Britt laughed. “Oh my God. I don’t understand why there’s a specific popcorn button on the microwave, when pressing it is, like, nuclear meltdown.”
“Exactly! Okay, so—as you know, a bunch of kids were drinking in the woods Friday night at the mattresses off the Nordic trail. It was warmish for March, so they were taking advantage. I mean, it was probably thirty-three degrees, but you know that first day when the air doesn’t hurt your face?”
Britt said, “I have so many notes on this. It was nineteen students total.”
“I’m pretty sure it was all kids who’d been at the musical,” I said, “or in it. Not Thalia, but most of her friends, and her boyfriend, so it was a little odd she wasn’t there. My point is, a lot of kids were hungover Saturday. Not me—I mean, I wasn’t virtuous, but—that wasn’t my friend group. So between the smoke alarm and the drinking, people were tired, sleeping in. And Thalia had a single, so no one missed her for a while.”
What had happened was that Jenny Osaka, our senior class president, had been invited to the mattress party—she played flute in the pit orchestra—but stayed back for prefect duty in the dorm where Thalia and I both lived. When the Singer-Baird contingent of the mattress crew was late for checkin （11:00 p.m., the weekend curfew）， Jenny stalled, did room checks slower than usual. Jenny didn’t drink, would never break curfew, but wasn’t about to rat them out. She knew where they were, she explained later, so she wasn’t worried. Then at five after, a handful of girls poured through Beth Docherty’s ground floor window and scurried to their rooms. Jenny clocked that they were back, quickly checked off the rest of the names, and handed the sheet in to Miss Vogel. Jenny assumed Thalia was among them; those were her friends, so where else would she be? The fire alarm business was after all that. Miss Vogel followed protocol then and went through the dorm to make sure every room was empty—but because we were all standing together in the cold, what looked like forty of us, and no one was left inside, she didn’t take attendance, didn’t bother checking us back into our rooms at 12:30 as she was supposed to.
Jenny had been racked with guilt—maybe still was. She went on to ski in the actual Olympics, the first of our classmates to do something huge. But how do you move on from a mistake like that? After Thalia’s body was discovered, Jenny was the one to go to Miss Vogel and tell her about the mattress party. Not that the others wouldn’t have, soon enough; after all, it was the alibi for everyone there. Jenny resigned as class president, resigned as prefect. I’m sure Miss Vogel faced quieter, more serious repercussions.
I wasn’t about to tell Britt all this. To name poor Jenny Osaka, of all people.
Britt said, “Were you in the same dorm? Singer-Baird?”
“Yep, all four years.”
“Oh my God!” Britt sounded like the cheerleader she might have been in some past era of Granby. “I lived there my first two! I haven’t been able to figure out what room she was in.”
I was glad Thalia’s room wasn’t some haunted shrine. “I don’t remember the number,” I said, “but it’s the single at the left end of the upstairs hall, the one with the window seat.”
Britt shuddered, pleased. “I know who has that room! Should I tell her?”
“Probably not.”
Britt looked a little dreamy, like she was planning a reason to stop by this girl’s room, to check the inside of her closet for Thalia’s initials. “But upstairs means she couldn’t have left her room in the middle of the night.”
“Not unless she went out through a ground floor room. But even so, the latest time of death they gave was midnight,” I said. “And no one ever saw her back in the dorm, or outside after the fire alarm.”
“But no one noticed she was missing till they found her?”
“Right. And that was Saturday afternoon.” I was pleased that I had something firsthand to relate now. “I rowed crew, and we had our preseason swim test, so a few of us were walking together toward the gym. It would have been around four o’clock. Suddenly this police car and ambulance come barreling down the access road. They must’ve been the first ones.”
“Did you see anything?” Britt affected calm professionalism, but her eyes glowed.
I shook my head, then remembered to say “no” aloud for the podcast. I was usually holding a script for these things. “Eventually there was a crowd outside. The crew girls, some volleyball players, teachers. At some point, we heard it was a drowning. There was a fire engine, too, by that point. I guess they sent the whole emergency squad.”
“When did you know it was Thalia?”
I tried to remember. Maybe an hour later, I told her, a stretcher emerged from the pool’s side door, the figure on top covered with a white sheet. It was dark by then, everything glowing in the gym floodlights. But we had no idea who it was yet, and somehow I didn’t think it was a Granby student. It must have been one of those white-haired ladies from the local swim club, suffering a heart attack mid-lap. Or it was a janitor, or maybe that creepy townie who liked to watch basketball practice. Even when whispers started in the crowd that it was a student—it was Hani Kayyali, it was Michelle McFadden, it was Ronan Murphy—that seemed too dramatic to be true.
I said, “They sent us away, and we still didn’t know. By the time I got back to the dorm they’d already put up signs that we had mandatory dorm meetings before dinner and Camelot was canceled. We met in the common room and there were already girls crying, ones who’d figured it out.” Fran had come out of the Hoffnungs’ apartment, which she didn’t do for most dorm meetings. I remember her sitting with me on the coffee table. Her parents came out, too.
I knew who it was before the teachers spoke; word had spread through the room, and, of course, Thalia was the only one missing.
“Who announced it?” Britt asked.
“Miss Vogel. She was young. I don’t think she stayed much longer. She taught physics and coached girls’ skiing.” It occurred to me that Angela Vogel must, as dorm head, have been the one to clear out Thalia’s room, after the police went through it. It would have fallen to Dr. Calahan, as headmistress, to call the Keiths. I couldn’t imagine breaking that news to anyone, ever. It wasn’t like being a surgeon, someone who’d trained for this moment and expected it. And then, my God, two other kids the same year. It was a miracle Dr. Calahan had stuck around another decade, hadn’t run off for some cushy fundraising job at a museum.
I said, “They ordered pizza for anyone who didn’t want to go to the dining hall.” Fran and I absconded to my room with our slices, sat cross-legged on my bed. I remember Fran saying she knew it wasn’t the point, it wasn’t the main thing, but it sucked that we’d only had two of four performances and now the show was over. Fran had been playing Mordred, putting on a husky tenor and a swagger. I said, “Jesus, Fran, she was my roommate.” Fran said, “I thought you hated her.” If this hadn’t been my room, I’d have stormed out. Instead I just stared at her, dead in the eye, until she looked mortified and hugged me and I started sobbing on her shoulder.