Don’t worry, she didn’t. She made herself scarce.
The living room of Gage House is still set up that way, as a parlor for schmoozing donors and alumni. Photos of historic Granby on the walls. Starting at 10:30, we perched on uncomfortable chairs and settees angled toward the empty stone fireplace, the room lit with dim lamps. Alder had lugged an urn of coffee from the dining hall and appointed himself “séance barista,” with the unfortunate side effect that the kids were wired. Britt seemed quiet and moody, but her silence was overridden by the other four, giddy as middle schoolers.
Being here was good for me, a reason to stay away from alcohol tonight, a reason to stay offline. And their teenage ebullience was a salve for my angry heart.
The feeling had returned to my fingers and toes.
The kids’ energy, their improbably fresh faces glowing in the low-watt bulbs, reminded me again that they were kids. Yahav was right. We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.
The cheerleader trope in most grown men’s heads is about adults (God, let’s hope they’re adults) putting on pigtails and squeaky voices for porn. It’s about what we think we remember. It’s not about actual adolescents unless there’s something wrong.
Which is all to say: I imagine you told yourself you loved Thalia. I imagine you promised her the same. And you might still believe it. But I’m telling you, from a furious place in the bottom of my gut: It might have been about power, it might have been about sex, it might have been about control, it might even—in some broken part of you—have been something warped but paternal, something tender and blind. But it was not about love.
After the first few Ouija attempts (our ghost was named XGHERERE, and YES, it was at peace, and NO, it didn’t know anything about the ghost of Arsareth Gage Granby), Alder asked if we could try to summon Thalia’s ghost, or if that would be too weird for me. I said they were welcome to try. Britt didn’t make a move toward her phone to capture it for her podcast, so Alder recorded with his.
This time the kids were smarter. They didn’t ask the ghost’s name, just asked if it was Thalia and, consciously or subconsciously, nudged the pointer to YES.
“How can we prove it’s her?” Jamila asked me, and I said, “Ask if Khristina stole her running shoes.”
The pointer went to YES, and I shook my head. “Fake ghost,” I said, and filled them in on the bra.
Something cracked, one wall of the house settling in the cold, and they all jumped. Alder squealed and scooted up next to Britt, hugged his knees to his chest in a way everyone seemed to find funny and endearing. I tried to imagine a boy doing that in the ’90s, and all I could think of was the freshman everyone called “the Oklahomo,” whose dormmates duct-taped him naked to a Couchman pillar in the middle of a lightning storm. I was only mildly horrified at the time; it just seemed like standard hijinks, and the other boys barely got in trouble. He didn’t return the next year. I hadn’t thought of that in years, and I felt a guilty stab, an actual cramp, even though I’d barely known the boy and hadn’t been there. I doubt the episode, or our indifference to it, were things my students could even have computed, these sweet souls who’d been trained in antibullying since kindergarten.
I didn’t tell them that story, but I did tell them they were more conscientious and kind and artistic than my own classmates. Jamila let out a snort-laugh. She said, “That’s because of what you’re teaching. You should see who’s taking the stock market class and the, like, Get Your Dad to Fund Your Startup class.”
“There’s a lot of douchebags,” Lola said. “And we’ve still got those secret societies. Like, only white boys whose grandfathers went here.”
Alder said, “What do they even do?”
“Nothing. My uncle said they just told each other enough secrets that they could blackmail each other—to make them stick together. And I guess they give each other jobs after college?”
“Wait, was he in one?” I asked. We used to speculate who was in the Peregrine Society, the alumni of which had built the ice rink, and Omega, whose main activity was blanketing campus with Xerox copies of their logo in the middle of the night.
“He wouldn’t tell me!” Lola said.
Alder said, “That means he was.” Then, “Oh my God, Britt, you have to look into all that! What if Thalia found out their secrets or something? That’s one of my theories. I have eight theories.”
Britt closed her eyes and smiled with only her mouth. She looked as numb as I felt.
“Ms. Kane,” Alder said, although most of them had taken me up on the invitation to call me Bodie, “what do you think happened? Hand to God?”
I took a long time to answer, navigating my still-spinning mind. I said, “You’ll have to stop recording first.” He obliged. I was careful, the way I spoke. Partly because I hadn’t articulated much of it to myself yet. “There’s a bunch of evidence against Omar that I can’t explain. But really they didn’t cast a very wide net. Personally, I think Britt is right that they missed important details, and they missed important people.”
“Wait!” Alder said. “Wait, you didn’t say that before! Like who?”
“There were close friends who weren’t in the woods. There was a girl named Puja Sharma who had a really strange mental health episode a few weeks later, and then she left school. There was this kid Max Krammen in Camelot, just a sketchball. I do not think either of them did anything; I just think those were people to look at.” There had been rumors that Max was the one who started the bingo card, although that seemed awfully ambitious for him. I said, as if this name weren’t any more important than the others, “There was a teacher named Denny Bloch.”
I wonder if you felt some twinge just then, of betrayal or guilt. Maybe I crossed your mind for no reason. Maybe a rooster crowed three times.
“He did Choristers and orchestra and Follies and spring musical and taught a few classes.”
Jamila said, “They had one person doing all that?”
“It was a different place. But he—Britt, you should look into him. He was married with kids, but I’m pretty sure they were having an affair, him and Thalia.” The kids’ jaws dropped, all but Britt’s. “Or—I mean he was preying on her. That’s not an affair.”
I hated how part of me—still!—held on to the notion that Thalia was, with full volition, choosing to sleep with you because you were young and everyone thought you were cute and it was a matter of status among her friends. But no. There was a line, a solid line, between Thalia and someone like Jasmine Wilde. A line of age, a line of agency. And there was a world of difference between you and Jerome.
I remembered Puja asking, right after I’d started rooming with Thalia, “Don’t you think she’s a little hoey?” I hadn’t understood the word, especially with her London accent, and I’d asked what she meant. “Hoey,” she said. “Like a ho.” I assumed this was a common word I’d missed. It remained part of my conception of Thalia. An adjective I would never hear used for anyone else.
Alder said, “Wait, I know who this is! It’s the guy onstage at the end of the Camelot video?” I nodded, although I wanted to know why Alder was asking the questions, rather than Britt, miserable next to him on the lavender settee.