That week in 1994, Fran and I were thrilled to have the dorm VCR essentially to ourselves. We watched The Shining and Wait Until Dark and part of the box set of Twin Peaks—anything to help us channel the vibe of the nearly empty campus. I’d just started to appreciate film, and the Hoffnungs’ movie collection was a treasure trove.
One night, we broke the horror-and-suspense streak to watch the Disney Robin Hood, and decided, halfway through, to paint our nails. I went back to my room for polish and when I opened the door, Thalia was on her bed, arm flung over her eyes, Granby duffel on the floor spilling clothes.
She sat up quickly and said, “That’s why the door was unlocked. I forgot you were here.”
Her eyes were ringed with pink; her nose was red.
I said, “Are you sick?” It was only Thursday, an illogical time to return. School didn’t start till Tuesday.
She stood, started tossing clothes from her bag into her dresser. “Let’s just say that Robbie Serenho is a little bitch.” She and Robbie had been dating since November—happily, I thought. She pointed at me and squinted. “Don’t ever date Robbie Serenho. He’s an angry little sexist bitch.” She chucked Hamlet from the bag to her desk.
As I said, I’d rarely heard Thalia swear, which is why I remember her words so clearly. That and the absurdity of the idea that I’d ever date Robbie, or he’d ever date me.
I knew better than to ask what he’d done. I wasn’t a confidante, wasn’t privy to this group’s drama. But my silence kept her talking.
She said, “He can flirt with whoever he wants, apparently. I go on a walk with one person and it’s, like, nuclear war. He’s an alcoholic, I swear to God. He passes out at nine p.m., and I’m not allowed to talk to anyone else? I’m supposed to, what, hang out with his sleeping body? Clean up his barf?”
“Wow,” I said. I was still near the doorway. “That sucks.”
She stopped unpacking, stared as if she’d just noticed me. “What do you mean, that sucks?”
“I mean—it sounds bad.”
She said, “Oh, thanks a lot. Thanks for your vote of confidence.”
I told her I’d see her later—maybe I apologized, too—grabbed a handful of nail polishes from my dresser, ran back to the common room. I told Fran what had happened and asked if I’d done something wrong. She agreed I hadn’t.
When I returned late that night, my nails painted purple and black, Thalia was asleep.
Sunday, as people started straggling back to campus, Thalia became agitated again, kept asking if I’d seen Beth or Rachel. I didn’t imagine anyone who’d been skiing would return before Monday, hungover and complaining that their quads were sore and they hadn’t done any of the reading. Thalia came back from the showers Sunday night in her knee-length pink robe, a striped towel wrapped elaborate and high around her hair. She was changing behind her closet door when she said, “Bodie, you don’t have, like, a pregnancy test, do you?”
For a second I thought this was something about me, about my stomach looking fat. Then I understood. I said, “Oh. No, I—I mean, I’ve never dated anyone here, so no. Only back home. Maybe the infirmary?”
“Never mind.”
Later that night, she came back from the bathroom doing a little dance, singing, “I got my pe-ri-od, I got my pe-ri-od!”
I knew she was sharing all this with me just because I was the only one around, but I went with it. I said, “How late were you?”
To be honest, the only sex I’d had, back home that summer, was so brief and inept that I wasn’t even sure full penetration had occurred. But half my few remaining friends from middle school were heading straight toward teenage motherhood. Home on break once, I’d helped shoplift a First Response test and another time stood outside a McDonald’s bathroom stall while my friend Renee waited and then showed me the negative stick for a second opinion. I knew, at least, the right questions to ask.
Thalia said, “I just—I thought it had been about a month, and I got freaked.”
“You don’t keep track? In your planner or something?”
“What, I’m gonna write I HAVE MY MENSES on my calendar?”
I had not yet met Mrs. Keith, but when I did, her brittle southern formality made sense for a woman who’d apparently never taught Thalia to code her cycle. Thalia was from Duxbury, Massachusetts, but Mrs. Keith was straight out of a South Carolina cotillion.
I pulled my own Granby planner off my desk and showed her the subtle red dot I’d make in the corner of a calendar square. （My own mother hadn’t had the wherewithal to teach me herself, but she’d done this on our kitchen wall calendar my whole childhood.） I flipped back to mid-August, when Brian Wynn and I had fumbled around in his basement. I showed her the purple X I’d made there after I got the planner the first week of school, counting back the days. I said, “You do this whenever you have sex. Then you can keep track of when you can take a test, too. Because they don’t work for sure till two weeks in.” I was really pleased with myself, let me tell you, that I had this to display. If Thalia had seen Brian Wynn, his scrawny legs, his peach fuzz mustache, she never would have taken worldly advice from me. But all she saw was the purple X.
“Nice,” she said. “Who’s the guy?”
“A total loser.” I loved how it sounded more like dismissive exaggeration than the truth.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’m never sleeping with Robbie Fucking Serenho again, so it’s beside the point.”
But by Tuesday afternoon, they were entwined on the bench outside Mr. Dar’s classroom, Robbie sucking on her neck.
35
Dane Rubra lived in Milwaukee, but had traveled to Granby five times—first on his own dime, then thanks to crowdfunding from his tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers.
In one video, he’s out back of the gym by the pool’s emergency exit, talking about the faint smears of blood found on the doorframe and on the wall just outside. Those smears were terribly popular on Reddit.
“Maybe it’s from Security holding the door open for the paramedics and the stretcher,” he says, “and maybe not. The State Police come in later and find this stuff, but you know where they don’t find any blood is in Omar Evans’s office. They luminoled that whole place, and nothing. Which is why they come up with this story about some imaginary poster on his wall that apparently absorbed all the blood. Well, listen: The only way that works is if he hit her head once, just once, and there was very little blood. Because he does that a second time? There’s blood everywhere. They need to believe Omar killed Thalia inside the building, so they need to believe the blood outside the building is unimportant.”
We’d all known about the luminol, because it was a whole production. It doesn’t work like on TV, where CSI teams squirt the stuff as casually as Windex. It has to be mixed with hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide, which means protective gear, fumigation. It requires the complete absence of light, too; they taped over all the gym’s and pool’s high windows with black garbage bags. They set up cameras on tripods. We’d previously been allowed back in the building, if not the pool—but then for a few days it was off-limits again. Fran, who’d left her best fleece in a gym locker, was livid.