I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

“That one,” because what is she now but a story, a story to know or not know, a story with a limited set of details, a story to master by memorizing maps and timelines.

It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention.

We’d slowly grown allergic to each other, eventually realized we were each unfairly shackled to a person who was sick of our face.

I was scared like a dog is scared of the spot where a walnut once fell on his head. Irrationally, viscerally, in a way tied more to memory than possibility.

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.

Would I feel obliged to come forward? Would I need, for my own conscience, to say something, even if no one listened?

What bothers me now is those boys internalizing girls as audience, there only to act as mirrors, to make their accomplishments realer.)

“You know what’s weird,” I said, “is the memories don’t dim. I have fewer memories. But the strong ones don’t go anywhere.”

For a teenager, being seen a certain way is as good as being that way—and soon your vision became part of my self-image.

Although the cause of death was drowning, Thalia also had open fracture wounds to the back of her skull plus bruising on her neck and damage to her carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, as if she’d been choked.

“One danger is that if you lay out your theories at the beginning, and then change your mind as you investigate, you’ll be stuck.”

If the podcast somehow got out into the world, I didn’t want it to look like I was steering the ship. I wasn’t someone who’d decided that despite being utterly peripheral to this story twenty-three years ago, I was the one to tell it now.

The one where the men finally told about the priests, decades later, and everyone lauded their bravery. The one where the women came forward after five years, and everyone asked why they hadn’t spoken sooner.

Remember how we always said Denny Bloch was involved with students? Do you think that was true?

Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of it.

If you care, Mr. Bloch: Fifty miles away, Omar was only then being allowed his second dose of ibuprofen. They finally changed his soaked gauze. It was too early for any signs of infection. He had not yet developed a fever.)

“Here’s my concern about Britt. I know the better narrative is that Omar was the victim of racist cops, but sometimes—it’s Occam’s razor, right? The guy who was stalking her is the one who killed her.”

I understand: It’s human instinct to put yourself at the heart of a disaster. Not even for attention, but because it feels true.

My adult self, looking back with experience and perspective, or my raw teenage self, both jaded and naïve, taking everything in fresh.

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.

“There’s a bunch of evidence against Omar that I can’t explain. But really they didn’t cast a very wide net. Personally, I think Britt is right that they missed important details, and they missed important people.”

They’re not interested in stirring up trouble, and I think their focus will be on how the school itself impeded or aided the investigation.

As humans have intuited since the dawn of time, blaming the problem on someone outside your circle takes the problem far away.

“What I’m saying,” he says, and he should wipe the sweat off his forehead, “is the pockets are deep, and the conspiracies run deeper.”

I’d just advise against getting hopes up. It could be horribly unsatisfying, to halfway unsolve a murder. He stays in prison, but now no one has closure, including the victim’s family. That’s all you ever get from this.

The onus is on the defense to prove the new evidence strong enough to cast serious doubt on the validity of the original verdict—in other words, to prove that no reasonable jury would now convict.

You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

She was speaking, I realized, with the practiced self-awareness and the monologuing capacity of someone who’d gone through a lot of therapy.

And yes, most of the problem was that I was so fixated on you, so laser-focused on your alibi, your motives, your sins, your lies, that what I should have seen as illumination, I saw as a blinding glare. I could only look around the edges of it, like an eclipse.

Some people have rage right below the surface, and an overcooked potato is enough to incite domestic homicide.

Something I wish I’d figured out earlier in life: Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.