By 2018, my mother and I were on decent terms, although since she’d missed most of my adolescence and only reentered my life in my twenties （the Robesons supplementing my aid package for IU, too, only slightly disappointed I didn’t follow their kids to Brigham Young）， we had a stiff, cordial, adult relationship. She was still in Arizona, divorced from the hippie, keeping books at a resort-cum-ashram. She loved her grandkids, which was something. Severn Robeson had died in 2009, and Margaret Robeson was someone I sent an extra Mother’s Day card. When there were wildfires anywhere in California, Margaret emailed asking if I was all right in LA.
I quite like most Mormons as people, even if I settled into solid agnosticism at Granby, even as I take great issue with the church’s history of bigotry. I at least owe them my fondness. But I was always a guest in the Robesons’ home, and the more I changed at Granby—such a different Granby than the coat-and-tie all-boys school Severn attended in the ’50s—the clearer it became that their support of me was rooted in their values, rather than attachment.
I don’t believe the adults at Granby knew any of this, except the Hoffnungs, and perhaps Mrs. Ross, since as my advisor she communicated with the Robesons.
I got so good at answering those generic orientation questions. Favorite vacation? Arizona! I love the sunlight! How many siblings? One. My dad’s golf friends joked that since my brother was Ace, I should be Birdie. So they named me Elizabeth and tried to call me Birdie. And what did my brother do, with his lisp? Called me Bodie. Closer to bogey, yes, ha ha ha! How did your parents meet? Blind date! Name one food you miss from home! Brownies, I always said, because the Mormons make excellent brownies.
9
I autopiloted my afternoon film class, launching into my standard first-day Intro to Film Studies lecture, movie clips cued up. I had twelve kids, three of whom named The Godfather as their favorite film. I told them we’d start at the beginning. We’d talk orientation and disorientation.
I couldn’t help checking my phone as the first clips played; Yahav still hadn’t written back.
On-screen, the Lumière brothers’ train pulled into its 1895 station.
A space capsule hit the moon right in the eye.
A firefighter carried a woman from a burning building.
There was one kid in that class, a jetlagged white girl from South Africa, who was brand new to Granby. She’d arrived on the continent only the day before, and I felt guilty keeping the lights off. The girl was not cute enough to warrant a swarm of attention, but not awkward enough that other kids kept their distance. When we took a break halfway through the period, a boy kept giving her words to repeat （“Say milk!”） then trying to match her accent. She found it funny, or pretended to.
How strange that this girl, a sophomore, had known the people around her for all of an hour, and yet soon they’d wind up deep in her psyche. They’d pop into her dreams thirty years from now, unbidden.
On-screen, a silhouette with a knife, Janet Leigh’s face in close-up, her fingers on the tiles, the shower curtain rings in close-up, the drain. “Let’s talk about what he doesn’t show,” I said.
There had always been kids who arrived at Granby a semester in, a year in. Some left again right away, a rejected organ transplant. Others stayed and you couldn’t remember a time before them.
Thalia was one of those, arriving two years late and in a fog of rumors.
A junior transfer, so there had to be a story. Sophomore transfers made sense—their middle school had run through ninth grade, or they’d found another school wanting, or failed to make friends, or plain failed. Senior transfers were all like Parkman Walcott, whom I doubt you knew—nineteen at the youngest, graduates of other high schools, public or private, brought in as fifth-year football or hockey ringers with hopes of a better shot at a better college. An acne-riddled defensive lineman with a Kentucky accent that grew more pronounced the longer he spent in New Hampshire, Parkman Walcott was called, with unsubtle irony, Peewee, and I have a particularly unpleasant memory of him I’ll save for later. Those were the senior transfers: four or five Peewees a year. There were no junior transfers, unless you counted the Nordic or Brazilian exchange students who’d come for nine months to date everyone hot and break our swim records and shake their heads at our college process, then leave.
Then, out of nowhere, came Thalia Keith. （Theme music! Follow spot! All heads turn.） Black curls down her back, clear olive skin, eyes people reverently described as aqua. Flat-chested, which helped explain why rather than killing her on sight, a high-status group of junior girls instantly adopted her. Chief among them were Rachel Popa and Beth Docherty, who looked like negative images of each other. （The Pantone Twins, Fran called them. “I wonder if they come in blue,” she said. “Maybe I’ll order one in lavender.”） Rachel was glowingly tan with long straight dark hair, Beth glowingly fair with long straight blond hair—both of them petite and pretty and athletic and rich enough to spend their days sparking social drama rather than dodging it. They scooped Thalia right up. So did Sakina John, who, along with Beth, was one of Granby’s musical theater stars. She embraced Thalia once October Follies rehearsals began and Sakina realized Thalia was good, but not better than her. Puja Sharma met Thalia on the tennis team and glommed on hard. Puja was from London and a bit socially desperate but adept at buying friends with vacations and gifts. Thalia was not the queen bee of the class （that would be Beth）， but she was central, beloved.
And she was new meat for the boys, could have been half as pretty and still held their interest with her newness alone. I know now that for straight boys at that age, it’s less about the girl than the competition. Just as soccer isn’t about your love of the ball. And once she was declared the object of collective interest, she became the ball.
A Thalia-specific bingo card started making the rounds of the boys’ dorm bathrooms—a sheet on which they could initial squares that said things like touched outside clothes, or under clothes above waste （this spelling error gleefully reported to me by Geoff Richler）， or asked out, or fucked. The only initials he believed, Geoff said, were the five guys who claimed to have already asked her （in September!） to Homecoming. But I saw what was happening: boys running up to Thalia and poking her arm so they could sign the outside clothes square. Thalia laughed so confidently that she managed to own the joke, laughed so beautifully and so well that it was clear to anyone watching that these boys were her friends, whether or not they’d ever spoken to her. She laughed like someone who’d known them for years. An “Oh, Marco, that’s how you’ve always been” laugh, when—did she even know that was Marco Washington running up to stroke her hair?
You might not remember Marco. He wasn’t exactly signing up for your opera seminar. Do you remember Peewee Walcott and Dorian Culler and Mike Stiles? Don’t worry about it. They were the foundational souls of my adolescence, but to you they were faces passing through. You’ve had a new crop every year since. Thalia meant enough to you that I’m sure you remember the kids right around her—Robbie Serenho, Rachel, Beth—the ones who orbited her like moons.