We went around the table doing names and pronouns and hometowns and aspirations, but I couldn’t stop fixating on their youth. Unlike my UCLA students, these were children. Seniors, all but one （the guy in the Bowie shirt, an ebullient half-Ghanaian, half-Irish junior from Connecticut, wanted to work in public radio）， but so dough-faced, so unformed.
You would have loved these kids, Mr. Bloch. They would’ve been yours for the molding.
The Bowie kid was named Alder （“like the tree,” he clarified） and he kept apologizing for his sneezing, getting up to grab Kleenex from the chalkboard ledge. Eventually I handed him the whole box, and he looked mortified. “I want to make something about the 1930s,” he said. We were going around a second time, spitballing podcast ideas. “But I want to do it like it is the 1930s.”
In the email I’d sent the week before, I’d asked them to brainstorm topics related to the past or present of Granby. This way, I wrote, you’ll have easy access to interview sources and archives. It also meant I wouldn’t have to deal with video game fancasts or vampires. I included a list of ideas, with links. The fire that destroyed the original gymnasium in 1940. The 1975 murder of a Granby teacher by her drug-addled boyfriend in her apartment in Kern, a story I’d been obsessed with as a student. The hazing situation in the late aughts, and the resulting expulsions. The recent fallout from the school ending its football team. The debate about AP classes. The 1995 death of Thalia Keith.
If you’d asked me at the time why I included Thalia I’d have said I was just trying to get them thinking, trying to lay out as many different points on the Granby timeline as I could. I’d have believed it, too.
Alder said, “My concept is, like, what if they’d had podcasts back then, so, sort of a cross between old radio and podcasts. So I’m a Granby student from the ’30s, talking about life. I’m basically the only Black kid at Granby and then there’s the Great Depression and, like, Roosevelt—”
A girl named Jamila interrupted. “You’d have to pick a year,” she said. “There’s a huge difference between 1930 and 1939.”
Alder nodded slowly, rolling a tissue to a point in his hand. “1938,” he said. “It’s 1938, and I’m a podcasting kid sending messages into the void, and I’m inventing podcasts as I go.”
“1938 was the year that War of the Worlds—” I started, but Alder slapped the table, grinned, pointed at me.
“Yes!” he said. “You get it!”
Jamila planned to do a series on financial aid and race at Granby. That sounded like a tough job reportorially, as I couldn’t imagine the admissions office being terribly open on the subject, but Jamila seemed determined and well-informed.
I’d hoped they’d at least read my email, but I hadn’t dreamed they’d come with notes, with research already done, some with backup proposals, too. By the time we got around the table, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they had grant money secured. The kid with purple hair, Lola, who used they/them pronouns and had spoken at length about their passion for elephant welfare, wanted to interview restaurant workers in town. Alyssa Birkyt, a quiet skier who’d already committed to Dartmouth, had settled on the complicated legacy of Arsareth Gage Granby.
Only one demurred: Britt, an intense girl with long caramel hair, who would have struck me as a typical golden-child Granby student of my own era （loose cashmere sweater, cute jeans, genetically blessed cheekbones） if it weren’t for the ankh tattoo on her inner wrist and the way she talked with no embarrassment about clinical depression when we first went around. Her voice was dry and deep, somewhere between a smoker’s and a fifty-year-old lawyer’s.
She shrugged when it was her turn. “I’m torn between a few ideas.”
After class, she hung back near the door, waiting out Alder’s monologue about the links he planned to send me to his favorite music criticism podcasts and his favorite documentary series, and also a podcast where the earliest blogs of the late ’90s were read aloud. He blew Britt a kiss as he left, an actor floating out of a party held in his honor.
“I, um,” Britt said, looking at the floor and then over my shoulder. “Okay, this is no offense, but, like, I know you do a lot of true crime on your podcast, and I think it’s a problematic genre.”
She waited, as if I were supposed to repent. I said, “That comes up. But we’re following the workings of the studio system, not chasing gore.”
“I’m concerned about the tropes of true crime, the way it’s turned into entertainment.”
“That’s sharp of you,” I said. “It’s definitely a matter of approach. When we fetishize things—”
“Right, no. I listened to your podcast, and I get, even when you did the Patricia Douglas thing, or the Black Dahlia thing, I get that you’re doing—it’s more about structures and—like I said, no offense. I just, I see so much fetishizing, and I don’t want to be another white girl giggling about murder.”
I said, “Most violent crime is remarkably boring.” I pulled out a chair and sat back down, gestured to Britt to do the same, but she didn’t, just stood tugging her backpack straps. I went into my panelist answer. “The vast majority of murders are two young men getting into an altercation; one kills the other. You dig deep on unsolved crimes, or quote-unquote interesting crimes, and most of what you find is a man killing his partner. So either you talk structural racism, domestic violence, policing issues, or you end up picking one story that’s interesting in specific ways. Usually in ways that break those molds. One concern is that those cases are misrepresentative. And sure, there’s a temptation to sensationalize things. Are you—” I expected to find her glazed over, but she wasn’t blinking. “Are you interested in pursuing this as a subject?”
Britt said, “Like, also, me as a white person, if I wanted to tell the story of a white person’s murder, then I’m ignoring the violence done to Black and brown bodies. But I can’t tell a story of violence against people of color, because I’m white and that would be appropriation.” She sounded frustrated. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she talked like an Oberlin freshman who cared deeply but hadn’t fully worked things out—I used to teach undergrads, after all—but it felt so incongruous here at Granby, where we’d all once spoken with such blithe, hurtful carelessness. And hadn’t that been just yesterday?
I said, “I really don’t think that’s appropriation. And honestly, this is for a small audience.” I gestured at the bare trees outside the window, hoping Britt would see what I did: that we were in the woods, not—as it certainly felt to a twelfth grader—at the center of the universe.
She said, “In that email, you had two murders. The one from the ’70s and the one from the ’90s. I was thinking I’d do one of those. But—”
I could feel my pulse in my neck. It was like being a child in an audience as the magician asked for volunteers, utterly terrified he’d pick you but also thrilled he might. Whether I could admit it or not, I wanted this girl to look directly at Thalia’s death in a way I myself couldn’t （out of closeness, out of trauma, out of the irrational fear that my former classmates would think me presumptuous—no, that Thalia herself would somehow find me presumptuous）; and at the same time, and for some of those same reasons, I wanted to stop her. I regretted putting Thalia on the list. I thought I could maybe steer Britt toward Barbara Crocker and 1975, the boyfriend they found hiding in the woods right near campus, his remarkably light sentence.