I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai

I have opinions about their deaths, ones I’m not entitled to. I’m queasy, at the same time, about the way they’ve become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I’m queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs.

What bothers me now is those boys internalizing girls as audience, there only to act as mirrors, to make their accomplishments realer.)

Let’s pause and acknowledge that in my twenty-four hours at Granby, I’d had three separate conversations about Thalia Keith. Last night and just now, I’d brought it up myself. And while Britt had found the story on her own, that didn’t change the fact that I’d put it right in that emailed list. If Thalia was following me around, it was in the way bees follow someone who happens to have slathered their hands in honey.

She looks so much like 1975 that you can’t imagine what life she might have lived outside it.