The last three shots were from the next Tuesday: Jimmy’s dorm room floor—laundry and textbooks and pilfered dining hall dishes—as he quickly finished off the roll.
I’d missed a text from Fran: Where are you?? I’m outside. Another: Are you sleeping with that guy? Get your ass down here. I leapt up to brush my hair. It was a quarter past. I had lost myself.
#3: ROBBIE SERENHO
He has split himself in two.
There’s a Robbie Serenho who goes to the mattress party, who’s captured on film, seen by friends, who checks in only twelve minutes late, who shows up at breakfast the next morning and jokes around and finds out that afternoon with the rest of us that Thalia’s dead. This is the Robbie who loves Thalia, the Robbie who’ll be a decent father and teach his kids to ski.
But there’s a second Robbie, the entitled jock, the one who’s gotten everything the easy way, the one who can’t control his anger or his fists, the one whose hard edges come out when he drinks. This is the Robbie who meets Thalia outside the theater.
The first Robbie takes off with his friends while the second Robbie needs to ask Thalia about all the time she’s been spending with you. He noticed something tonight, when he snuck backstage before the show. He saw you leaning too close to Thalia, your hand on her elbow. He noticed the way she looked at you, tilting her face down, her eyes up. He lingered backstage, tried to get her attention during her scene, which made her turn her head to the wings and mouth What? He goes to sit in the audience then and seethe. Dorian leans over to tell him one of his Thalia jokes. “Your girlfriend’s not a slut,” he says. “She’s just a volunteer prostitute.”
Robbie’s backstage again at curtain call, beckoning her into the wings.
He says, “Let’s go for a walk.”
He interrogates her, won’t stop asking about you. He’s drunk. There were Poland Spring bottles full of cheap vodka floating around the audience, and Robbie, for all he drinks, can’t hold his liquor. While the other Robbie sips his first beer at the mattresses, flashing the camera a peace sign, this Robbie is wasted.
They end up behind the gym, and Thalia tells him she has to leave because she needs the bathroom. But there’s a bathroom in the gym, he tells her. He has a master key in his pocket, because he always does—and this back door accepts it, doesn’t need the special pool door key. The exit alarm doesn’t sound. （Things always work out for Robbie.） They go through the pool, quietly, quietly, and down the hall—not past Omar’s office, where the door is open and the light is on, but just into the girls’ locker room, where Robbie won’t stop asking questions even while she pees.
She takes so long that he steps into a shower stall with his clothes on, turns on the water. He must have fallen asleep for a second, leaning against the wall, because she’s in here now with him, slapping his cheek, telling him to wake up.
If they’re in the shower they might as well have sex, and he tries to take her wet clothes off.
She gets mad and yells, pushes him away. She’s making too much noise. He asks why she won’t have sex, asks if it’s because she already had sex with someone today, asks if that person was you.
She tells him he’s an idiot and tries to leave the shower stall.
This Robbie grabs Thalia’s neck, shakes her, just wants to shake sense into her, needs to shake her against something hard, against this wet and slippery wall, and he feels like an animal, feels like when he’s flying down a hill in snow, when the fire flows into his muscles, when his body is a machine. He doesn’t tell his body what to do because it knows, it follows the hill, it follows gravity, and that’s what he’s doing now, following gravity, until Thalia starts seizing, her eyes rolling back. She slides to the bottom of the stall, the water washing the blood on the wall from red to pink to nothing.
He sobers up, or at least the things in front of him come clear: He needs to fix this. Not fix her, because it’s too late, she’s twitching like she’s electrocuted—but fix all of this, this bad movie, this problem, this thing that’s befallen him.
He drags her small, wet body out of the locker room and back to the pool, gets her clothes off, gets her into a swimsuit he finds. He has all the time in the world, because meanwhile the other Robbie, the one in the woods, is singing along with the boom box, a falsetto rendition of “Come to My Window.” That Robbie is hamming it up, spinning with his arms out, as this Robbie slides Thalia into the pool, knowing, to the extent he knows anything right now, that she’s still alive, that what he did in the shower might have been an accident but this is intentional, this is murder, is murder, is murder. He has time to find the bleach, to use it on the pool deck and in the hall—Omar is gone by now, his office light off—and in the locker room. He has time to vomit in the sink, to wash it down the drain, to wash his hands and face.
There are extra clothes in Thalia’s backpack—a green sweater, jeans, some underwear—and he folds these neatly on the bench as if this were what she’d worn. He’ll take the wet, bloodstained clothes and find a way to burn them.
He slips back out through the emergency exit. In the morning, it occurs to him that he should have left the key with Thalia, given her a plausible way to have entered the pool alone.
But then, this version of Robbie is not the one who’ll wake up in the morning, because this Robbie vanishes. He becomes molecular, floats away in the damp March air.
The real Robbie is hurrying back to his dorm now with his friends, crossing North Bridge, happy and only a little drunk and only a little late for checkin.
He’ll get married and have kids and live in Connecticut, and he’ll never know what he’s done.
28
The Granby Supper Club was exactly as I remembered it, except that in adulthood the excellent wine list was an option, which immensely helped the mediocre food. There’s a particular charm to the glass of breadsticks on the table, the man who comes around with the basket of rolls and little tongs. We don’t get many bread basket men in LA.
When the carb man left—I managed to pass, to Fran’s eye-rolling—I said, “So you called Mr. Bloch a creeper.”
“Why, what.”
“You remember how we used to think Thalia was involved with him?”
Fran laughed, said, “Wait, do not let Britt say that on the podcast. Did I tell you she asked me for an interview? We’re doing it Monday.”
“But were they sleeping together, you think?”
“No. No! And don’t let her say that. Good God. I meant he was too close to the students. I didn’t mean he was fucking them.”
“But you were right,” I said. “Teenagers have a sixth sense for that stuff. I just keep thinking, if we thought it was happening, it was happening—or something was. Maybe not actual sex, but impropriety.” I told her about Bethesda Fountain, but it didn’t sound convincing.
“I mean,” she said, “teenagers also believe wild rumors. Remember how we thought Marco Washington was Denzel’s cousin?”
I was frustrated at her backtracking. It wasn’t fair for her to plant the seed in my mind, disrupt my sleep all week, then disavow it.