“Wasn’t there an actual model in there at one point? Or no, wait, a fitness coach.”
“That boy did not have a moment of action at Granby,” I said.
“Sure. He was too busy fawning over you and Carlotta.”
“Umm,” I said, “not me.” I tried to give her the look she deserved, but she was ahead of me on the trail. “Just Carlotta.” But Fran made a sarcastic humph.
She said, “Do you remember those shirts he wore? I think that was half his problem.”
It came back to me from the ether, how freshman year he’d had three of the same shirt in different colors—these jewel-toned rugby shirts with white piping at the collar and cuffs. Something you’d put on a five-year-old.
“Poor Geoff,” I said.
I was out of breath keeping up with her. One thing about living in LA is you forget how to move in clothing or gear that weighs anything.
We were up around where the mattresses must once have been, although the trees and even the trail had changed enough that I couldn’t have found the exact spot.
Fran said, “We’re good, right? You’re not mad at me about the other night? I just don’t want you falling into this whole conspiracy mindset.”
I wanted to ask if she thought I was morphing into Dane Rubra, but that would mean acknowledging I knew who Dane was, which wouldn’t help my case.
“Like I said, it’s not my project. If I knew how to brainwash teenagers, I’d be rich.”
“Okay, good. There’s so much crazy stuff out there. We all killed her in a satanic ritual, right?”
“I’m still mad I wasn’t invited.”
“And there’s all the stuff about Barbara Crocker’s killer. And the dot theory thing.”
I made her repeat herself twice and still had no idea what she was saying.
“Her planner? Oh my God, do not look this up, they’ll get to you. I guess her planner was in her backpack when she was found, but it was never admitted to evidence.”
“That seems . . . ungood,” I said.
“Because it was just academic stuff. She didn’t put her social life in there. But there’s a thing about colored dots on certain days, like the Reddit crazies think it was some kind of code.”
“Her period,” I said, proud both to know this and to sound so reasonable.
“That seems way more logical than them being Masonic code or something.”
I said, “Unless they’re braille, I’m sure that was her period. That’s what she did when we lived together.”
It was true; sometime that spring, after I’d shown her my system, she asked to borrow a red pen. She said, “Look at me! I’m being so good!”
I’d said, “Oh, funny. I just mark the page with my actual period blood.” Thalia looked horrified, letting out only a small, cautious laugh. I had to ruin the joke by telling her I was kidding, lest she repeat this to her friends.
We crested the highest point of the trail and stopped, looking down on campus from above. You could see the Tigerwhip, and you could see the tops of both Old Chapel and New Chapel poking through the overstory.
We discussed the gossip of the day, which was my housemate’s budding relationship with Amber, the Latin teacher he’d been into at the party. Oliver lived in New Jersey, but that wasn’t too far away to keep up something promising.
“The only question,” Fran said, “is whether we lose Amber to the world, or keep Oliver here forever.”
I’m sure Fran would have kept trekking several more miles, but she took pity on me and after a minute at the crest, we turned back.
She said, carefully, “So you know I follow Starlet Fever on Twitter.”
“Oh, good God.”
“I can’t even figure out what’s going on.”
“It’s about Jerome.”
“Right, I mean I got that. But what the hell happened with you?”
What she’d seen were the irate, cryptic screeds people were posting under each of the show’s old tweets. I filled her in as best I could, even managing to laugh at myself, at my drunken bathtub thread, my awkward thumbs.
I said, “I offered to quit the podcast. Maybe I do a book now. The early women screenwriters, Anita Loos and Frances Marion and everyone.”
“I have no idea who those people are,” Fran said, “but no, you don’t quit your job over this.”
I said, “Before 1925, almost half the films produced in Hollywood were written by women. But as soon as there was real money involved, men took the jobs.”
“Twitter is just Twitter,” she said.
I said, “We’re finally back at something like twenty-five percent, but for a long time it was closer to zero.”
“Bodie,” she said. “Just ignore it, and it’ll go away.”
I loved that Fran’s advice always started with the word “just.” (Just tell that boy you like him, just take an extension, just ask the Robesons if you can stay with me, just say you want a raise.)
“It might be too late,” I said.
“So maybe it’s a lesson learned. Stay off the internet, where everyone’s nuts.”
I chose not to acknowledge that she was talking about more than the Jerome situation.
She said, “Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.”
47
The best thing I overheard on my secret pay phone was a conversation between Geoff Richler and his mother, fall of senior year. I listened for only a minute before I felt too guilty about eavesdropping on a friend and hung up. She’d been telling him how there were possums on the lawn, and the community board wouldn’t do anything about it.
“I never think about possums,” Geoff said. “I’d forgotten possums existed till this very minute.”
“Well, they’re nasty,” she said.
“Tiny little devil eyes,” Geoff agreed.
“And fangs!”
The next day, Geoff and I had jimmied open the athletic equipment shed because it was too rainy to get to the mattresses to smoke. The shed sat by the rear of the gym, right next to the football field and track, with an open-air press box on top. The room itself was so hazardous and gross that when people needed to access the press box, they usually climbed the ladder stuck to the building’s side rather than clambering over the mess of orange cones and sprinklers and lacrosse goals to use the rickety indoor stairs. We sat on the blue high-jump landing pad, partly because it was squishy and partly because it kept my feet off the floor, where there might be mice. We joked about how many people had gotten naked on it, but I cared less about germs than mice. The place smelled like mice, like dust and decay and spiderwebs and mold. It was only the size of a couple combined dorm rooms, but there were infinite corners and crevices where vermin might hide. This is how I knew I was addicted: I was willing to come in here just for a cigarette.
I said, “You know what’s worse than mice? Possums.”
Geoff said, “Oh my God,” but before he could finish I went on.
“They have those tiny little devil eyes. They just crossed my mind yesterday for some reason. I was sitting in my room at four o’clock and suddenly I was, like, possums. Is that weird?”
I couldn’t see well—the shed was lit only by one pull-string lightbulb—but I could make out Geoff’s wide eyes, and he was silent several seconds, which might have been a record for Geoff.
He said, “Bodie, you’re freaking me out.”
“You’re scared of possums?”
“No, I—I think I’m dreaming?”
He explained his déjà vu, and I didn’t let on in the slightest. Partly not to spoil the joke, and partly because I loved the idea that he might think we had some special psychic bond. Maybe I did have a crush on Geoff, maybe I always had. If so, it was profoundly different from the theoretical lust I felt toward someone like Mike Stiles. Geoff was a little short for me, which I think is what let me convince myself I didn’t have feelings for him—which in turn let me get closer to him than I otherwise would have.