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when he grew his hair out. I asked some teammates if they’d known, and they looked at me like I was an idiot. Angie Parker, who was Black, found it hilarious the rest of the year to point out random blond people and say, “Whatcha think, Bodie, Asian? Jamaican?”
Sheila said, “His little brother was lost for so long. Malcolm was only six when his father died but Omar was fifteen and I told myself, okay, my husband raised up one man, now Omar can raise his brother.
a bunch of BS
Sheila Evans, unlike my own mother, hadn’t abandoned her remaining child.
She claws him, makes the deep scratch the police will find nine days later behind his right ear, down to his collarbone, the one he’ll say he
handed—this was what he said in his confession (drugs,
This is what he said in his confession, a detail
that always destroyed me: the idea that someone who’d been so alive could be killed—so gently, so slowly—by a pool net.
ectomorph.
The mattresses were, as we now all know, 1.4 miles from both the theater and the gym. It was a bit farther than that from the darkroom in Quincy, which was where Geoff and I would start our trek.
She’d told a few friends she was having trouble with some older dude.
And then—I wonder if I actually sat there slack-jawed,
or if I managed to keep my face composed—it was as if the hemispheres of my brain jolted out of decades-long disconnection.
we joked that you were sleeping with her. Wasn’t it a joke?
It hit me with the weight of twenty-three years. The older guy was you. If Thalia was having trouble with an older guy, the older guy was you.
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.
Robbie Serenho was only there because Thalia was, and Kellan was only there because Robbie was. A ski star, Robbie oozed privilege.
sent a postcard to my mother in Arizona—letters spelling NEW YORK, each filled with a photo of the city.
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?
“I was at the Met!” he said, and I was so confused, because weren’t we going to the Met every night?
“So you and Fran Hoffnung are dykes together, right?” And that was the thing I went to bed angry about, the thing I stewed over. Not what I’d seen in the park.
Beth Docherty was responsible for my greatest humiliation at Granby. That year, I’d started bleaching the
ignominy
That winter, Fran pulled out the previous year’s Dragon Tales and showed Carlotta, in the freshman section, how I used to dress, and Carlotta let out her most frog-like laugh. “Were you kidnapped into a cult? It’s like—if JCPenney was a cult!” And I was able to laugh with her, grateful she saw the girl in the picture as the fake me, the one who’d gotten something terribly wrong.
If I’d gone to any public high school in 1990s America, I’d have blended in, at least with a certain crowd. But at Granby, land of Ralph Lauren and duck boots, I was seen for the wreck I actually was.
And I was someone who knew all about you.
Thalia and I were roommates from 1993 to 1994. She died in March of ’95.
It would have fallen to Dr. Calahan, as headmistress, to call the Keiths. I couldn’t imagine breaking that news to anyone, ever. It wasn’t like
being a surgeon, someone who’d trained for this moment and expected it. And then, my God, two other kids the same year.
Jungian
The products of that night’s insomnia:
Half-dreams about you and Thalia, you looking into the dumpster, you keeping Thalia hidden in your house all these years. You morphing into the guy who assaulted me in college.
Puja
Her overdose two years later at Sarah Lawrence—I always wondered if it was related.
(“What did Thalia say when she found out she was pregnant? I wonder if it’s mine.”)
Jasmine Wilde. Real name. She’s a performance artist in Brooklyn now. And her, ah—apparently her new piece is about me.” “What do you mean ‘piece’?”
Listen to what predator Jerome Wager put her
thru.
It was an uncomfortable echo of the way I’d had to recast every memory of Omar, twenty-three years back. And the way, over the past day, I’d been turning memories of you in the light, looking at their ugly backsides, the filthy facets long hidden.
Bodie Kane and I separated a few years ago, he wrote. Please leave her out of it. He was classy. Or at least I’d always thought so.
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.
lightning loves a scarred tree.
I decided to google you.
I wrote: Remember how we always said Denny Bloch was involved with students? Do you think that was true?
I contributed details about Brian Wynn, the boy I’d quasi slept with in Indiana that summer,
and his rodent-like penis, which lay on his stomach half-hard and pulsing.
Even nervous Brian Wynn, that summer, had been the one to undo his belt, push my head down with his sweaty hand.
Yahav wrote that he could come up Saturday—the day after tomorrow.
(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.)
He saw you leaning too close to Thalia, your hand on her elbow. He noticed the way she looked at you, tilting her face down, her eyes up.
