Here is what I want to say to you:
When I was still raw and unformed, everyone failed me. No one was permanent. Back home there were people with good parts to them, but on the whole, they couldn’t be relied on. By fourteen, my bitter understanding was that I could rely on myself and only myself. So here I was in a place that looked nothing like home, and I was an island. You were one of the only people who saw me as that—as an island—and made me feel good about it.
We’re meant to reject the selves we were at fourteen, meant to grow and learn. That college therapist worked so hard to convince me to trust, to find people I could rely on, to believe they wouldn’t vanish on me.
So every year after Granby I tried harder and harder to lean on other people, and to defend them in turn. Partners and Jerome and my friends and my colleagues. And the problem was, I had. I’d leaned on them with all my weight. I’d sworn my loyalty. I’d always known, deep down, that it was a mistake.
I had been in the ravine so long that the sun was setting.
What I know now is that while I was in the ravine, Omar was found unconscious in his bed with a temperature of 105 degrees. They transported him to Concord Hospital for the scans he should have received from the start, and found a seven-centimeter sickle-shaped sliver of glass lodged in his liver, where it had caused ongoing internal bleeding. The fact that the external wound was infected—and the resultant fever—had likely saved his life by getting him there: The glass had lacerated a major blood vessel in his liver, and he required immediate surgery.
While Omar’s body burned, I was made of ice. I could freeze myself to the creek, I could become part of it, a snow child who’d haunt these woods forever. As my eyes stopped watering, as my face went numb, I settled, with a singular fury, on you.
You were the older man giving her trouble. You had keys to everything. You had the protection of being preppy and white and respected.
Who the fuck moves to Bulgaria?
I didn’t know how it was possible, when Omar’s was the DNA on her, when Omar was the one who’d confessed; but I knew you’d hidden things. I knew you did something or knew something or made something happen. I knew it was you.
Fran was right: My loyalty was a fierce thing. It was a dangerous thing. But you no longer had it. I owed more to Thalia than to you.
This was what pulled me off the ice, what sent me scrambling for tree roots to pull myself up the slope.
I took a huge gulp of air, and it hit my lungs, cold and full.
It was dark. I needed to shower, I needed to change, I needed dry clothes. I had to get ready for, of all things, a séance.
40
What if I said that when I took the kids to Gage House, Thalia’s ghost told us all about you? What if she spelled your name on the Ouija board?
Don’t worry, she didn’t. She made herself scarce.
The living room of Gage House is still set up that way, as a parlor for schmoozing donors and alumni. Photos of historic Granby on the walls. Starting at 10:30, we perched on uncomfortable chairs and settees angled toward the empty stone fireplace, the room lit with dim lamps. Alder had lugged an urn of coffee from the dining hall and appointed himself “séance barista,” with the unfortunate side effect that the kids were wired. Britt seemed quiet and moody, but her silence was overridden by the other four, giddy as middle schoolers.
Being here was good for me, a reason to stay away from alcohol tonight, a reason to stay offline. And their teenage ebullience was a salve for my angry heart.
The feeling had returned to my fingers and toes.
The kids’ energy, their improbably fresh faces glowing in the low-watt bulbs, reminded me again that they were kids. Yahav was right. We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.
The cheerleader trope in most grown men’s heads is about adults （God, let’s hope they’re adults） putting on pigtails and squeaky voices for porn. It’s about what we think we remember. It’s not about actual adolescents unless there’s something wrong.
Which is all to say: I imagine you told yourself you loved Thalia. I imagine you promised her the same. And you might still believe it. But I’m telling you, from a furious place in the bottom of my gut: It might have been about power, it might have been about sex, it might have been about control, it might even—in some broken part of you—have been something warped but paternal, something tender and blind. But it was not about love.
After the first few Ouija attempts （our ghost was named XGHERERE, and YES, it was at peace, and NO, it didn’t know anything about the ghost of Arsareth Gage Granby）， Alder asked if we could try to summon Thalia’s ghost, or if that would be too weird for me. I said they were welcome to try. Britt didn’t make a move toward her phone to capture it for her podcast, so Alder recorded with his.
This time the kids were smarter. They didn’t ask the ghost’s name, just asked if it was Thalia and, consciously or subconsciously, nudged the pointer to YES.
“How can we prove it’s her?” Jamila asked me, and I said, “Ask if Khristina stole her running shoes.”
The pointer went to YES, and I shook my head. “Fake ghost,” I said, and filled them in on the bra.
Something cracked, one wall of the house settling in the cold, and they all jumped. Alder squealed and scooted up next to Britt, hugged his knees to his chest in a way everyone seemed to find funny and endearing. I tried to imagine a boy doing that in the ’90s, and all I could think of was the freshman everyone called “the Oklahomo,” whose dormmates duct-taped him naked to a Couchman pillar in the middle of a lightning storm. I was only mildly horrified at the time; it just seemed like standard hijinks, and the other boys barely got in trouble. He didn’t return the next year. I hadn’t thought of that in years, and I felt a guilty stab, an actual cramp, even though I’d barely known the boy and hadn’t been there. I doubt the episode, or our indifference to it, were things my students could even have computed, these sweet souls who’d been trained in antibullying since kindergarten.
I didn’t tell them that story, but I did tell them they were more conscientious and kind and artistic than my own classmates. Jamila let out a snort-laugh. She said, “That’s because of what you’re teaching. You should see who’s taking the stock market class and the, like, Get Your Dad to Fund Your Startup class.”
“There’s a lot of douchebags,” Lola said. “And we’ve still got those secret societies. Like, only white boys whose grandfathers went here.”
Alder said, “What do they even do?”
“Nothing. My uncle said they just told each other enough secrets that they could blackmail each other—to make them stick together. And I guess they give each other jobs after college?”
“Wait, was he in one?” I asked. We used to speculate who was in the Peregrine Society, the alumni of which had built the ice rink, and Omega, whose main activity was blanketing campus with Xerox copies of their logo in the middle of the night.