This was all based on the second party photo, a candid, poorly composed group shot. Most threads were obsessed with the timing and order of the pictures. The first photo from the mattresses, stamped 9:58 p.m., is of the ground, a blurred coat, some legs. After the mud splatter one, a 10:02 shot shows Robbie with his arms around Beth and Dorian, tongue out, a mad devil grin. In that one Robbie has his hat on, but in others you can see his hair shaved up the sides, long and floppy on top, parted in the middle. (“The penis cut,” Fran had called it. But in 1995 it was on trend.)
The show had ended by 8:45 at the absolute earliest. Let’s say fifteen minutes for the Camelot kids to shed their costumes; for Mike, at least, to wash the makeup off. A few minutes to gather friends who hadn’t been in the audience, for Beth to stuff a backpack with bottles from under her bed, for others to grab flashlights, cigarettes, lighters. Everything procured from the girls’ dorms, because the boys’ dorms were down on Lower Campus. The boys stood outside waiting for the girls. They headed the 1.4 miles from the theater up the Nordic trail to the mattresses no faster than Mike could hobble—about a half-hour trek. Then the first photos around ten p.m., party already in full swing. That’s where the Reddit responder got his “ten minutes” thinking. Someone might have had a few minutes to run off and do something, but not enough time to critically injure someone, change her clothes, get her into the water.
According to the state, within the time of the party Thalia had headed from the theater to the gym to meet Omar, to wait for him until he got off his office phone at 10:02 p.m. They believed she was dead before curfew. And I agreed: If she wasn’t back in the dorm by eleven, something had already happened. Thalia might have broken rules, but never something she’d automatically get caught for. She wouldn’t have missed checkin.
Most of the rest of the photos (twenty-one of the thirty-six shots were taken in the woods) were spread out over the next forty minutes; the last of these, at 10:39, shows Fizz downing a can of Pabst.
The kids who were there said in their statements that that’s when someone noticed the time. They scrambled back down the trail, Jimmy Scalzitti falling and twisting his ankle. The girls made it back to the dorms at five after, and the boys, who had to cross to Lower Campus still, and had an injured Jimmy and a still-fragile Mike with them, were twelve minutes late. They got heat from Mr. Dar, but they all checked in together.
Another Reddit theory went that Robbie killed her later that night, that the two of them sneaked out of their dorms to meet. He just seems the type, one person wrote. Spoiled kid, has a tantrum when something goes wrong. He finds out she’s screwing Omar, flips out. There were reasons this was impossible, one of which was that Mr. Dar, who’d been on duty in Lambeth, vouched that after checking in, Robbie stayed in the common room playing Madden Football till midnight, when he had to be upstairs in his room. And Mr. Dar wasn’t one to go to bed early and rely on the door alarms to keep kids inside. He would famously set up a card table on the stairway landing and sit grading history papers in his little panopticon till two in the morning.
The last three shots were from the next Tuesday: Jimmy’s dorm room floor—laundry and textbooks and pilfered dining hall dishes—as he quickly finished off the roll.
I’d missed a text from Fran: Where are you?? I’m outside. Another: Are you sleeping with that guy? Get your ass down here. I leapt up to brush my hair. It was a quarter past. I had lost myself.
#3: ROBBIE SERENHO
He has split himself in two.
There’s a Robbie Serenho who goes to the mattress party, who’s captured on film, seen by friends, who checks in only twelve minutes late, who shows up at breakfast the next morning and jokes around and finds out that afternoon with the rest of us that Thalia’s dead. This is the Robbie who loves Thalia, the Robbie who’ll be a decent father and teach his kids to ski.
But there’s a second Robbie, the entitled jock, the one who’s gotten everything the easy way, the one who can’t control his anger or his fists, the one whose hard edges come out when he drinks. This is the Robbie who meets Thalia outside the theater.
The first Robbie takes off with his friends while the second Robbie needs to ask Thalia about all the time she’s been spending with you. He noticed something tonight, when he snuck backstage before the show. He saw you leaning too close to Thalia, your hand on her elbow. He noticed the way she looked at you, tilting her face down, her eyes up. He lingered backstage, tried to get her attention during her scene, which made her turn her head to the wings and mouth What? He goes to sit in the audience then and seethe. Dorian leans over to tell him one of his Thalia jokes. “Your girlfriend’s not a slut,” he says. “She’s just a volunteer prostitute.”
Robbie’s backstage again at curtain call, beckoning her into the wings.
He says, “Let’s go for a walk.”
He interrogates her, won’t stop asking about you. He’s drunk. There were Poland Spring bottles full of cheap vodka floating around the audience, and Robbie, for all he drinks, can’t hold his liquor. While the other Robbie sips his first beer at the mattresses, flashing the camera a peace sign, this Robbie is wasted.
They end up behind the gym, and Thalia tells him she has to leave because she needs the bathroom. But there’s a bathroom in the gym, he tells her. He has a master key in his pocket, because he always does—and this back door accepts it, doesn’t need the special pool door key. The exit alarm doesn’t sound. (Things always work out for Robbie.) They go through the pool, quietly, quietly, and down the hall—not past Omar’s office, where the door is open and the light is on, but just into the girls’ locker room, where Robbie won’t stop asking questions even while she pees.
She takes so long that he steps into a shower stall with his clothes on, turns on the water. He must have fallen asleep for a second, leaning against the wall, because she’s in here now with him, slapping his cheek, telling him to wake up.
If they’re in the shower they might as well have sex, and he tries to take her wet clothes off.
She gets mad and yells, pushes him away. She’s making too much noise. He asks why she won’t have sex, asks if it’s because she already had sex with someone today, asks if that person was you.
She tells him he’s an idiot and tries to leave the shower stall.
This Robbie grabs Thalia’s neck, shakes her, just wants to shake sense into her, needs to shake her against something hard, against this wet and slippery wall, and he feels like an animal, feels like when he’s flying down a hill in snow, when the fire flows into his muscles, when his body is a machine. He doesn’t tell his body what to do because it knows, it follows the hill, it follows gravity, and that’s what he’s doing now, following gravity, until Thalia starts seizing, her eyes rolling back. She slides to the bottom of the stall, the water washing the blood on the wall from red to pink to nothing.
He sobers up, or at least the things in front of him come clear: He needs to fix this. Not fix her, because it’s too late, she’s twitching like she’s electrocuted—but fix all of this, this bad movie, this problem, this thing that’s befallen him.
He drags her small, wet body out of the locker room and back to the pool, gets her clothes off, gets her into a swimsuit he finds. He has all the time in the world, because meanwhile the other Robbie, the one in the woods, is singing along with the boom box, a falsetto rendition of “Come to My Window.” That Robbie is hamming it up, spinning with his arms out, as this Robbie slides Thalia into the pool, knowing, to the extent he knows anything right now, that she’s still alive, that what he did in the shower might have been an accident but this is intentional, this is murder, is murder, is murder. He has time to find the bleach, to use it on the pool deck and in the hall—Omar is gone by now, his office light off—and in the locker room. He has time to vomit in the sink, to wash it down the drain, to wash his hands and face.