“I had no idea,” I said. I poured us both more whiskey. “You must’ve felt protective.” I worried Mike would snap into defensive mode, but he leaned back in the floral chair, feet close to mine. He had an impressive five-o’clock shadow. “When everything happened with Thalia, I didn’t realize how vulnerable he might have been. It’s one thing if a rich kid gets accused of something and they can lawyer up, but if they’d blamed Robbie he’d be in the same position as Omar.” I didn’t believe that was true for one second. “He must have been terrified.”
“He was.” Mike’s eyelids were drooping. I needed to keep him awake, happy, talking.
I said, “I remember Scalzitti got those photos developed, like, right away. When usually the last thing you’d want proof of was drinking on campus. I always imagined that was to protect Robbie. Or maybe Robbie asked him to.”
Mike pointed at me. “That’s exactly it,” he said. “Scalzitti wanted to destroy the film. I was there in Lambeth and they had this blowup. Serenho was like, They’re gonna say Thalia was with us, and we’ll all get blamed. If we get the pictures developed they’ll see she wasn’t there. Scalzitti was still chickenshit so I literally walked him over to the darkroom to see that little—what was that guy’s name? Ritter? Otherwise I think he would’ve dumped the film in the creek.”
I said, “There were the timestamps and everything. That was a lifesaver for Robbie.”
“For all of us, probably.”
“Right. Because no one who was there could’ve done it. Which—that wouldn’t have been obvious for a few days, right? It took a while for them to get the cause of death, and the time of death. You figure, at first it might’ve looked bad. These are the kids who were out drinking, and they were sneaking around campus, so who knows what else they did.”
Mike looked confused, thick brows coming together. “I guess the point was she wasn’t with us.”
“But it’s funny,” I said, “that Robbie took that risk.”
“He knew he had nothing to hide. That makes it easier.”
“I know from Sakina that you guys got to the mattresses in clusters,” I lied. “I mean, that only makes sense. You were probably slower than everyone else with your leg. But when they ask about it, you just—you simplify it, right? If you all walked there together, it gets the gist across better.”
“Wait, is that what she said on the stand?”
“I doubt it. I mean, if anything, they’re interested in when people left.”
“Right.” He relaxed back in his chair. “I don’t know. In the days afterward, we kept checking with each other, making sure we had our story straight. Not like we were making it up, but just things like whose idea was it, how long were we there. Honestly, we decided together to say it was only drinking and cigarettes. There was definitely some pot, but that wasn’t in the photos, so why bring it up?”
“Right,” I said. “Why would pot be relevant?” But he didn’t seem to catch my sarcasm.
I refilled his glass, even though it wasn’t empty. I topped mine off just a millimeter. I’d barely drunk any. As I leaned back on the pillows, I stretched my arms overhead, a move I’d learned men took as egregious flirting even though I never meant it that way; I just had tight shoulders. But I lingered with my arms up, stretching to the right and the left.
In the aftermath of my latest Yahav relapse, I’d had the unflattering realization that I had never once, in my life, gone after a man who was fully available. In my early twenties, I honed my skills on married men, men whose rejections and eventual departures it would be impossible to take personally. Even Jerome wasn’t someone I ever possessed completely, or wanted to. And look who I’d pined after at Granby: the hottest guy on the ski team, and Kurt Fucking Cobain. Men who could never hurt me, because I could remain invisible to them. （“Do you think this might have to do with your father and brother?” asks every new shrink, tentatively, as if it weren’t glaringly obvious.）
Now I said, to the boy in whose honor I’d once borrowed a library map of Connecticut just so I could look up the precise location of his street in New Canaan: “You know what the clock tower made me think of, the other day, was all the spaces people used to go to make out. Or smoke.”
He laughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Oh, man. I was never a smoker, so I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Right. You only knew the make-out places, and I only knew the smoking places.”
“You never got busy on campus?”
“Not once.” It didn’t sound pathetic, the way it might have if I’d said it at eighteen. “Where were the big spots? I’d catch people in the theater all the time.”
He said, “Aw, man, that’s not even creative. There was this guest apartment at the back of Jacoby. That was a good one if you had the key. But in spring they’d put up people interviewing for jobs, so that was out.”
I said, “I remember certain couples had spots that were, like, theirs. You’d never go to the Quincy balcony at night, because Sakina and Marco would be there.”
“Man! I forgot that. It was so territorial. Can’t you imagine a David Attenborough narration? The adolescents have staked out their breeding grounds.”
I laughed. “Totally. Angie Parker and that short guy, Steve whatever, they were always up in the English hallway.”
“Dorian,” he said, “when he dated Beth, they’d get a full-on hotel room in town. The rumor was she made him, she wouldn’t sleep with him on campus.”
“That tracks.” I laughed, this time not genuinely. Good God, I didn’t blame her, given what his friends had all seen. I said, “Where was—Robbie and Thalia had a place, right?”
He blanched, actually blanched, to the point where I couldn’t just play it cool; I had to say, “Why, what?”
I hoped he was drunk enough. I knew what I wanted him to say, and he just needed to be drunk enough to say it. He wasn’t. I could see his wheels turning, but he said nothing.
So I said, “Oh God, was it—was she waiting for him that night, you think? In the shed? I bet she was there looking for him, when someone—oh, shit.” Mike didn’t deny it, so I pressed on. “That makes sense, then, why you’d need to back up his alibi. Even before we knew it happened in there—it was so close to the pool. God, can you imagine? If the police had tried to put him right there by the pool?”
He said, quietly—as if lowering his voice would keep this just between us—“This is why he’s always felt responsible. They got their signals crossed, somehow. He thought she was meeting him at the mattresses, and she thought he was meeting her at the shed.”
“So you all knew she was at the shed. I’m not—don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but that’s got to be heavy, that you all didn’t mention the shed to the police.”
“We didn’t know it happened there.”
“Sure, no, of course. But if the police had looked there, if they’d found the blood, it might have changed things.”