I contributed details about Brian Wynn, the boy I’d quasi slept with in Indiana that summer, and his rodent-like penis, which lay on his stomach half-hard and pulsing. Carlotta messed around with a few Granby boys but was always still dating one or two from home. Sakina—to the distaste of her father, the first Black Granby alum on the Board of Trustees—spent all four years attached to Marco Washington, who was always in trouble. Marco filled her in on the dick of every boy in Lambeth, since the boys in the dorms saw each other not only in the shower but also, apparently, on not infrequent occasion, fully erect—a joke, a performance, a threat. So Marco shared that Kellan TenEyck was hung like a Coke can and Blake Oxford, who had it bad enough already, was tiny and uncut. Pinky finger, Sakina wrote on the list, and drew a picture of what she imagined. Under Mike Stiles’s name, Sakina wrote, Even Marco is jealous.
I wasn’t particularly friends with Sakina, who played Morgan le Fay in Camelot and Chiffon in Little Shop and Rizzo in Grease and seemed destined for Broadway fame—though in reality she wound up an ob-gyn—but when Carlotta started a band and got Sakina involved, they ended up close, and she would join us in the Singer-Baird common for My So-Called Life. I was always worried she was judging me, and she probably was, yet later she ended up one of the people I kept in closest contact with—at first because we were both in New York, and then because our oldest kids were born the same day.
The list lived in Carlotta’s dresser. No one else was supposed to know (not even Marco; he told Sakina about everyone’s dick just for fun), but senior year, on our morning walk to the mattresses, I filled Geoff in. Geoff seemed only amused, especially once I assured him he wasn’t on it. He said, “You need to add me. Please. Can you make me nine inches long with the balls of a god?” For weeks, he’d mouth it to me in the hall or the dinner line: balls of a god. Is it wrong if that still cracks me up? Unlike the bingo sheet, our list didn’t put anyone in danger, didn’t turn anyone into a ring to be grabbed.
Plus, dicks were in our faces, figuratively or literally, whether we wanted them there or not. I never sought out a dick, hoping to see it, until college. But here they were. Even nervous Brian Wynn, that summer, had been the one to undo his belt, push my head down with his sweaty hand. Dorian Culler exposed himself to me three times. Once was in the back hallway of the gym. He’d passed where I sat on the floor studying, then returned with a couple of friends, already laughing. He said, “Bodie, when you snuck into my room last night you left a bite mark on my cock.” He pulled it out the top of his gym shorts and managed a confused, wounded look. Instinctively, I held my hand up to block my view—he was only a few feet away—and he said, “God, Bodie, look at you reaching for me again. You’re insatiable. And when I’m wounded! I need medical attention.” I chastised myself for doing the wrong thing. What would the right thing have been? They left, but I had a feeling they’d be back so I scooped up my books and found another floor to sit on.
Which is all to say: Documenting the dicks of Granby felt more like revenge than predation.
I tried to imagine Jerome whipping it out in front of Jasmine Wilde. But no, Jerome was not Dorian. I tried to imagine Jerome pulling her onto his lap at an after-party. I tried to imagine him saying, “You should come by my studio tonight; I’ll give you some pointers.” Or “You know I can make or break people in this world.”
Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it.
All of this went through my head in the time it took Lola to find a photo of Mike on their laptop—his official shot from the UConn website—and show the class.
Britt was bouncing in her corner seat. “Can I interview him? Lola, can I interview him?”
Lola shrugged.
I said, “He knew Thalia pretty well. He’d know Omar, too. He was an athlete.”
Mike would have more to say than I had: Another ski star, he was one of Robbie Serenho’s best friends. He’d been both in the show and at the mattresses. He’d likely spoken to the police at much greater length than me. Plus, if he talked to Britt he’d see how obsessed she was, and, if news of the podcast got out to my classmates, he could maybe vouch for the fact that I hadn’t put her up to this.
Lola said to Britt, “I mean, I can give you his email.”
We caught up on everyone’s projects and talked editing, since the first of their first episodes would be due the next morning.
Alder had a convoluted idea about convincing listeners his podcast consisted of rediscovered tapes from 1938, tricking them the way War of the Worlds had tricked people. Alyssa, the one covering Arsareth Gage Granby, kept falling asleep. I couldn’t blame her: She sat in front of the radiator, framed by a window that bathed her in morning sun. I was jealous.
Britt had tried reaching out to Omar himself, through his lawyer, but hadn’t heard back. She’d decided to structure the podcast around unanswered questions. How exactly did that emergency pool exit work, in 1995, and who else might have had access to the building? What influence did the school have over the State Police? What were the circumstances of Omar’s confession? Was Thalia sleeping with her music teacher? Okay, no, not that last one. Not yet.
25
That afternoon, I had the film kids think about flashback. I showed them, to start, the wavy-screen memory intros from the Wayne’s World sketches of my own adolescence. Then I showed cheesy jump cuts from Lost. Also before their time, as ancient to them as the clips of Rashomon I showed next.
We talked about the difference between a character remembering, and the camera as impartial eye on the actual past.
Jimmy Stewart was dreaming, falling, his head floating in fields of vertiginous color.
Fellini’s traffic jam gave way to flight.
Their assignment that night was to watch Memento, to come in with notes and thoughts.
“You’re going to watch it on your phones, aren’t you,” I said as they stood to leave.
They shrugged. My bright-bulb kid said, “When you hold it close to your face, it’s as good as a theater.”
26
I was scared to check my phone, didn’t want more bad news about Jerome coming through the screen. But I looked, and it was worth it: Yahav wrote that he could come up Saturday—the day after tomorrow. I’d been thinking I wouldn’t see him, steeling myself with a lifetime’s accrual of getting-over-men skills. But yes, he could drive up Saturday, and “maybe walk around” and had “three hours at most.”
I could sense my proximity panicking him. Since August, I’d been just my electronic self, nudes in his phone, words and pixels. And now here I was, shaking him from his moorings. But I found myself uncharacteristically helpless to leave him alone. It had something to do with Yahav being the only man with whom I’d ever first been friends and then lovers—so I was stuck to him on two levels, which hadn’t even happened between me and Jerome. Jerome and I met when he shot me sexy-eyes at a friend’s gallery opening. Our first conversation was loaded with innuendo, him teasing me for eating the olive out of my martini before it had time to soak up the vodka. I wonder now how I’d have felt about that encounter had I been a young artist, had I already known Jerome’s work and worried about impressing him. Wasn’t my notion of him the purer one, though? I’d seen him for what he was: a wildly confident, wildly insecure flirt.
But with Yahav: It was like we’d been scored open and then stuck together, and his absence was a raw wound.
The need I felt would have been fascinating, were it not so painful.
I wrote back: I will take you on a tour of my adolescence. Beware.
27
Following his failed appeal in ’99, Omar’s family had launched the Free Omar website. I’d seen it briefly years ago, after Dateline discussed it; when I pulled it up in my darkening guest room before dinner, I found it relatively unchanged. It seemed that after that initial flood of publicity, online interest had drifted from activism into true crime gossip. The Spider-Man actress left to chase new causes, and the Dane Rubras of the world stepped in.
The home page led with childhood photos of Omar: ears too big for his head, toes buried in sand, smile a yard wide. In Web 1.0 neon purple on a black background, his family stated their case: Omar was coerced into a false confession. The evidence against him was questionable. Other suspects weren’t investigated.