Which is all to say: Documenting the dicks of Granby felt more like revenge than predation.
I tried to imagine Jerome whipping it out in front of Jasmine Wilde. But no, Jerome was not Dorian. I tried to imagine Jerome pulling her onto his lap at an after-party. I tried to imagine him saying, “You should come by my studio tonight; I’ll give you some pointers.” Or “You know I can make or break people in this world.”
Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it.
All of this went through my head in the time it took Lola to find a photo of Mike on their laptop—his official shot from the UConn website—and show the class.
Britt was bouncing in her corner seat. “Can I interview him? Lola, can I interview him?”
Lola shrugged.
I said, “He knew Thalia pretty well. He’d know Omar, too. He was an athlete.”
Mike would have more to say than I had: Another ski star, he was one of Robbie Serenho’s best friends. He’d been both in the show and at the mattresses. He’d likely spoken to the police at much greater length than me. Plus, if he talked to Britt he’d see how obsessed she was, and, if news of the podcast got out to my classmates, he could maybe vouch for the fact that I hadn’t put her up to this.
Lola said to Britt, “I mean, I can give you his email.”
We caught up on everyone’s projects and talked editing, since the first of their first episodes would be due the next morning.
Alder had a convoluted idea about convincing listeners his podcast consisted of rediscovered tapes from 1938, tricking them the way War of the Worlds had tricked people. Alyssa, the one covering Arsareth Gage Granby, kept falling asleep. I couldn’t blame her: She sat in front of the radiator, framed by a window that bathed her in morning sun. I was jealous.
Britt had tried reaching out to Omar himself, through his lawyer, but hadn’t heard back. She’d decided to structure the podcast around unanswered questions. How exactly did that emergency pool exit work, in 1995, and who else might have had access to the building? What influence did the school have over the State Police? What were the circumstances of Omar’s confession? Was Thalia sleeping with her music teacher? Okay, no, not that last one. Not yet.
25
That afternoon, I had the film kids think about flashback. I showed them, to start, the wavy-screen memory intros from the Wayne’s World sketches of my own adolescence. Then I showed cheesy jump cuts from Lost. Also before their time, as ancient to them as the clips of Rashomon I showed next.
We talked about the difference between a character remembering, and the camera as impartial eye on the actual past.
Jimmy Stewart was dreaming, falling, his head floating in fields of vertiginous color.
Fellini’s traffic jam gave way to flight.
Their assignment that night was to watch Memento, to come in with notes and thoughts.
“You’re going to watch it on your phones, aren’t you,” I said as they stood to leave.
They shrugged. My bright-bulb kid said, “When you hold it close to your face, it’s as good as a theater.”
26
I was scared to check my phone, didn’t want more bad news about Jerome coming through the screen. But I looked, and it was worth it: Yahav wrote that he could come up Saturday—the day after tomorrow. I’d been thinking I wouldn’t see him, steeling myself with a lifetime’s accrual of getting-over-men skills. But yes, he could drive up Saturday, and “maybe walk around” and had “three hours at most.”
I could sense my proximity panicking him. Since August, I’d been just my electronic self, nudes in his phone, words and pixels. And now here I was, shaking him from his moorings. But I found myself uncharacteristically helpless to leave him alone. It had something to do with Yahav being the only man with whom I’d ever first been friends and then lovers—so I was stuck to him on two levels, which hadn’t even happened between me and Jerome. Jerome and I met when he shot me sexy-eyes at a friend’s gallery opening. Our first conversation was loaded with innuendo, him teasing me for eating the olive out of my martini before it had time to soak up the vodka. I wonder now how I’d have felt about that encounter had I been a young artist, had I already known Jerome’s work and worried about impressing him. Wasn’t my notion of him the purer one, though? I’d seen him for what he was: a wildly confident, wildly insecure flirt.
But with Yahav: It was like we’d been scored open and then stuck together, and his absence was a raw wound.
The need I felt would have been fascinating, were it not so painful.
I wrote back: I will take you on a tour of my adolescence. Beware.
27
Following his failed appeal in ’99, Omar’s family had launched the Free Omar website. I’d seen it briefly years ago, after Dateline discussed it; when I pulled it up in my darkening guest room before dinner, I found it relatively unchanged. It seemed that after that initial flood of publicity, online interest had drifted from activism into true crime gossip. The Spider-Man actress left to chase new causes, and the Dane Rubras of the world stepped in.
The home page led with childhood photos of Omar: ears too big for his head, toes buried in sand, smile a yard wide. In Web 1.0 neon purple on a black background, his family stated their case: Omar was coerced into a false confession. The evidence against him was questionable. Other suspects weren’t investigated.
There was a link for donations, an email address for tips.
There was a page labeled “A Prayer for Thalia.” It read: We pray for the soul and family of Thalia Keith, beloved daughter and treasured child of God. She left earth too soon. We pray for her spirit to guide us to truth, and to justice for herself and Omar. There was that same photo of her, the one cropped from the tennis team shot.
Another page gave the details of the case. I hadn’t gotten this far last time, but I had an hour till Fran would pick me up—we had plans to eat out, while Anne stayed home with the boys—and I’d rather read the website than the seven texts Lance had sent since he’d written me back that morning asking if we should block all the Jasmine supporters tagging the podcast.
I started clicking, skimming. Here were transcripts of the initial trial, made in preparation for the failed appeal. Here was Omar’s recanted confession, with footnotes pointing out inconsistencies.
After a short list of evidence entered by the defense in court—you could click through to see Omar’s office phone records, for instance—came a much longer list of documents and items entered by the prosecution, plus ones handed over during discovery. This included all the photos from the mattress party—presumably proof that nineteen of Thalia’s closest friends were accounted for all night and didn’t need looking into. What horrible photos. Red-eyed students washed out by flash. The kind of shots that, these days, you’d instantly erase from your phone. But here these kids remained, forever drinking in the woods, forever overexposed. I couldn’t imagine what good the shots did Omar’s case, why his family would put them up online, but then this archive seemed comprehensive.
I recognized almost all the kids.
Robbie Serenho. He’s in many of the night’s photos, in his gold Granby Ski sweatshirt, jeans, Red Sox cap.