Imagine me (remember me), fifteen, sixteen, dressed in black even when I wasn’t backstage, my taped-up Doc Martens, the dark, wispy hair fringing my Cabbage Patch face; imagine me, armored in flannel, eyes ringed thick with liner, passing the pay phone and—without looking—picking it up, twirling it upside down, hanging it back the wrong way.
That was only at first, though; by junior year, I couldn’t pass one without picking up the receiver, pressing a single number, and listening—because there was at least one phone on which, if you did this, you could hear another conversation through the static. I discovered the trick when I started to call my dorm from the gym lobby phone to ask if I could be late for 10:00 checkin, but after I pressed the first button I heard a boy’s voice, muffled, half volume, complaining to his mother about midterms. She asked if he’d been getting his allergy shots. He sounded whiny and homesick and about twelve years old, and it took me a while to recognize his voice: Tim Busse, a hockey player with bad skin but a beautiful girlfriend. He must have been on a pay phone in his own dorm common, across the ravine. I didn’t understand what rules of telecommunications allowed this to occur, and when I told my husband this story once, he shook his head, said, “That couldn’t happen.” I asked if he was accusing me of lying, or if he thought I’d been hearing voices. “I just mean,” Jerome replied evenly, “that it couldn’t happen.”
I stood in the gym lobby mesmerized, not wanting to miss a word. But eventually I had to; I called my own dorm, asked the on-duty teacher for ten extra minutes to run across campus and get the history book I’d left in Commons. No, she said, I could not. I had three minutes till checkin. I hung up, lifted the receiver again, pressed one number. There was Tim Busse’s voice still. Magic. He told his mother he was failing physics. I was surprised. And now I had a secret about him. A secret secret, one he hadn’t meant to share.
I had a sidelong crush after that on Tim Busse, to whom I’d never previously paid an ounce of attention.
In the following months I tried every pay phone on campus, but it was only the gym one that worked, and only if someone happened to be talking on a phone (maybe one specific phone) in Barton Hall.
Most of what I heard was indecipherable mumbling. Once I heard someone order pizza. Sometimes people spoke Korean or Spanish or German. Once I heard “Rhapsody in Blue,” the hold music for United Airlines. Sometimes I heard more interesting things, bits of information I held close. I knew that someone—I never figured out who—would be home for Passover but refused to go to Aunt Ellen’s house. I learned that someone else missed his girlfriend, no, really missed her, really, and no, he wasn’t seeing anyone else, he loved her, why was she being like that, stop being like that, didn’t she know he missed her?
We’re granted so few superpowers in life. This was one of mine. I could walk the halls knowing things none of those Barton Hall boys would voluntarily tell me. I knew Jorge Cardenas didn’t let himself drink when he was sad, because that was how alcoholism started, and he didn’t want to be like his father.
It would be convenient if I’d picked up that phone one day and heard something useful, something incriminating. Heard someone threatening Thalia, for instance. Or heard something about you.
But it was simply part of a broader habit: I collected information about my peers the way some people hoard newspapers. I hoped this would help me become more like them, less like myself—less poor, less clueless, less provincial, less vulnerable.
Every summer, I’d bring home the yearbook and mark each student’s photo with a special code of colored checkmarks: whether I knew them, considered them a friend, had a crush. Sometimes, in the depths of summer isolation, I’d look up people’s families in the school directory to learn their parents’ first names, with the sole purpose of lifting me, for a minute, out of a bedroom I hated in a house that wasn’t my own in a town where I didn’t know anyone anymore.
This doesn’t make me special, and I knew that then, too. I’m only saying it by way of explanation: I cared about details. Not because they were something I could control, but because they were something I could own.
And there was so little that was mine.
3
Fran and Anne had invited me for a late dinner, so I put on the snow boots I’d purchased for the trip and headed across South Bridge to Lower Campus. It was nine degrees out, the snow hard enough to walk across without sinking. I wondered if I’d pass people I knew, but I seemed to be the only living thing outdoors.
When I’d been back before, it was to limited parts of campus. I hadn’t crossed the bridges, entered academic buildings. The dimensions seemed off now; my memory, and my frequent Granby dreams, had moved things inch by inch. The statue of Samuel Granby had somehow moved ten feet uphill, for instance. I passed close, touched his foot with my glove for old times’ sake.
That fall, right after I’d accepted the invitation to teach, I woke thinking about the main street through town, the one with all the businesses, but couldn’t remember its name, so I googled Granby School map.
What I found, beyond the answer (Crown Street!), were detailed maps of campus as it was in March of 1995, maps people had marked with dotted lines representing their theories, the routes they’d charted through the woods. I knew Thalia’s murder had caught and held the public’s attention, but I hadn’t understood the sheer amount of time people were putting in.
Diving down online rabbit holes was not great for my mental health. (The night after I watched the Camelot video, I stayed up googling Granby classmates and faculty, and I googled facts about drowning, and I rewatched part of the Dateline episode. Finally Jerome woke up and saw my eyes and made me stop, told me to take a NyQuil and spend the morning in bed.) So I allowed myself only an hour to stare at the maps, to read what people were saying.
The term rabbit hole makes us think of Alice plummeting straight down, but what I mean is an actual rabbit warren, the kind with endless looping tunnels, branching paths, all the accompanying claustrophobia. It blew my mind how much people cared. To them, Thalia was a face from a few well-shared photos: a life barely sketched out, rather than a girl who smelled like that Sunflowers perfume, whose laugh sounded like hiccups, who’d toss herself onto her bed like a hand grenade.
But I’ve cared as much, I admit, about people I haven’t met. I care about Judy Garland and Natalie Wood and the Black Dahlia. I care about the lacrosse player murdered by her ex at UVA, and the girl whose boyfriend was definitely not working at LensCrafters that day, and the high school student killed in her boyfriend’s Shaker Heights backyard while everyone slept, and poor Martha Moxley, and the woman in the hotel elevator, and the only Black woman at the white-lady wine party, dead on the lawn, and the woman shot through the bathroom door by her famous boyfriend, who claimed he thought she was a burglar. 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. That I’m not alone in my fixations.