She said, “Who?”
“The guy who did the Obama mural in West Hollywood, the one—”
“Oh!” she said. “Yeah! I love him. Wait, what’s the thing?”
“Nothing.”
Utter relief. There was Twitter, and then there was the real world.
Mr. Levin said, “Who made the pimiento cheese dip? This is delicious.” I agreed. I needed to step away from it so I wouldn’t eat more.
The television crowd erupted in shouts. Some game-winning shot they were now going to replay over and over.
Dana Ramos asked who was watching my kids while I was away.
Priscilla kept infiltrating whatever conversation I was part of, and eventually she cornered me by the sink. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I have to ask you something.” I wished I had her bulldog to talk to again. She said, “Did you come back here just for this?”
“For this party?”
“For the—your student’s thing, the Thalia Keith thing.”
I went hot and then cold and then hot. This was exactly what I’d been afraid of all along. “God, no. I came because I was asked. The students picked their own ideas.”
She said, “I’ve stayed close with the Keiths.” She told me some rambling story about the Keiths’ “winter place” in Florida, something about baking cranberry bread with Caroline Keith. “Anyway,” she said, “they would be devastated”—she paused and, in a moment of literal condescension, stooped to level her eyes with mine—“I mean devastated, if there were more bullshit about this case.”
I tried to laugh lightly. “Britt’s podcast is just for class. We’re not exactly looking at national distribution.”
Fran shot me a look from across the kitchen, and I attempted to signal with my eyebrows that yes, I needed rescuing.
“But you have a voice,” Priscilla said. “You have a big audience. I hope you own that and enjoy your fame. But, Bodie, you have to think. You have to consider who could be hurt.”
“I don’t see how this could hurt anyone,” I said. Although, yes, victims’ families generally did not appreciate someone poking at an already closed case. I got that. Fran was trying to make her way to me, but she’d gotten stuck behind someone dealing with a slow cooker full of meatballs.
“I got the sense, when she interviewed me, that Britt is trying to say the wrong person is in prison. You know, those stories about some man living in the woods, or it was some satanic thing. These flights of fancy.”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“And I think of the damage. The pain for Myron and Caroline. Sometimes they reopen these cases, and they redo the whole trial. Or they let the guy out, and then what?”
“It’s extraordinarily hard to get convictions overturned,” I said. “If Omar Evans were freed, it would be for very good reason. And that’s not likely to come from a class project.”
I wished I were drunk, wished time could roll over me, wished I wouldn’t remember this all in the morning and worry everyone was talking about me.
“Well, and the right man is in prison. He was a monster. To take—to rip away the life of someone so young, so promising. You have to ask yourself why he sought out a job like this to begin with. You know,” she said, her hand back on my shoulder, “it was all so long ago. It seems like yesterday and then I remember how young I was. It was another millennium. To these kids, it’s history.”
This last part I could agree with. I nodded, and Fran finally showed up at my side. Priscilla said, “I was just saying to Bodie that we should let history be history.”
Fran, God bless her, told us there were cupcakes on the coffee table. She pointed at the couch in the corner, where Oliver was talking with Amber, the young Latin teacher who’d driven us home last night. They looked like a casting director’s dream couple—both of them nerdy-chic and adorable. She said, “They’ve been leaning closer and closer all night. They haven’t moved in an hour.”
#4: PUJA SHARMA
How would it even work?
Puja waits for Thalia backstage during curtain call, asks if they can talk. She hates the whine in her voice. She hates that when she came backstage in the first act, Thalia spotted her, looked irritated, mouthed something. Thalia says she has a second, but there’s a cast party at the mattresses. Just for the cast. But Puja knows it’s not only the cast. Robbie and Rachel were talking about it at intermission. Thalia should have invited her. Hadn’t she befriended Thalia before anyone else? Thalia treats her now like an embarrassing relation.
They walk in the dark, Puja asking what she’s done to offend her, Thalia saying, “I’ve just been busy!” Puja tries to warn Thalia that those other girls aren’t her friends, that they talk behind her back. Thalia laughs it off. They wind up behind the gym, and Puja knows how to open the back door to the pool. She shows Thalia the trick and they stand there in the dark, in the warm, humid air. Puja says, “We should night-swim. It’s a senior tradition.”
“Not in my clothes,” Thalia says, and she drops her backpack, disrobes, pulls a stray bathing suit over her too-thin body. She dives off a starting block, long and graceful, and the water splashes Puja’s jeans. She emerges, pulls her wet hair from her eyes.
Puja doesn’t have a suit, but she strips to her underwear and jumps straight in, feet first. The chlorine fills her nose, hurts her face.
Thalia says, “Just ride it out, and in college you can make some real friends. Like, people you have more in common with.”
Puja feels hot, her hands prickly, and suddenly she’s slapped Thalia, hard.
“Jesus!” Thalia says, and touches her cheek. “This is why people have issues with you! Do you get it? Do you get it now?”
Puja needs to delete what just happened, but for some reason her instinct is to grab Thalia’s swimsuit at the shoulder strap, to yank her sharply forward and then shove her back, where her head makes a sickening sound against—what was it? the edge of the pool?—like a hard piece of fruit. She expects Thalia to lunge at her, to scream, but in the dim light Thalia looks dazed, nauseated.
Puja says, “Oh God—I didn’t—”
Thalia makes a noise that’s not quite a scream, scratches Puja’s chest. Puja goes under, swallows water. She has to get up, and she grabs what she can, which turns out to be Thalia’s hair. They scramble at the lane line, and Puja, pushing her way up, pushes Thalia down, pushes her neck onto the plastic rings. She just needs to get her breath, needs time to think.
Everything sparkles with panic, everything buzzes and flickers and roars. Someone might find them. They need to get out of the pool—but Thalia is retching, shaking, slipping under.
Puja climbs out, pulls clothes back over wet underwear, thinks.
But Thalia has slipped under. Her mouth and nose are beneath the surface. If she pulls Thalia out, there’s no good ending. If she leaves her there—
She watches the race clock on the wall, not trusting her own sense of time. One minute, two minutes, five. Then she runs.
She returns to the dorm a minute late for checkin, but other girls are later, rolling in from the woods smelling of beer and mud. Thalia will be missed, and at first it won’t be a huge deal, but as the night goes on they’ll worry, they’ll look for her, they’ll find her, and Puja’s fingerprints might still be on Thalia’s body. Can fingerprints do that? The longer Thalia stays in the water, the better. Puja sticks popcorn in the microwave, sets the timer for fifteen minutes. She’s bought herself a half hour of chaos, at least.