Petra, the journalism teacher, met me outside the guesthouse and presented me with a Granby tote containing a Granby fleece and a water bottle and a copy of the Sentinel. She was strikingly tall with a soft German accent and chicly short hair, a curtain of blond over her left eye. She asked if I’d slept well, if I needed a coffee.
I skimmed the paper as we walked: dorm renovations, sandwich delivery options reviewed, an ongoing lawsuit from a former art teacher.
We stepped off the slushy road and onto the frozen planks of South Bridge and I tucked the paper away, ducked my head against the wind so the freezing air hit my hat and not my face. The last of my hangover evaporated in the cold.
Someone called out behind us and we waited for her to catch up. Good Lord: It was Priscilla Mancio, who was still teaching French. “Bodie Kane,” she said. “Unbelievable. I never would’ve recognized her,” she told Petra, “if they hadn’t run her picture in the magazine.” She was walking her bulldog, a delicious beast she introduced as Brigitte, and whom I squatted to scratch.
Petra said, “You’ve changed since eighteen.” I find it hard to tell if people with German accents are asking questions.
“Sure,” Madame Mancio said, “but—well, most alums, they either look the same, or worse. You know, it’s the boys. They go sloppy in the middle. But you look so much prettier, Bodie! Was your hair always that color?”
I said, “Yep, this is my hair.” It was still dark—just no longer stringy and self-cut and ruined by cheap shampoo.
“Well, I’ve listened to your podcast, and I suppose I was picturing your old face.” To Petra she said, “She had such a round little face!”
Madame Mancio, meanwhile, looked shockingly unchanged. If she’d been thirty when I was at Granby, she was maybe in her early fifties now, but with the same androgynous haircut, the same tall, bony frame. She still dressed as if she might head off at any moment to hike the mountains.
She said, “We were always so worried about her, especially at the end there. There are those students you just worry about. And look at her, turning out so successful, so put-together.”
I was glad to be on Brigitte’s eye level rather than hers. The dog licked my face, and I marveled at the little pocket her wrinkles made between her eyes. You could stash a spare piece of kibble in there.
We walked toward campus, the two of them discussing the lawsuit in the paper, the details of which I couldn’t grasp.
Petra said to me, “Granby is always being sued. So is every other school in the country.”
“For what?”
“Oh God,” Madame Mancio said, “anything. Mostly it’s families threatening to sue. Suspensions, grades, negligence, the kid didn’t get into the right college, a coach didn’t put the kid on varsity. I wish I were kidding. All those lawyers the school pays? They’re busy.”
I said, “I didn’t know.”
Beneath the bridge, the Tigerwhip was surely frozen solid under its blanket of snow. I could see boot prints heading down the ravine slope and across the flat surface that was, now, only a suggestion of water. （We’d sat on those slopes during junior year bio, Ms. Ramos making us each sketch ten plants. I wore a sweater long enough to hide my backside, and it got ruined in the dirt.） Fifteen miles away, where the creek emptied into the Connecticut River, the ice would be looser, chunkier, yielding to slush and running water.
“Has the campus changed much?” Petra asked me.
Madame Mancio, whom I ought to be thinking of as Priscilla if I were to have any chance of a normal conversation with her, said, “Not as much as Bodie! I remember when I saw your picture on that cover. I thought, my God, she’s gone and done something! I don’t remember everyone that well, but I had you all four years, didn’t I?”
I nodded, although it wasn’t true; I’d had Mr. Granson freshman year.
Then she said, with sudden urgency: “Who’s watching your kids while you’re away?” As if I might have overlooked this detail.
“Their father.”
“Oh, good. They must miss you so much!”
Brigitte panted casually, and I got the impression this was a dog who never retracted her tongue.
When Lance and I toured for Starlet Fever, people would often ask me where my children were, how they felt about my absence, how my husband felt about it—but they never asked Lance, who had three kids.
We stepped onto Lower Campus, onto the quad path, its snow packed down to gray ice.
Priscilla said, “Now, who are you still in touch with?”
“More faculty than students. Mostly through Facebook.”
“Oh, Facebook, pffft.” Priscilla dismissed it with the hand that wasn’t holding the leash. “I believe in phone calls and letters. I’m out there every reunion weekend. You know who I still exchange Christmas cards with, is Denny Bloch and his wife. Weren’t you an orchestra kid?” She said to Petra, “I remember her up there playing the flute. It was flute, wasn’t it?”
I said, “You wouldn’t want me anywhere near a flute. You’re remembering me doing backstage stuff.”
“You were in the orchestra, though!”
“No. I just ran lights for them.”
She said, “He transformed that music program in such a short time. You know they’re still good. It’s so hard to get boys to sing, though, isn’t it? They have to make girls sing tenor.”
But: Now that she’d brought you up, you were the fourth person in our group, a phantom crossing Lower Campus to the teachers’ lounge.
As a child, I’d often compulsively imagine someone watching me. I knew it wasn’t true, I wasn’t paranoid, but I’d pretend, for instance, that my third grade teacher could see everything I did without seeing anything else around me. So as long as I stepped naturally over the junk piles on my floor, she’d never know my room was messy. As long as I brushed my teeth long enough, she wouldn’t know I hadn’t used toothpaste. The habit still crops up in adulthood, particularly when I can’t believe where I am, when I need to process myself from the outside.
And as soon as Priscilla mentioned your name, as soon as she summoned you, the person I imagined watching me was you.
In the lounge, you watched me pour chemical creamer into my coffee, stevia from a little green packet.
I wasn’t furious with you yet. That would come later. For now, you were simply an audience.
Don’t be flattered.
I didn’t understand yet that I was there on your trail, that I wanted answers from you. But the subconscious has a funny way of working things out.
6
After HR, Petra walked me into Quincy Hall, swept me upstairs and down a corridor that still smelled exactly like itself, like the dark, ancient wood of its windowsills. Only—what used to be the darkroom was a 3D printing lab; the water fountain was now a bottle-filling station with a digital counter. In the corner classroom where I once took art history, my five podcasters waited.
They were the most adorable, wide-eyed babies. There was a tall, skinny boy with an old-school high-top fade and a David Bowie shirt. There was a pale kid with purple hair who looked like Lillian Gish. They were all beautiful, in a way we never were. I don’t mean this on some profound spiritual level. It took a few minutes, but then I had it: It was their skin and teeth. Not an acne mark among them. No one wore braces, but their teeth were straight, already aligned in middle school. The dermatologists and orthodontists have finally solved it.