When Puja stops sleeping entirely, when she finally wanders off two weeks later, it’s not only because of what she’s done. It’s because they’re whispering. Beth and Rachel and Donna Goldbeck. They’ve guessed too easily. （If she only had a bike or a car, she could get to Hanover, and then New York. She could vanish. But no one has a bike. No one has a car.）
It’s also this: Her father sent a tissue-thin airmail from London, asking if she knew the girl killed, if she’ll buy Mace in town. He writes, I thought University would be the more dangerous place, but I see you need protection even there in paradise.
For some reason, it’s the word paradise—the suggestion that this is as good as things will ever get—that does her in.
37
I woke up Saturday to a flurry of concerned and cryptic texts from Lance, from Jerome, from LA friends.
My hands were shaking too badly to download Twitter on my phone again, so instead I opened it on my computer. Late last night, Jasmine Wilde had quote-tweeted my thread and responded.
As a Person of Color, she wrote, I’m devastated that Bodie Kane feels she can define what she experienced as “ACTUAL assault” while dismissing the very real experience of someone like me.
It went on from there, but I was back at the video, staring at her sandy hair, feeling as dumb as when I’d thought Omar was Middle Eastern. I texted Jerome: Person of color??? You didn’t feel this was worth alerting me to?
He answered: IDK what the hell she’s talking about. I swear, that was never something she mentioned. She has blue eyes! I have no fucking idea, Bodie.
I dug around Twitter. Someone asking in another thread what Jasmine’s ethnic background was, someone else saying this question was an aggression, someone bringing up Rachel Dolezal, someone writing She’s a quarter Bolivian and linking to an interview where she mentioned her Bolivian abuela who herself had a German father, which meant, someone else noted, she was actually one-eighth Bolivian. Below that, someone dropped a racist Elizabeth-Warren-as-Pocahontas GIF, someone else wrote She doesn’t even speak Spanish, someone answered with an eight-tweet tirade about how racist it was to gatekeep ethnicity.
My first instinct was to explain myself, but there was no way that didn’t make everything worse. Apology would make it worse, too, for everyone involved; I knew how the internet worked.
A text from Lance: Please call? We just lost Flower People and Fresh Feast.
Instead I closed Twitter and hoped it would somehow make everything go away. And it would go away, I reminded myself. I wouldn’t say anything else. People would move on. Trump would say something dangerously idiotic any moment now, and everyone’s attention would turn.
I texted Lance and said as much. I added, I’m not going near it anymore. I will never type again.
I managed not to defenestrate my computer, and instead took it and my headphones to the dining hall to make editing notes on the students’ first episodes and wait for Yahav. This way, if he didn’t show, I’d have something to do besides stew.
Sitting by the fruit salad bar （a fruit salad bar!）， I watched kids roll in to brunch—sleepy and alone, or in chatty pairs, or in loud, sweaty, post-sports-practice hordes—and did my best to compartmentalize, to ignore the dull fire alarm in the back of my head.
My students would have another chance to edit, and they had a second edited episode due the following Friday. I’d told them if they produced a third, they could send it to me after mini-mester and I’d still give them feedback. The idea was for them to launch their group portal on the school website before Feb Week. I had a whole fresh wave of concerns about my voice being in Britt’s first episode: If her podcast got out there now and someone angry latched on to it, Britt could get dragged into the vortex with me and Jerome.
Alder hadn’t been ready to play his podcast in class, had only emailed it to me late Friday night. The episode proved a good distraction, though it was confused, too ambitious. Halfway through he came on saying, “Okay, so, Ms. Kane? I think at this point in my final version I’ll do something with, like, current students? Like, asking them to read the last text on their phone?” I couldn’t imagine what this had to do with the 1930s—but give me a kid with too many ideas any day.
And then, a miracle: Yahav walking in the door, five minutes early—cheeks blazing red, eyes and nose watering. He’d parked off campus, he told me, even though I’d told him exactly where to go. He might have been out of breath from the walk, but more likely it was from the stress of seeing me.
He said, “This place really is in the woods.”
I hugged the cold off him and took in his smell: clean but sweaty. He was an unreasonably beautiful man. His accent was clear but rich, and everything he said sounded like a line from a sad art film. For reasons I can’t articulate, he was, to me, an incarnation of some Platonic ideal of both maleness and sex, like something conjured from my own imagination. I could never quite believe he was real.
I got us both borrowable Granby travel mugs full of coffee.
My phone kept vibrating in my pocket—more people mad at me, more things I’d done wrong—and I kept ignoring it.
We walked uphill and I gave him a personal tour: That fire escape is where I used to study. That’s where I twisted my ankle, freshman year.
Yahav had two modes—all over me, or evasive—and he’d chosen the second that day. Ten minutes in, he hadn’t yet kissed me, hadn’t squeezed my shoulder, wasn’t making good eye contact. I wasn’t about to ask for any of that, but I found myself trying hard to reel him in, to put shiny things in front of him.
I showed him Quincy, showed him the door to the former darkroom, although it was, advisably, locked to keep the 3D printers safe.
He said, “This is where you made out with boys?” He was finally teasing, flirting, relaxing a little. He raised one thick, lovely eyebrow.
“I never made out with a single Granby boy,” I said. “I only dated guys at home.”
“In Indiana.” His accent made the word gentler, more romantic, than should have been possible.
“Just summer flings, so I couldn’t get hurt. And no one at Granby could know my business or feel bad for me when I got dumped.”
“Dumped is a harsh word,” he said. “We have the same idiom in Hebrew, but at least it doesn’t sound so ugly. You never went to dances?”
“Sure, in a pack.”
“You must have been pretty.”
I said, “I was a disaster. Did I never show you pictures?”
“Now you have to.”
So we went to the library, that wall of yearbooks in the back. I showed him the 1995 Dragon Tales, my unsmiling senior photo, my half page of shout-outs and quotes—private jokes for Fran and Carlotta, a bunch of Nirvana lyrics, a Monty Python reference for Geoff: “You’re not the Messiah—you’re a very naughty boy!”
Yahav said, “Your makeup. You were—in a raccoon phase?”
My eyes were ringed in black; my face had thinned considerably, so we must have taken those photos in the spring. But not too late in spring, because Thalia’s photo was on the next page, once again only Hani Kayyali separating us. Thalia in a chair outside, looking over her shoulder, a position no one would find herself in if a photographer hadn’t contorted her that way.