Anne returned and we poured new drinks and the evening turned to a sort of retroactive gossip session. (Wait, remember Dani Michalek? Remember how she tried to pierce her own nose and it got so infected? Yeah, and she had to go home for a month. We were paired for lab and I didn’t do a thing. She hated me. Me too. Whatever happened to her? Didn’t I tell you? She’s a Lutheran minister!)
Anne’s encouraging laughter, her bewildered questions, egged us on. If she hadn’t been there, we might’ve said “Remember the Kurt shrine?” and left it at that. But with Anne present, we wound up describing for her sake (and really each other’s) the elaborate shrine we’d built to Kurt Cobain in the woods junior year, and tended from the time he overdosed and was hospitalized (early March, when we wore thick gloves to tack cutout magazine photos to the frozen tree) to the time he died by suicide in April. By then other people knew about the shrine, and the day after his body was discovered, Fran and I found messages and more magazine photos and a Mylar heart balloon and what looked like a leftover Spring Dance corsage stuck to the tree as well.
“We were so in love with him,” I said, and then it occurred to me that Fran probably hadn’t been, actually. “Or I was.”
“Oh, I loved him,” Fran said. She was drunker than me. “But I was in love with Courtney. Kurt was my beard.”
Dessert was caramelized bananas with vanilla ice cream—Anne still sober enough to manage things at the stove, to ignore our demands that she light the bananas on fire—and the more into arcane details we got, and the more lost but patient Anne was, the more hilarious everything became.
I was always my funniest self around Fran, or at least she found me funny. We met in world history our freshman year, and didn’t talk at first, just flopped into adjacent desks most days out of seating inertia. I’d squirmed through September without any real friends, eating my meals at the corner of a long table of assorted freshmen, watching them splinter off into actual friend groups and knowing I’d soon be alone. There was a kid named Benjamin Scott who’d established himself early as the genius of our grade—a tall blond kid who, from the way he referenced books none of us knew, seemed to have arrived at Granby following a couple of PhDs. Someone must have made a joke in class about killing Benjamin, or Benjamin dying, because what I said, under my breath, was “If you die, can I have your grades?” Fran was the only one who heard me. She snickered and looked around and said, loudly, “Yeah, Benji, if you die, can I have your grades?” And (a miracle!) the class cracked up. Even Benjamin Scott laughed sheepishly. After class, Fran ran up beside me in the hall. “Don’t hate me,” she said. “It was too good a line to waste.”
From then on, I made sure Fran could hear my asides, the things I usually wouldn’t even have said aloud. She never repeated me again, but she’d smirk or cover her laughter with coughing. Because Fran had claimed the classroom’s only left-handed desk, our writing surfaces abutted and we didn’t have to pass notes, could just scribble in our own textbook margins.
Where are you even from? she wrote once, and I wrote back West Bumblefuck, which was original enough to us at the time to be amusing. No one had ever found me particularly entertaining before. It was intoxicating.
Fran had a different lunch block than me and lived with her parents rather than in a dorm room, played field hockey while I rowed crew, so it took a while for us to become friends outside of class. When we did, though, it was natural. We could already read each other’s handwriting. She started coming to my room to study for our history midterm, and then for other exams. And then she was shrieking at me because I didn’t know who the Pixies were, and then we were best friends.
Neither of us dated anyone the whole time at Granby—Fran because she was closeted and assumed she was the only lesbian in New Hampshire; me because I had a pathological aversion to risking rejection and humiliation in a place where I was already only hanging on to the edge. I needed to keep Granby pristine. Indiana was the place where bad things happened; Granby had to be a place where nothing could hurt me. The second my heart got broken in New Hampshire, the whole place would crumble. In the summers, I dated a few guys. But not at Granby, not even for a dance. Fran would gather a group for Homecoming, a phalanx of the dateless, and I’d join, wearing Chucks with my dress so everyone knew I wasn’t serious. Because neither of us dated, we didn’t have those months apart when one person eats lunch only with her boyfriend. When Fran and I got bored of each other, we’d just add another friend to the inner circle. Carlotta French, Geoff Richler, a Polish student named Blanka who was glued to our hips for the entirety of her one semester in the US.
For some reason, that night we started listing classmates who’d died since school. We didn’t do this with the gravitas it deserved—but remember that we were drunk, and it was part of the general reminiscing.
Zach Huber, a year above us, crashed in a helicopter in Iraq. Puja Sharma, who fled Granby a few weeks before graduation, died of a pill overdose two years later in her Sarah Lawrence dorm. Kellan TenEyck, just that previous spring, had been found in his car at the bottom of a lake. He was divorced and alcoholic and had, generally, a terrible life. He’d seemed so happy at Granby, so unremarkable. He had red hair that would flop in his face when he ran for the lacrosse ball.
We’d counted eight of our classmates dead, and then Fran said, “But three kids dying senior year has to be the record.”
“Except maybe in, like, World War II,” I said. But no, I was thinking of college. High school students didn’t go to war. Maybe I was trying to change the subject. I hadn’t told Fran the extent to which Thalia had been on my mind, how talking every week for my podcast about dead and disenfranchised women in early Hollywood, about a system that tossed women out like old movie sets, had helped bring back Thalia’s death: the way her body had been cast aside, the way Granby distanced itself from the mess, the way her murder had made her public property.
“Wait,” Anne said. She was at the sink, already scrubbing dishes. “Three died, out of the whole school, or only your year?”
Only our year, we confirmed. “It’s not like there were other dead kids in other grades,” Fran added. “Three died, and they were all our class.”
“Three out of a class of, what, a hundred twenty? That’s absurd.”
“Two together,” I said, “just a month before graduation. Two guys drove up to Quebec to drink, and they went off the road on the way back. And of course Thalia Keith, a couple months earlier.”
“Jesus,” Anne said. “I knew about Thalia, but not the others. Hell of a senior year.”
“Graduation was weird,” I said. And for some reason, Fran and I both found that hilarious, both lost it while Anne stood watching, soapy scrubber in hand.
4
The lights of the Old Chapel tower illuminated long, geometric patches of snow on the quad—the opposite of shadows. They were so beautiful that I avoided stepping on them. The tequila maybe helped my appreciation.