I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

we were all young enough to think someone smarter had the answers.

woken up half-frozen, terrified she could have killed herself, wondering if this had actually been her intention.

She waited, as if I were supposed to repent.

I have to resist the urge to self-mythologize, to paint my own journey as harder than everyone else’s just so I can give myself credit for getting out.

We were so quick to spread lurid gossip, but so void of concern. Perhaps because we believed we were adults. If she’d slept with a teacher, that was on her. We were scandalized or even impressed, but not worried.

the one where she walked around in her skin and her bones for the rest of her life but her body was never recovered.

wanted the ability to remember things I was never there for.

One loss wasn’t worse than the other, but it was the second that did us in.

It was me, Thalia and her boyfriend Robbie, Beth Docherty, Kwan Li—who went and became an actual opera singer—and Robbie’s friend Kellan TenEyck, the one who drank himself to the bottom of a lake twenty years later. It’s hard to look back and see us as we were, rather than who we would become, hard not to see text bubbles floating above our heads: “Murdered Girl” and “Opera Star!” and “Sad Drunk.”

I sent a postcard to my mother in Arizona—letters spelling NEW YORK, each filled with a photo of the city. She didn’t know I was there, and I wanted to casually surprise her. In retrospect, it wasn’t a kind thing, sending that postcard. The back might as well have read, Look how little you know about me. Or You’ve never been here, have you? It’s possible I was taking the opera class for the same reason. How much farther could I get from Broad Run, Indiana?

the front page devoted to the same story that had been on the news the other night. 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.

She said, “You’d think if she was all that troubled, she’d have told the producer.” It was the one where fifteen women accusing the same man of the same thing was too much of a coincidence; they must have coordinated their stories.

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.

“This isn’t the moment for caution.”

I don’t even remember what happened. I remember what I told you. I remember what I remember remembering.”

We hugged like old friends, because we were. You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.