Maybe he asks if the makeup was for Robbie. He asks why she needs to look trampy for the play, asks if she’s looking for more boyfriends, because he knows she doesn’t care about him, she’s probably fucking Dartmouth guys, too.
Sometimes this is foreplay for them. Sometimes she says, What if I went to a frat party and saw how many guys would screw me?
But he’s not in the mood, and he stands over her, still high on whatever he took while he waited for her, and he grabs her throat and maybe he didn’t mean it till this moment. If her face hadn’t seized with terror, he could still play it off as a joke, but it’s too late; she’s seen what’s in him, and the only way he can fix things is to stop her from seeing him and judging him and remembering this. He slams her head against a new CPR poster taped to the cinder-block wall above the couch. She claws him, makes the deep scratch the police will find nine days later behind his right ear, down to his collarbone, the one he’ll say he got from his neighbor’s dog. There was no skin found under her fingernails, but hours in chlorinated water could account for that. He chokes her harder, and when her arms go limp he steps back.
No. This couldn’t be it.
This was the version we were all handed—this was what he said in his confession （drugs, his office, the couch, the wall, a poster no one ever remembered seeing）， but I couldn’t make it work. The movie director who lived in my brain wanted to scrap it, send the actors home for the day.
Omar was someone who noticed the stress in your shoulders before you felt it yourself—not someone who bottled up rage till it exploded.
So maybe instead—maybe there’s someone else there. Maybe Omar has a violent friend, one whose temper erupts. And Omar decides, later, to take the fall for them both.
Maybe Omar has taken tainted drugs, ones that make him hallucinate.
I had to leave it at something happens. Because it did. Because there was no other explanation. Because there was no one else in the gym that night. Something very bad happens, and he can’t call for help.
She’s breathing still. He has enough medical training to know, even in his haze, what he’s done, and also to know she could still survive this. But if she survives this, he won’t.
He checks the hall, carries Thalia over his shoulder the twenty-six feet to the pool.
He strips her rag-doll body on the pool deck, wrangles her into a spare suit from the equipment locker. He’s reminded of dressing his little brother, pushes down the thought. Her breaths: ragged but steady. He rolls her into the water, doesn’t notice till she’s in that there’s blood on the pool deck cement. This must mean there’s blood on his wall, blood on the hallway floor. Her dark curls had been hiding the wound.
Omar grabs the pool net, uses the handle end to hold Thalia’s body a few inches below the surface. She doesn’t struggle. This is what he said in his confession, a detail that always destroyed me: the idea that someone who’d been so alive could be killed—so gently, so slowly—by a pool net.
Omar racks his brain to think who’s seen them together, who might know. He can’t deny being here in the gym; he’s been making calls all evening from his office phone. He’ll have to say he saw nothing, heard nothing. （So why, then, when they first questioned him, did he volunteer that his door was open?）
He waits ten minutes, longer than anyone could possibly survive without air. To his surprise, she sinks a little. Her feet lower than her head, but both below the water’s surface. He folds Thalia’s clothes, puts them on the bench. He knows where the maintenance guy keeps the bleach, industrial strength, and he goes to the cabinet, uses his shirt cuff to lift the bottle, to pour it onto the bloody pool deck. He watches it fizz white. He scrubs with a forgotten towel, and it’s a long time before he can step back and not see a pinkish blur. He turns on the lights for a second, to check. He uses the same bleach and the same towel on the drops that dot the tiled hallway. He’s lucky: In his office, there’s blood visible only on the CPR poster. Still, even after he peels it off, folds it, stuffs it in his backpack, he scrubs the wall. He returns the bleach to the maintenance closet. To do this, he has to reenter the pool, has to see Thalia bobbing below the surface.
He’s sobered a bit, and it’s harder now to look. The smell of chlorine starts to sicken him, and the last thing he needs is his own vomit at the scene. The water keeps moving her. Her arms don’t stay by her sides, her head hits the lane line. She’s close enough to his end of the pool that he can reach one lock of her hair to pull her closer. He rubs the hair in his fingers, because oh God, what has he done, such a beautiful girl—he ruins everything. He breaks things. He broke his own marriage. This is who he is, and he hates who he is, hates that he’s the same boy who once broke his grandmother’s crystal hummingbird. Look at him. Look at her. He wraps her hair around the lane line, getting his sleeve wet. He wraps it around five, six, seven times, to anchor her in place, to keep her from—what? He doesn’t even know.
He locks the pool door behind him; maybe it will buy him time, delay the moment her body is found. He takes the towel, to burn with the poster.
All that night, all the next day, his hands smell of chlorine.
（Was I satisfied with my story that morning? I told myself that despite the missing pieces, I ought to be. Perhaps the dull nausea I felt had something to do with last night’s dining hall lo mein. In any case: I was able to get out of bed. I was able to start my day.）
16
Before class, Britt asked if she could interview me later. I told her I’d talk, but that mine shouldn’t be the first interview she played on the podcast. “It might seem sloppy,” I said, “using your teacher as your first source.”
I said it partly out of an instinct to disavow responsibility. If the podcast somehow got out into the world, I didn’t want it to look like I was steering the ship. I wasn’t someone who’d decided that despite being utterly peripheral to this story twenty-three years ago, I was the one to tell it now. （Everyone shut up and listen to me, a girl who wasn’t even friends with those people!）
I warned Britt that I didn’t have a lot to say, that all I could do was describe Thalia as a person. And that I might not even be free that night; I was trying to meet up with a friend from Boston. But by class break, I hadn’t heard from Yahav. I texted him—because if I didn’t, I’d wait around like an idiot. Sthg came up for tonight, but lemme know if you have time in next few days!
I don’t need you to care about Yahav. It would be odd if you did. But he’s part of the story, and he was a big part of my mental state those two weeks. Lest I sound clueless and desperate: This was someone I’d been seeing for two years, someone who would, when things were working, text me just to say good morning. When we got together he, too, was separated and starting the divorce process. We were already friends—both teaching at UCLA, both enjoying rapid-fire conversation and politics and tapas bars. I don’t believe in soul mates, and that’s made life easier; we were simply good together.
I’d met him at a potluck thrown by a psychology professor friend, in a house full of spider plants—a remarkably unsexy party if only because the place smelled of cat litter. Yahav had piled his plate with so much food that I found myself scoping his physique to see if he was all muscle or just an ectomorph. The answer turned out to be both, I confirmed two years later when we finally slept together, when I ran my hand down his ribs and his long, ropy quadriceps. But in the moment, I apologized for staring at his plate, the mountains of orzo and chicken and veggie lasagna. I said, “You have literally everything, so tell me what ends up being best.” He took the request seriously, and kept reporting back throughout the night, advising that the brownies on the far end of the table were the superior ones. “The key is salt,” he sotto-voced into my hair. “The others lack sufficient salt.”