I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

if you

knew Thalia it’s easy to see she wasn’t actually upset, was simply smiling for the camera when she didn’t feel like it. It was the story that got told and retold.

It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough ...

I first watched the video in 2016.

1995 VHS quality,

below with the exact time markers for when Thalia Keith shows up,

had also posted the list of cast and crew. Beth Docherty as a petite Guinevere, Sakina John glowing as Morgan le Fay with a crown of gold spikes atop her cornrows, Mike Stiles beautiful and embarrassed as King Arthur. My name is misspelled, but it’s there, too. The curtain call is the last shot where you clearly

Watching the video twenty-one years after the fact,

January of 2018, I

I didn’t explain the concept of mini-mester, either, because it would sound twee, the exact kind of thing he’d imagine these spoiled kids getting

up to.

Rolling Stone. That article (“Live Free or Die: Drink, Drugs, and Drowning at an Elite New Hampshire Boarding School”) came out in 1996, and

I’d only been back to Granby three times in the nearly twenty-three years since graduation.

My podcast at the time was Starlet Fever, a serial history of women in film—the

The Robesons, the family I lived with, had driven me most of the way from Indiana in one day,

when I told my husband this story once, he shook his head, said, “That

“I just mean,”

Jerome replied evenly, “that it couldn’t happen.”

I knew Jorge Cardenas didn’t let himself drink when he was sad, because that was how alcoholism started, and he didn’t want to be like his father.

I hope you remember Fran, because Fran deserves

remembering. Fran Hoffnung—although now it’s Hoffbart, since she and her wife combined their last names. You at least remember the Hoffnungs: Deb Hoffnung taught English, Sam Hoffnung taught math, and Fran and her three older sisters grew up in the front apartment attached to Singer-Baird, the girls’ dorm with that funny steep roof.

She meant everything about Jerome, because I’d

mentioned, when we emailed a few weeks back, that Jerome had moved out and was living next door.

“So the upshot is,” she said, “you’re single?” “Essentially. Married but single.”

“It’s funny that my marriage is more traditional than yours.”

Dorian Culler shouted down from his window, asked if I was there

These kids got winter forestry, textiles, abnormal psychology, Shakespearean soliloquies, the history of rap.

just like Paideia

Petra, the journalism teacher,

Good Lord: It was Priscilla Mancio, who was still

teaching French. “Bodie Kane,”

When Lance and I toured for Starlet Fever, people would often ask me where my children were, how they felt about my absence, how my husband felt about it—but they never asked Lance, who had three kids.

You know who I still exchange Christmas cards with, is Denny Bloch and his wife. Weren’t you an orchestra kid?”

“He transformed that music program in such

a short time.

Now that she’d brought you up,

you were the fourth person in our group, a phantom crossing Lower Campus to the teachers’ lounge.

And as soon as Priscilla mentioned your name, as soon as she summoned you, the person I imagined watching me was you. In the lounge, you watched me pour chemical creamer

who is she talking to?

into my coffee, stevia from a little green packet.

I wasn’t furious with you yet. That would come later. For now, you were simply an aud...

I didn’t understand yet that I was there on your trail, that I wanted answers from you. But the subconscious has a...

The 1995 death of Thalia

Keith.

Britt extricated the pen cap and said, “I think the wrong guy is in prison.” “Interesting.”

I stood to walk around the library at my Fitbit’s insistence, and as I circled I remembered, Mr. Bloch, how you used to nap in the big leather chair by the periodicals, how some of us thought it was funny to leave a magazine in your lap as if you’d fallen asleep reading it.

This was winter, when I didn’t have to rise at four a.m. for crew.

I don’t believe the adults at Granby knew any of this, except the Hoffnungs, and perhaps Mrs. Ross, since as my advisor she communicated with the Robesons.

Senior transfers were all like Parkman Walcott, whom I doubt you knew—nineteen at the youngest, graduates of other high schools, public or private, brought in as fifth-year football or hockey ringers with hopes of a better shot at a better college. An

Then, out of nowhere, came Thalia Keith.

Flat-chested, which helped explain why rather than killing her on sight, a high-status group of junior girls instantly adopted her.

I know now that for straight boys at that age, it’s less about the girl than the competition.