I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

You said, “This is the first place you’ve gotten yourself. That means it belongs to you.” I was silent, not because I disagreed, but because I wanted to weep with gratitude. You said, “You might think Granby belongs more to some kid whose grandfather went here. But you chose it, and that makes it yours.”

What I wanted, but could never get, was to go back and see it happen. Not the grisly parts, not the death, but every step leading up to it, every moment when fate could have stepped just an inch to the side and left Thalia intact.

I’d forgotten about the light at Granby. It was different there, older, passing through centuries before it reached you.

She was reed-thin, but I didn’t hate her for it. She seemed to have sprung from the earth that way, rather than crafting herself from the pages of a magazine.

And I was someone who knew all about you. RC Cola, I told her, was your favorite soda. I said it because you’d found that six-pack in the greenroom fridge and announced that you hated them. You’d been trying to offload them ever since, offering me one every day until I finally started accepting them just so I could hide them, unopened, around your office. If Thalia gave you an RC Cola, you’d know it was really from me.

She struggles a minute, drifting in and out of consciousness. She can’t pull herself out but she follows the lane line to the shallow end, draping herself on the green and gold rings, nestling them under her chin, slipping under, coming up, slipping under, coming up on the far side, but now something has her hair, something’s pulling her head back and down, and the easiest thing, the only thing, is to sleep.

I’d love to be one of those people who complain when things change. But no one around me was changing; here was my entire high school, preserved in amber. The only thing changing was my vision—like the first time I put on glasses and looked in wonder at the trees, and felt inexplicably betrayed. Those clearly delineated leaves had been there all along, and no one ever told me.

But with Yahav: It was like we’d been scored open and then stuck together, and his absence was a raw wound.

The kind of shots that, these days, you’d instantly erase from your phone. But here these kids remained, forever drinking in the woods, forever overexposed.

How many times did I have to learn the same lesson? You’re not special. And that’s okay.

I couldn’t figure out who knew more about what happened to Thalia: me now, or me at barely eighteen. My adult self, looking back with experience and perspective, or my raw teenage self, both jaded and naïve, taking everything in fresh.

When I was still raw and unformed, everyone failed me. No one was permanent.

What happens when your only escape is the same thing you’re trying to escape? Here’s the soundtrack of your tragedy: Dance to it.