More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He asks why she won’t have sex, asks if it’s because she already had sex with someone today, asks if that person was you.
Every article about Thalia’s death had fixated on how Thalia and Robbie were the perfect prep school couple, moneyed and talented and privileged, and Omar Evans—no mention of his mother working at Dartmouth—was this outsider. That made the best narrative.
Dana Ramos made all of us sit still and look at plants.
Dane Rubra lived in Milwaukee, but had traveled to Granby five times—first on his own dime, then thanks to crowdfunding from his tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers.
A
room is never drunker than when you’re the sober person.
were onto the news story again. Mr. Levin joined them, and so did a man with a baby in his arms. The man said, “Did you see they have him on suicide watch?”
defenestrate
Deeb: When you know, you know. (I know you
know.) Don’t start collecting things. Robbie: My luuuuuv. You’re my 100% and my CHEEP! I won’t be far!
Deeb. I’d never heard anyone call you that, but it had to be you, in this place of honor between her family and Robbie.
He said, “It feels like you’re leading me farther from my car.” “Did you need to leave already?”
Don’t start collecting things, don’t start collecting things, and then I had the next line: People will say we’re in love. It was from Oklahoma!, from a song about people
who were, of course, actually in love. Fuck. Well, there it was. I didn’t need agreement from Fran or Carlotta: Thalia was telling me herself.
The realization that you, one of the best things about Granby, might have been not only a fraud, not only a predator, but—it was possible, I was finally letting it creep into view—a more violent kind of monster.
The news story had been getting to me, too, clawing at the edges of my dreams. The way no one would listen to her testimony. The way they mocked her victim impact statement. The way they read her diary aloud.
Maybe a rooster crowed three times.
Omar taught the rowers alternate-nostril breathing for meditation.
“Oh,” I said at the next shot. “That’s Mr. Hoffnung! That’s Ms. Hoffbart’s dad!”
She said, “Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess.”
anodyne.
I had the sudden
You don’t tell them that you know she wasn’t sleeping with Omar. You know the older guy her friends heard about was you. You don’t tell the police anything at all, except to give your own alibi and tell them what a lovely girl she was, what a promising student. A great kid, a great kid, a great kid. You’ve had to live with yourself for a quarter century.
I should have been listening to the students’ revised episodes—though I’d already decided to give them all As, regardless. Who was I to come in and blow someone’s GPA?
What happens when your only escape is the same thing you’re trying to escape? Here’s the soundtrack of your tragedy: Dance to it.
(Whether or not you did it was, for the time being, irrelevant. You weren’t about to confess, and we weren’t
about to find your fingerprints on the pool door after all these years. What mattered was the travesty of a case against Omar.)
because I couldn’t explain about the marks I made for Ace, the pay phone, the earnest séances, the way I took everything as a sign.
????
tried to remember if that fever was before or after my weeks of meltdown, my dangerous episode by the Kurt tree.
????
Let’s say it was your wife. Was it your wife?
a purple X. I turned the planner around for Vanessa. “Have you heard the name Denny Bloch?”
Back at Granby, everything was still—a snow globe no one had shaken in days.
It was after classes; Carlotta was practicing “These Are Days” on her guitar,
And I ended up by that tree in the woods. And I ended up hurting myself in slower ways, too. Loretta Young didn’t understand that Clark Gable had raped her.
The tree arms had turned to chaotic blurs, the scratchy handwriting of someone in a hurry, a doctor’s prescription only the pharmacist could read.
????
And then, on a frigid Wednesday in March of 2022, I was back.
The defense team had budgeted to fly me in from
California and put me up, but I paid my own way.
The best result would be the judge vacating the conviction, which would not mean Omar went free; it would mean back to square one, as if he’d just recently been arrested for Thalia’s death.
Geoff Richler, who hadn’t been subpoenaed, was
But it took only a few hours for the armchair detectives of Reddit to figure out who you were, after a Granby alum—I’ll never know who—eagerly spilled what “everyone knew” about you and Thalia.
Don’t get me wrong: I wanted your head on a pike. I
was just willing to wait.
I’d misread the scene as dramatically as Bendt Jensen had misunderstood the fireflies.
???
“We won’t have a chance to name Denny Bloch, then.”
