But also: She was too thin. I registered this even through my envy at her thinness; it was too much. Her ribs were more evident than her breasts. Undressing in our room, we’d always been modest. She went behind the open door of her closet, and I usually changed in a bathroom stall. But I understood in that moment that the rumors about the eating disorder were well-founded. She hadn’t been this skinny during tennis season. Her winter jeans and sweaters had hidden the slow emergence of bone.
I understood that someone should talk to her about how her ribs were visible not only from the front but the back, how you could count her vertebrae. But that person couldn’t be me. A chubby girl couldn’t tell a skinny girl she was too thin.
I wouldn’t tell anyone else, I decided. I wouldn’t tell Fran or Geoff or Carlotta for gossip, nor （it almost went without thinking） would I tell anyone in authority. This would just be another thing I knew about someone, another piece of information to hoard.
Thalia opened the dryer to hurl her clothes in. She said, “Come on,” but she was already turning away, thank God, to look for something to cover herself with. She grabbed a pink towel, not hers, out of a laundry basket, and wrapped herself up. She kept digging and pulled out someone’s jeans and sweatshirt, handed them over her shoulder. I’d taken the opportunity of her turned back to undress as quickly as I could, and now I held the pilfered clothes in front of my breasts, in front of the stomach I thought looked like pocked bread dough. There were muscles under there from crew, but you’d never know it. It occurred to me at the same moment it must have occurred to Thalia that the clothes might not fit me. But before I had time to register this new embarrassment, she’d swept them back from me, whipped off the towel and handed it over. The towel, mercifully, wrapped all the way around. Thalia threw on the jeans and sweatshirt, added my pajamas to the dryer.
She couldn’t get the dryer door closed, and this is when we started laughing. Her dressed in baggy jeans she had to hold up with one hand, stepping back and kicking the contents with a bare foot, kneeing the door until it finally latched. We ran back down the hall shushing each other lest someone come out and see us in their clothes, their towel.
“You know what would be perfect,” I said when we’d reached the safety of our own room, “is if it turns out we stole Khristina’s stuff.” And we laughed harder. It was a wonderful thing, to make her laugh.
We both showered and hurried to get dressed for class, until Thalia looked at her watch and said, “Oh my God, Bodie, it’s only 6:50.”
I said, “Fanfuckingtastic,” and flopped down on my bare mattress.
“What are you doing?” Thalia shrieked, and I was back to my clueless, fumbling self, jumping up, brushing my clothes off, while Thalia stood as far from me in the room as she could. We were no longer in it together; she was clean and I was not.
32
My second hangover at Granby in five days: my head all cotton balls and hammers.
I filled a whole thermos with faculty lounge coffee, and grabbed a paper cup of it, too.
I stopped myself from checking Twitter by deleting it from my phone. How satisfying, to watch the little icon vanish along with any replies to my drunken thread.
I walked slowly to class, grateful for the winter air like a giant ice pack around my head.
The kids, too, were subdued at the end of a long week, and Britt in particular seemed down. Omar’s attorney had emailed back, saying Omar was not available to comment on his case.
Jamila said, “I could’ve told you he wouldn’t be up for talking to random kids from Granby.”
“Sorry,” Lola said, “but yeah, another white girl coming in to fuck up his life? I’m sure he’s like, no thank you.”
Britt sighed, put her head on the table. She said, “I’m not doing this without his voice. That would be so wrong.”
Alyssa bustled in late, with donuts from the Granby Bakery. We ate until the table was coated in cinnamon sugar, listening as they all played their first episodes for each other. Britt’s featured, in addition to my voice, an interview with Priscilla Mancio, one she’d need to trim.
A few minutes in, Britt asked what she remembered about Omar.
Priscilla said: Honestly, hardly a thing, before the arrest and trial. The athletic department, they’re not in faculty meetings.
Britt: What about Robbie Serenho?
Priscilla: Oh, the boyfriend. Well, yes, what they saw right away was he wasn’t involved. He was in the woods drinking. You’ve seen those photos.
Britt: Sure, but I just mean, what was he like?
Priscilla: [pause] A talented skier. He didn’t take French, so I didn’t know him well, but I’ll say this: Some students haven’t found their best selves yet, when they come to us. And Robbie was immature. Loud in the hallways, a little full of himself. I remember his parents, very sweet. The father was a Portuguese immigrant, and the—or no, maybe they were both just New England Portuguese. Vermont, working class. The father was a—maybe an electrician, you can correct me if I’m wrong. Robbie was a scholarship case. My first husband was Portuguese, so when I met the Serenhos at some Parents’ Weekend or other I struck up a conversation. You connect about one little thing and then that’s someone you know.
This threw me for a loop, and I barely listened as the other four students gave Britt editing suggestions. I’d always imagined Robbie to be from the part of Vermont with the A-frame ski houses my classmates fled to for long weekends.
Plenty of kids earned their popularity from assets other than class and wealth. Some were charismatic, or great athletes, or extremely attractive, or all three. There were plenty of reasons Robbie was a king of the school, someone with enough cultural capital for Thalia to date, no matter where he came from. Still, Robbie Serenho not being rich was a confounding development. The version of Fran that lived in my head said, See? Just because we thought something doesn’t make it true.
Alyssa went next with her Arsareth Gage Granby project, and I stretched my arms, tried to refocus.
As a student, I’d been angry that there was no statue of Arsareth, when she’d had more to do with the founding of the school than her husband, Samuel. And yet he, alone, cast in bronze, stood there collecting snow and pollen.
But as I’d only learned years after graduation, and as Alyssa explored in her project, Arsareth, who had grown up in Virginia, did nothing to free the man, woman, and child she’d been left in her uncle’s will, selling them into further slavery before she set out for the New Hampshire woods. Thank God we hadn’t built her any shrines.
The story Dr. Calahan told at every fall matriculation in the ’90s was that the governor granted a school charter in 1814 for the young men of the town still called Midpoint, to turn them into farmer-scholars. Arsareth Gage, a spinster schoolteacher of twenty-four, moved into a tiny cottage next to the schoolhouse and began teaching twelve boys of various ages. Dr. Calahan would ask us to imagine Arsareth leaving home for a landscape so unlike the one she knew. She’d ask us to imagine the dark of these woods in 1814, the brilliance of the stars.
The official story continued: By the time Samuel Granby came through six years later, retired young from law and seeking a place to make his mark, the school was flourishing. He met the young woman from Virginia who’d whipped up a notable school from scratch, and offered to fund a real Presbyterian college preparatory school, to build a library and a chapel and put her at the helm. While he was at it, he rebuilt the local Presbyterian church and fixed the road; thanks to his money, both school and town took his name. Somewhere along the way, he and Arsareth fell in love and married, and while he became headmaster at the quickly growing school, she maintained the redundant role of head teacher. They never had children, the boys—and, as of 1972, the girls—of Granby being their legacy.