I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

Just as soccer isn’t about your love of the ball. And once she was declared the object of collective interest, she became the ball.

Before long her friends, her real friends, came to help her move in. Beth Docherty and Rachel Popa stood on her

coming as it did from Donna Goldbeck, our class gossip and a highly unreliable source.

On the screen: A narrow cloud crossed the moon; a man slit a woman’s eyeball. The students covered their faces.

Dorian Culler, maybe, who made his own warped reality, announcing that I was stalking him or that Thalia was his secret fiancée or that poor Blake Oxford had asked to be his prison bitch. Maybe Mike Stiles, our King Arthur, who wore his charisma like a custom-tailored suit.

Mr. Levin cleared his throat and asked exactly how old they thought he was. A ruckus, then, of laughter and teasing. Mr. Levin was born in 1962.

I didn’t add that crew seemed like something for girls named Ashley. I

Part of what I loved was the escape from campus. A boat was a place where no one could reach you, a place where some boy couldn’t slide into your path to make you a prop in his joke.

But out on the boat, we were

neither watchers nor watched; there was only the sound of water and of our cox’s voice calling for a power ten, only the muscle burn, only cold air on wet skin.

I said, “I love them at first sight.”

As we stood with our dishes, Mr. Levin said, “You know, I always knew you were going to be okay.” I felt like crying—out of bitterness? out of tenderness?—because if that was true, he was the only one who’d ever thought so. I

certainly hadn’t thought it myself. He said, “You were always going to be just fine.”

My housemate came out into the kitchen and introduced himself to Fran. Oliver Coleman. I was grateful for the reminder, repeated his name in my head.

list. If Thalia was following me around, it was in

the way bees follow someone who happens to have slathered their hands in honey.

“Is it unsolved?” Oliver was asking. “No,” Fran said, “they caught the guy right away. Omar Evans, this athletic trainer. He worked in the weight room, and he was the guy who’d tape your ankle if you twisted it. He’d been kind of stalking her. Or they’d been dating. Or both.”

“She was not dating him,” I said. “True,” she said. “She was too busy. She was hanging around Mr. Bloch all the time.” “Right, but that wasn’t—” “Mr. Bloch was a creeper.”

I didn’t remember Fran talking about you that way, back then. She sang for you in Choristers and musicals and Follies. She won the arts department award for overall involvem...

closets. I had to consider now that perhaps you were skilled at subtly eroding boundaries, making adolescent girls feel like adults.

And what about someone like Thalia, so clearly smitten with you from the moment she stepped onto campus?

It was for the social clout of gossip that we also spread—and even believed—stories about teachers with crushes on students, teachers who’d check out girls’ legs. But they couldn’t all be true, and as

the years passed I came to understand they’d been immature fantasies, related to our certainty that the world revolved around us.

The truth is that even if you’d kissed Thalia right there in rehearsal it never would have occurred to us to say something, just like we never would have turned in Ronan Murphy for having more coke in his room than a Colombian drug lord. Not because we were honor-bound, but because it seemed like just one of the many secrets of the world to which we were now privy, secrets we were supposed to be cool about. And because

maybe we knew, on some level, that our assumptions would melt away under examination.

We thought we knew, so we became certain we knew. It became as real to us as those lightning bugs, their mating dance at the tree line, our laughter, Bendt’s good-humored relief, our feet hitting the earth as we raced to catch them for him, bringing him miracles in our cupped hands.

Suspicion soon settled on Omar Evans, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who worked as head athletic trainer at the prestigious boarding school. He was the only official suspect in the case. Evans falsely confessed under extraordinary pressure after fifteen hours of interrogation, a confession he recanted the next day. He was a victim of an inexperienced and racist small-town police force and a

racist school that wanted to close the case quickly. Omar Evans was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to sixty years. He has now been imprisoned nearly twenty-three years for a murder he did not commit. This is the story of two stolen lives: those of Thalia Keith and Omar Evans.”

“Maybe there were flaws in the case. But they had his DNA on her swimsuit. One of his hairs was in her mouth.

Like, her boyfriend was this guy Robbie Serenho,

but by the end of class settled on She Is Drowned, a Hamlet reference

Alder confirmed on his phone. It seemed melodramatic, but this wasn’t something headed out to the wider world. It was just for us. Two or three episodes, just for us.

Eisenstein’s baby carriage tumbling down the Odessa steps.

Then, in color, sixty-two years later, De Palma’s baby carriage descending the steps of Chicago’s

Union Station, the mother’s silent scream.

with

If you can believe me: I told myself this was why I wanted to go to the pool. To cool off. That I’d packed my swimsuit because I liked to swim.

Fortunately, swim season was over when Thalia died, with only an away meet left. Could you imagine swimmers getting back in the pool, even with the water replaced?

swimming in a crime scene

The day I looked at the campus maps online, I’d found obsessively detailed calculations: The observation deck is twenty feet up and eight feet back from the lip of the pool, and the deck railing is three feet high, which means someone traveling from the top of the railing would have to travel twenty-three feet down and over eight feet out to reach the water. People had applied complicated geometry involving the arc of a jumping body. There were diagrams.

It was size Large, and Thalia was a small person. No swim cap, no goggles.

Trace DNA from Omar Evans was found inside the suit crotch—one of the main pieces of evidence against

him. Although: One of the articles Fran sent me the next year had mentioned the ins...

Then there was the piece of his hair in her mouth. Well, there were actually two hairs in her mouth. A two-millimeter piece consistent with Omar’s DNA, and a three-centimeter strand from someone else, someone unidentified.

Britt

The official cause of death was “drowning precipitated by injury.”

I certainly knew more about how rage gets ascribed to Black men.

Sheila Evans was prim—small and contained as a wren. I’d learned after Omar’s arrest that his mother was a

department secretary at Dartmouth, that his father died young.

“When my husband passed,” Sheila said, “it was like losing the bookend to a row of books. We all tipped over sideways. But losing Omar, the shelf itself went. He was pulled out from under us.”

When I first got to Granby, Omar had his head shaved—and because he was light-skinned and because I thought people with Arabic names must be Middle Eastern, I didn’t realize Omar was African American until late sophomore year,