats to the gym and finds the front door unlocked. She finds the pool door unlocked, too, and locks it behind her because she can change right here on the deck into the spare suit she’s found, one Omar spotted the last time he passed through, scooped up wet from the floor—and what, sneezed into? wiped across his sweating forehead? would that be enough?—and dropped on the bench with his DNA in the knit.
She knows if she gets in slowly it’ll be too cold; she’ll chicken out. So she climbs to the observation deck, because if she can fly in—and she’s seen people do it, knows it can be done—she’ll be irrevocably in the water.
She climbs over the two bars of the rail, painted Granby green, holds the top bar behind her, stands with only her heels on the edge. It’s a matter of force; the only danger is not jumping hard.
She used to have conviction. As a ten-year-old, grass-stained and sunburnt, swinging from branches; as a twelve-year-old athlete, diving racquet-first for the ball. But something has happened to her lately, even on the tennis court, a failure of the body to go full bore, to surrender to her will. It’s an instinct, perhaps, for self-preservation, but one that always betrays her.
And how does a seventeen-year-old girl lose that control? Did it crack the moment the bingo chart went up in the bathroom? If a thirty-three-year-old music teacher takes possession of a teenager’s body, does he take agency from her muscles as well? Does he fray the line between body and mind? Perhaps not entirely. But enough to make an inch, three inches, five inches of difference?