Diane nodded, oozing sympathy. I preferred Lester Holt, his frank blinking. You never felt he was putting on an act.
The camera zoomed in on one of the photos: a teenage Omar, smiling like he’d just heard a joke. He looked like the guy I’d known, only with a lot more hair. When I first got to Granby, Omar had his head shaved—and because he was light-skinned and because I thought people with Arabic names must be Middle Eastern, I didn’t realize Omar was African American until late sophomore year, when he grew his hair out. I asked some teammates if they’d known, and they looked at me like I was an idiot. Angie Parker, who was Black, found it hilarious the rest of the year to point out random blond people and say, “Whatcha think, Bodie, Asian? Jamaican?”
We learned now, through Diane Sawyer’s voice-over, that Omar had gotten his BS in athletic training at UNH, where he was a track star, and while he was at Granby he’d enrolled in part-time classes there again, working toward his MS. None of that had made it onto Dateline. Omar lived in an apartment in Concord above an independent pharmacy—an hour-long commute from Granby in his rusted-out Grand Am. UNH would have been another hour from Granby, and not toward home.
Sheila said, “His little brother was lost for so long. Malcolm was only six when his father died but Omar was fifteen and I told myself, okay, my husband raised up one man, now Omar can raise his brother. But the year Malcolm’s sixteen, his brother is ripped away, too. I try to hold things together, but I’m busy fighting for Omar. We have the trial and the appeal. I got shingles from the stress, and that was debilitating. All my support team, my sister, my own mother, we’re consumed with this. What’s left for Malcolm? And we live in a small community. You can imagine how he was treated after this, even by his teachers. He’s finding his way now, but only through the strength of his character.”
I felt gut-punched—the way she articulated something I’d never been able to. My own father’s death destabilized us, but Ace’s was a life yanked from the center of us all, the last pin holding anything in place. One loss wasn’t worse than the other, but it was the second that did us in.
I found that I’d finished brushing my teeth, that I was flossing them again even though I’d already flossed.
She said, “They made Omar out to be a bad person all-around. This one accusation wasn’t enough, they have to say he was dealing drugs, he was a violent man, he was sleeping with students. They paint a whole picture. They talk about him as if he came from nowhere, as if he had no family.”
It was true that the prosecution and the papers made him out as a full-on drug dealer, implied he was selling to students, which was news to me. In fact, he talked a lot about pot, would go on about the difference between indica and sativa, would tell injured athletes who returned from the hospital with narcotic painkillers that they should chuck them all, that pot was healthier. It seemed part of his being into meditation, breathing. He got the football team doing vinyasas. The pot talk never felt like a big deal. And even if it was more than talk: Every other kid on campus had a Ziploc of weed, or at least of oregano they’d been sold as weed. Ronan Murphy, that slick little kid from Bronxville, was the one everyone actually bought from, and he sold much more than pot.
After Omar’s arrest, I certainly believed he was selling to students, if only because everyone else said so. I’d wondered in the years since why he would jeopardize his career that way—but then, why would he jeopardize his career by stalking a student?
“I do think my mother would have lived longer,” Sheila Evans said, “were it not for the stress. She had deep vein thrombosis, and that’s not helped by worry. He was her first grandbaby. She used to get mad if I’d bathed him before she came over, she was so eager to do it.” She swallowed in a way that dimpled her chin; she was holding in so much it was a wonder she didn’t implode, turn to a tiny pebble of grief. “My mother left us in 2008,” she said.
I took my laptop with me into bed.
“My own sister fell out with all of us. She wasn’t sure of Omar’s innocence. We haven’t spoken in years. I started with a family,” she said. Her voice had started cracking, and she paused until she had control. “A healthy, functional family, and—you know, I ended with a shambles. It’s the ruins of a family.”
The dosage of my antidepressant is such that I haven’t cried actual tears in a decade, but there are times when I want so badly to cry that I make all the noises of crying, press my fists into my eyes so I feel something similar. The absence of tears hurts more—or makes whatever hurts hurt more—than if I could just sob. In any case: That’s what I was doing, on my bed. There was a childish bitterness to it all that I only slowly identified beneath the sympathy: Sheila Evans, unlike my own mother, hadn’t abandoned her remaining child.
I hated that I was thinking about myself rather than becoming a pure vessel to absorb Sheila’s grief, but the truth is that while anyone with a heart would have felt it break right then, my heart cracked along familiar fault lines.
Since I shouldn’t be thinking about myself, I stuffed the recognition down into the subterranean, into the dank, loamy places where it might take root.
Instead of working it all out, I went to sleep.
#1: OMAR EVANS
In the morning I couldn’t remember what I dreamed, except that it was troubling, that it was about water, that I dreamed about texting friends about the dream. I didn’t feel rested in the slightest. I knew, as the sun finally came through the blinds, that I couldn’t get up until I’d stayed there with my eyes closed fully picturing the night Thalia died. If I could do that, if I could think it all the way through, I could get up and leave behind me whatever had tangled these sheets into a sweaty mess.
So—may the universe forgive me—that’s what I did.
Thalia changes from her costume, the tulle smelling of sweat and sawdust. She puts on the jeans and sweater that will later be found neatly folded on the pool deck bench. They never found a shirt, just a green cashmere sweater, so let’s assume this is all she has. Hiking boots. No coat; the more foolhardy of us are done with them.
She grabs her backpack （reported contents: hairbrush, lipstick, tampons, calculus book, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Granby-issued weekly planner, assorted pens and scrunchies, mini deodorant, dorm room key）， slips past the other changing girls, exits via the backstage fire escape. No one will miss her: All her friends in the cast and a lot of other kids, Robbie among them, are heading to the woods to drink by those two disgusting old mattresses.
Her footprints melt into others’， and in any case, they’re rained away by the next night, the soonest anyone would think to look.
She avoids the floodlights till she’s behind the gym where there’s no light at all, her fingers on the building’s bricks to guide her. At the emergency exit she knocks three times, and Omar disables the alarm. He’s been waiting right there, impatient. They go to his office couch.
Thalia’s still in her stage makeup, the green eyeshadow that matched her dress. Omar says she looks hot.
Or no—he says she looks slutty, and she bats her eyes, pouts.