Sophomore year was when Carlotta French showed up, a refugee from an all-girls’ school in Virginia, and all but announced that Fran and I were her new best friends, positions we happily accepted because Carlotta was cooler than either of us. Carlotta wore ankle bracelets and no bra. When she played guitar on a blanket under trees, boys who theoretically were interested only in preppy girls out of shampoo commercials would move their Frisbee games closer, end up lying on their stomachs to talk to her. She found them ridiculous. She sang “Rhiannon” for Follies, an ethereal version that made me want to be her. Her hair was wild, the color of sand. She was reed-thin, but I didn’t hate her for it. She seemed to have sprung from the earth that way, rather than crafting herself from the pages of a magazine.
That winter, Fran pulled out the previous year’s Dragon Tales and showed Carlotta, in the freshman section, how I used to dress, and Carlotta let out her most frog-like laugh. “Were you kidnapped into a cult? It’s like—if JCPenney was a cult!” And I was able to laugh with her, grateful she saw the girl in the picture as the fake me, the one who’d gotten something terribly wrong.
But most people that fall greeted my transformation with concern.
Karen King saw me on move-in day and said, “Oh God, does this mean you’re quitting crew?”
Poor Ms. Shields tried to suss out if I was okay. Before practice one morning, as we waited outside the gym for the Dragon Wagon, she started asking about my summer but within two minutes was listing resources: people I could talk to, appointments I could make. I stammered something nonsensical, didn’t understand till later that I was radiating damage. Of course, that’s exactly what it was—I was damaged, and must have subconsciously wanted to dress the part. But since the damage was only newly visible to everyone else, they assumed it was fresh. The whisper was I’d discovered drugs that summer, or witchcraft. If I’d gone to any public high school in 1990s America, I’d have blended in, at least with a certain crowd. But at Granby, land of Ralph Lauren and duck boots, I was seen for the wreck I actually was. It was only the fact they got the details so wrong—heroin! occult! wrist-cutting!—that allowed me to shrug off the gossip.
After Kurt Cobain died junior year, Clover Music sold copies of his suicide note. It was a Xerox of a Xerox, Kurt’s handwriting blurring at the page edges. The pages were double-sided, and I bought two copies so I could tape the whole thing above my bed, each page facing out.
I was in the dorm hall, returning from the bathroom, when I overheard Rachel reading the note aloud to Beth and Thalia in a stoner voice.
Thalia said, “I think it’s sweet. He was her hero.”
Beth said, “You say that now, but wait till you find her hanging from the ceiling.”
Shrieks of laughter till I opened the door.
In any case: To Thalia’s friends, I was the girl to whom something had happened over freshman summer—or, at best, a girl playacting various roles and never getting it right. To Thalia, though, I was myself, unchanged. A tidy and considerate roommate who was deeply uncool but at least wouldn’t steal her bras.
And I was someone who knew all about you.
RC Cola, I told her, was your favorite soda. I said it because you’d found that six-pack in the greenroom fridge and announced that you hated them. You’d been trying to offload them ever since, offering me one every day until I finally started accepting them just so I could hide them, unopened, around your office. If Thalia gave you an RC Cola, you’d know it was really from me.
19
When Yahav hadn’t answered by Wednesday night, I told myself it was a relief that Britt wanted to meet. It would distract me from thinking about him, and from thinking about you, grasping for tiny moments I’d missed.
I’d given Britt a list of other people to talk to （Fran, and various teachers still around）， so I wouldn’t be the only other voice on her show.
We met at seven in an empty study room in Dwyer Hall, a sleek, glassy Upper Campus dorm that hadn’t existed in the ’90s. I sat on a plush couch under a whiteboard, and Britt set her phone on a table in front of me, opened to the recording app I’d had the kids download.
Britt wore a creamy fisherman’s sweater and skinny jeans and what looked like the same Frye boots Fran had in 1994. She said, “I’d love to start with the timeline.”
I went through the basics. Thalia and I were roommates from 1993 to 1994. She died in March of ’95. Omar was arrested that spring, but the details of the case didn’t come out till summer, when we were all spread back out across the country, packing for college. The internet was nascent; I didn’t have my first email account till that September. I told Britt about the snail mail news clippings, feeling ancient. Omar’s trial was ’97, his appeal ’99. After the appeal failed, a lot of nothing. The occasional mention on true crime shows, because, you know, dead white girl at a boarding school. More than that: pretty, rich, dead white girl. If only she’d also been blond. Each story a recap: Remember this gruesome case? The details hazier with each retelling, the verdict more obvious. They caught the guy who did it, thank God. Look at this photo of him after years and years in prison, bulked up and dead in the eyes. Doesn’t he look like a murderer? Then, in 2005, the Dateline special, the occasion for which was the tenth anniversary of Thalia’s death and a growing Free Omar movement online.
Dateline gave some time to his defenders—particularly the actress I remembered for her smallish role in Spider-Man, who’d briefly made it her pet cause—but mostly focused on the pile of evidence: The DNA, his pool access. His confession, even if retracted. That drawing in the directory. Even if he hadn’t been the “older guy” Thalia mentioned to her friends: Three skiers claimed they’d heard Omar joke about a fantasy of tying Thalia to the weight bench.
“Omar was fun,” I told Britt. “He’d blast music in the weight room and then he’d run around holding his fist out like a microphone to get you to solo.” This wasn’t relevant to the timeline, but it felt important. “He didn’t have the same boundaries a teacher would have. I guess when you’re icing people’s groins things get a little personal.”
Britt nodded as I talked. Then she said, “I was actually wondering about the timeline of that night.”
“Oh.” I was relieved, because I hadn’t known what I’d say next. I wasn’t about to mention you—certainly not on the record—but my mental deck was getting shuffled in uncomfortable ways. Why, for instance, had I thought so much about Thalia over the years, but so little about Omar? I wanted to defend myself from the very question.
I said, “Okay. That Friday. I was stage managing, we ended the show, I went back to my dorm, and I learned about everything the next evening. Which was Saturday.”
“Right. But what do you remember? About Saturday?”
One wall of the room we sat in was glass, and girls passed occasionally, still in sports gear or already wrapped in towels to grab the nighttime shower spots. They gazed in with mild curiosity.
I said, “I had a single, senior year, and I would’ve slept in. This isn’t a major part of the story, but the dorm smoke alarm had gone off Friday around midnight, just a microwave incident, so we were all standing outside till pretty late. Are kids still burning popcorn?”