They had to know I wasn’t even in that crowd. But did they? Were they actually tuned in to the fact that my too-old J.Crew skirt meant I wasn’t really friends with Thalia?
I could see how dots would get connected, how the detectives would write the word DRUGS on their yellow pad, circle it, how they’d start asking where Granby kids got drugs, how they’d form a theory that looped in Omar—the same guy Thalia’s friends were saying had followed her around, the same guy who’d been in the building. I could see how this theory would get handed to prosecutors as gospel. Thalia was on drugs; Omar sold the drugs. Thalia had romantic trouble with an older man; Omar was an older man. Thalia was sleeping with Omar, an older man, in exchange for drugs.
But other people must have said similar things. Because if her friends had insisted that she never touched a joint, the police would have listened, wouldn’t they?
“It’s possible,” I said, and I hated how my voice sounded. Like a trapped animal.
“Anyway,” Britt said, “I don’t believe the toxicology report. It sounds like she was on something. Maybe she thought she could fly.”
#2: THALIA
The products of that night’s insomnia:
Half-dreams about you and Thalia, you looking into the dumpster, you keeping Thalia hidden in your house all these years. You morphing into the guy who assaulted me in college. Me trying to put my contacts in, but they were the size of dinner plates, stiff, wouldn’t fit in my eyes.
An itching on my thighs that worsened the harder I scratched, an itch that arranged itself in long, hot welts.
Another story, another film reel I made myself watch all the way:
Thalia takes off alone.
She wants to get away from Rachel and Beth, who pretend to be her friends but aren’t, and from Robbie, who’s bound to be drunk and insufferable in the woods. She wants to get away from you, wants to make sure you don’t find an excuse to keep her back as everyone leaves, that you don’t look at her with puppy eyes and tell her she’s the one with all the power, she’s the one who has your heart in her fist. So she changes quickly, slips out the back.
Earlier, she took a few tokes off Max Krammen’s joint, a soggy thing he kept in the pocket of his Merlin robes. And late in the second act she sipped from Beth’s flask—but she isn’t wasted, just lighter, full with her own ideas.
She floats to the gym and finds the front door unlocked. She finds the pool door unlocked, too, and locks it behind her because she can change right here on the deck into the spare suit she’s found, one Omar spotted the last time he passed through, scooped up wet from the floor—and what, sneezed into? wiped across his sweating forehead? would that be enough?—and dropped on the bench with his DNA in the knit.
She knows if she gets in slowly it’ll be too cold; she’ll chicken out. So she climbs to the observation deck, because if she can fly in—and she’s seen people do it, knows it can be done—she’ll be irrevocably in the water.
She climbs over the two bars of the rail, painted Granby green, holds the top bar behind her, stands with only her heels on the edge. It’s a matter of force; the only danger is not jumping hard.
She used to have conviction. As a ten-year-old, grass-stained and sunburnt, swinging from branches; as a twelve-year-old athlete, diving racquet-first for the ball. But something has happened to her lately, even on the tennis court, a failure of the body to go full bore, to surrender to her will. It’s an instinct, perhaps, for self-preservation, but one that always betrays her.
And how does a seventeen-year-old girl lose that control? Did it crack the moment the bingo chart went up in the bathroom? If a thirty-three-year-old music teacher takes possession of a teenager’s body, does he take agency from her muscles as well? Does he fray the line between body and mind? Perhaps not entirely. But enough to make an inch, three inches, five inches of difference?
She springs, but she hesitates slightly, doesn’t push off with the legs of a ten-year-old but with legs that have been told what they are until she believes it.
She knows, in the way you always know, in any bad fall, that the earth is rising for you, and she manages to twist. Not to right herself, but to turn like a barbershop pole so it’s the back of her head that hits the pool rim. And not even the outer rim, but the inner one, the one under a few centimeters of water. Her head leaves no dent; her blood billows through the water in faint pink clouds.
She struggles a minute, drifting in and out of consciousness. She can’t pull herself out but she follows the lane line to the shallow end, draping herself on the green and gold rings, nestling them under her chin, slipping under, coming up, slipping under, coming up on the far side, but now something has her hair, something’s pulling her head back and down, and the easiest thing, the only thing, is to sleep.
20
After our interview, Britt had sent me a link to a YouTube video from a man named Dane Rubra. He had a whole channel, in fact, that seemed to be ninety percent about Thalia. At two a.m., suddenly wide awake, I decided I could enter this particular rabbit warren for exactly one hour, after which I’d sleep.
Dane Rubra looked, and I’m putting this gently, like he hadn’t seen the sun or eaten a vegetable or gotten laid in a decade. A pastier Norman Bates with stringier hair and doughier cheeks. According to his first video, which I had to scroll to find, he was “between jobs” when he first saw the Dateline special, and he had an epiphany, felt he could contribute.
When he said Thalia’s name, oozed over the vowels, I felt the skin on my neck tighten. He was about my age, and I imagined he fancied that if only he and Thalia had crossed paths, he could have saved her, bedded her, won her love.
He showed a yearbook photo of Puja Sharma and said, “This one wasn’t as pretty as her friend, and you have to think, that could have been a source of jealousy. Miss Sharma is a real possibility here. Someone we can never question, unfortunately.” I nearly slammed my laptop shut at that one, at the gall, the wrongheadedness, the slime. Puja might have been a hanger-on—might have used Thalia’s kindness as entry into the crowd that spent Feb Week at Mike Stiles’s ski house, that went to the Vineyard on long weekends—but she was devastated by Thalia’s death. Two weeks afterward, Puja took off on foot in the middle of the night, walking the roadsides until police picked her up two towns over, muddy and disoriented. She was sent home to London, and we never saw her again. Her overdose two years later at Sarah Lawrence—I always wondered if it was related.
Every time this guy said Robbie Serenho’s name, jealousy crossed his face like a moth. He believed Robbie knew something, thought Robbie was “an entitled boarding school prick” with a “suspiciously airtight alibi.”
In one video, he manages to get Robbie on the phone. Calling his office, he pretends to be a Granby alumni liaison looking for updated information. He gets Robbie to give his home address, which he’s mercifully bleeped out of the video. Then he asks Robbie who else from the class of ’95 he’s in touch with. “We have so many missing addresses,” he says. “Would you still be in communication with someone named Angela Parker?” Robbie says no. “How about”—and here Dane pretends to struggle with the pronunciation—“Thalia Keith?”