And that was the thing I went to bed angry about, the thing I stewed over. Not what I’d seen in the park.
18
When did you first notice her? She’d have been in Choristers from the start of junior year, one of many sopranos. Then she joined Follies, one of four girls spinning in black dresses to “I’m Every Woman.” By mid-September, you’d picked her for parts in the opening sketch and given her a solo in the closing number.
By the time we roomed together, she’d definitely noticed you. She kept asking how long I’d been stage managing, what your kids were like when I’d babysat, if I knew what kind of bagel you liked, what kind of soda she should bring you if she stopped by the snack bar before rehearsal.
Aside from this grilling, our interactions that year were oddly formal. Right before bed, the only time we were consistently alone together outside the merciful silence of study hours, Thalia always hit me with a polite conversation starter. It might have come out condescending—might have been condescending—but at least she tried. “Does your family have any special Christmas traditions?” she might ask, or “Have you seen any good movies recently?” She rarely just said things, didn’t complain to me about homework or tell me about her day. It was as if her grandmother were watching, and she needed to prove she’d been well raised.
That spring, she asked my summer plans. I said, “Maybe I’ll work at Burger King,” and she clearly didn’t know if she was meant to laugh. I was kidding, but barely; I hoped to land the swing shift at Baskin-Robbins again.
She said, “Back in Idaho?”
I wondered if she’d been picturing Idaho this whole time, or was picturing Indiana but didn’t know its name. I said, “The thing about Burger King in Idaho is our fries are local. We harvest them ourselves.”
That was junior year, of course. Senior year, after Thalia died, Asad Mirza said, kindly and with interest, “Bodie, is it true you live on a potato farm?”
Thalia’s friends spoke to me, in contrast to her studied politeness, with barely concealed distaste. Beth once told me that I should try a bronzer, that it would slim down my face and make me look “less angry.” Even something like “Nice top” was a baited hook, a feigned act of generosity played for the rest of the audience as pure joke. Its success relied on the assumption that while everyone else would hear the ironic edge, I wouldn’t. The irony being: I was steeped in irony. I was the one whose entire attendance at Granby felt ironic. I was the one whose clothes and posters were ironic. Whereas they （I believed） sailed through life sincerely, with their layered haircuts and North Face and plaid miniskirts. So when I replied with “Oh my God, you too,” even though the girl in question was wearing her lacrosse uniform, I enjoyed the look of confusion, then the unsubtle roll of eyes Beth would share with Rachel.
Beth was the star of that pair, the singer, a blonde Christy Turlington, the one who’d made flirting an art form. Rachel’s mother was the daughter of a former Connecticut governor, and her father owned commercial real estate in Manhattan. This seemed to compensate for her lack of personality. Rachel followed Beth like a shadow, and they made each other more attractive by proximity.
（Is it strange that I knew what random classmates’ parents did? Remember: Every detail I overheard made the world more navigable.）
Beth Docherty was responsible for my greatest humiliation at Granby. That year, I’d started bleaching the dark hair on my upper lip, using a little pot of stinging cream and powder you mixed in with a stick. It just gave me yellow fuzz, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had no idea this was something most women dealt with; I assumed it was an ignominy only a few dejected girls knew.
I took care of it every few weeks, in the time after school when Thalia walked Robbie to the gym and waited with him for the ski van. I had locked the door and spackled the stuff on my face one afternoon, when someone knocked. I looked for my washcloth and realized I’d left it in the bathroom. I made the mistake of asking who was there; Beth called that Thalia needed her music folder. If I’d known where Thalia’s folder was, I would have handed it out the door, but I didn’t—and now I was looking for something to wipe my lip on, something that could get bleach on it, but all my clothes were black, my sheets dark blue.
Beth wiggled the knob, said, “Would you just please let me in?”
I grabbed a white T-shirt from Thalia’s laundry and wiped my face, opened the door. I must have been flushed, out of breath. Beth looked me up and down and said, “Why was the door locked?”
The next day, Dorian Culler came up to me at breakfast. He said, “I heard you were letting your fingers do the walking.”
I didn’t understand until Puja Sharma, who had no filter, found me in the Singer-Baird laundry room and said, “Ohhh, you know, I don’t think Thalia hates you, everyone is just worried about her.” I asked what she meant, and she said, “They’re saying, like, oh, she has to live with a masturbator.”
I wonder if you can understand, as a man, the stigma around this at the time. It was one thing to be called a slut; that was half-good, half-bad. This was entirely bad.
Mike Stiles stopped me in the hall that week. He said, sincerely, “I’m sorry they’re being shits to you.” It was a lovely gesture, but the fact that he knew made it worse. Along with everyone else, I had a crush on Mike Stiles, our eventual King Arthur; I was infatuated in the purest way. Pure because I never really talked to him, and because he seemed genuinely nice. He had a sloped, ridged brow, a broad chin, Elvis-thick hair. （“He’s like a hot Neanderthal,” Fran had said once, although I’d thought he looked old-fashioned in other ways—like a Union soldier, maybe.）
When I signed Thalia’s yearbook that May, I opened to the back and saw that Jorge Cardenas had ended his message with Enjoy your summer free from the Masturbator! On the previous page, Beth had made a list of inside jokes （Bunny??? and That’s not ping pong and Mr. WHATNOW and The Masterbator）。 Thalia was packing, her back to me, and I flipped to the Little Shop of Horrors page and signed my name—only my name—under the cast and crew photo that included us both.
But Thalia never mentioned it, was never unkind for a moment. She was mature—which I’m sure made her more appealing to you. If you’d been interested in someone truly mature, you wouldn’t have spent time with a teenager, but her maturity was probably a convenient excuse. Maybe you told yourself she was an old soul. I’m sure you told yourself she knew what she was doing. I bet you felt, when she brought you bagels and soda, that she was mothering you.
It was to my advantage that Thalia and I had no past together. These other girls had seen me come in freshman year trying earnestly, wearing knockoff Laura Ashley hand-me-downs from the Robesons’ daughter, my bangs teased and sprayed—still the fashion in Indiana but definitely not at Granby. They saw me join yearbook in a fit of school spirit （where I didn’t last long but took Geoff Richler’s friendship as a souvenir）。 They saw me try to befriend people like them, before I found my way to Fran.
From the perspective of girls like Rachel and Beth, having lost track of me around November of freshman year, my transformation over the next summer must have seemed abrupt. I cut my hair chin-length, chopped my bangs Bettie Page–style. I left my hand-me-downs in Indiana and, when I got back to campus a week early to stay with the Hoffnungs, went thrifting with Fran in Hanover, spending my Baskin-Robbins wages on dark, oversized clothes, fishnets I carefully ripped, a fake army jacket. We went through her sisters’ closets for things they hadn’t been back to claim. I cultivated a look I’d now call goth grunge, designed to hide my weight: all black, a flannel shirt either tied around my waist or flung on open like a coat. At Clover Music in Kern, I bought chokers made of hemp and Fimo, black-light nail polish. Fran gave me her old Doc Martens, duct-taped at the toes and a size too big. I plucked my eyebrows into sharp little checkmarks. Everyone was doing this, but mine were extreme. I learned to apply thick black eyeliner. I’d spent the summer shedding what I’d seen as pathetic artifice, ready to return as my true self.