I Have Some Questions for You

“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.”

Describing her obsessive research on the internet, Bodie recounts how harmful these digital mazes can be for her mental health. Noting how serious and complex these rabbit holes can be, Bodie pushes back at the image of blond Alice falling into a wondrous world. Instead, rabbit holes are places where searchers lose themselves and feel the walls close in, foreshadowing the pressures and pain of researching Thalia’s murder.

“Fifteen-year-old Bodie might have fallen on the ice, might have been breakable or broken, might have drunk herself to sleep one night by the Kurt shrine and woken up half-frozen, terrified she could have killed herself, wondering if this had actually been her intention. But forty-year-old Bodie had her act together, had long been in control of her body and mind. And here was the cold ground, rising up to remind me how easy it was to slip.”

As Bodie returns to Granby, encountering the winter again, the snow and ice symbolize how little has changed for her. She has a husband (estranged), children, and a career, but the ice and snow on campus remains treacherous for her, just as her investigations will prove equally treacherous. Rebecca Makkai’s use of ice to represent ever-present and inescapable danger also suggests how little control Bodie has over her life, whether as a teenager or an adult.

“‘Oh God,’ Madame Mancio said, ‘anything. Mostly it’s families threatening to sue. Suspensions, grades, negligence, the kid didn’t get into the right college, a coach didn’t put the kid on varsity. I wish I were kidding. All those lawyers the school pays? They’re busy.’”

After Petra claims that all schools, including Granby, get sued, Granby’s French teacher Priscilla responds to Bodie’s question as to why this is true. Priscilla diminishes the reality, as Bodie later discovers. The lawyers aren’t just for defense, but for offense. Omar claims Granby’s money and lawyers are one of the reasons he’s serving time for a crime he didn’t commit.

“I wasn’t furious with you yet. That would come later. For now, you were simply an audience. Don’t be flattered. I didn’t understand yet that I was there on your trail, that I wanted answers from you. But the subconscious has a funny way of working things out.”

In speaking to Mr. Dennis Bloch, a music teacher at Granby and Bodie’s erstwhile mentor, Bodie foreshadows how she revises her view of him. Bodie addresses Bloch throughout the entire novel, thus creating a type of podcast script addressed directly to Bloch as though he were in fact capable of hearing, considering, and responding to her angry accusations. This stylistic choice has the effect of keeping even the “absent” characters present throughout the course of the novel, forcing them, in some way, to stand accused and judged for the crimes they successfully committed…even though no such justice is forthcoming.

“Robbie wasn’t mean to anyone; it was more that he tended to pass through the halls like a Zamboni, gliding straight ahead and expecting everyone to move out of his way.”

Comparing Robbie to a Zamboni (a brand of ice resurfacer, a machine that cleans and smooths ice sheets), Bodie highlights not only his seemingly smooth movement but also the violence that movement hides. By smoothing out worn ice, a Zamboni allows skaters to glide with no resistance, foreshadowing what Robbie does to Thalia.

“This Robbie grabs Thalia’s neck, shakes her, just wants to shake sense into her, needs to shake her against something hard, against this wet and slippery wall, and he feels like an animal, feels like when he’s flying down a hill in snow, when the fire flows into his muscles, when his body is a machine. He doesn’t tell his body what to do because it knows, it follows the hill, it follows gravity, and that’s what he’s doing now, following gravity, until Thalia starts seizing, her eyes rolling back. She slides to the bottom of the stall, the water washing the blood on the wall from red to pink to nothing.”

Makkai uses machines as metaphors elsewhere in the novel, and in similar ways. In this quotation that details Bodie’s imagined version of Robbie murdering killing Thalia, Bodie compares his possible actions to a machine, mindless and unstoppable. Perhaps trying to explain the dynamics of the murder itself, Bodie envisions him as mindless and animalistic, driven by impulse and programming. Together with the other mention of male abuse as a machine, this image highlights the pervasive danger of gender-based violence.

“I understand: It’s human instinct to put yourself at the heart of a disaster. Not even for attention, but because it feels true. Someone who was supposed to fly the day after 9/11 was, in the retelling, supposed to fly that very day. He was on his way to the airport, in fact. He was in the airport. He’s not claiming he was booked on one of those flights, nothing like that, he just moves himself a few steps closer to the departure gate.”

Discussing the accusations against Jerome on Twitter, Bodie suggests that belief and empathy complicate how truth functions. Because memories are notoriously faulty, such nebulous evidence creates endless complications in the serious endeavor of verifying accusations and bringing justice to bear against the true wrongdoers in any given situation.

“She stood, started tossing clothes from her bag into her dresser. ‘Let’s just say that Robbie Serenho is a little bitch.’ She and Robbie had been dating since November—happily, I thought. She pointed at me and squinted. ‘Don’t ever date Robbie Serenho. He’s an angry little sexist bitch.’ She chucked Hamlet from the bag to her desk.”

Returning early from Feb Week, from a skiing trip, Thalia rails against Robbie, suggesting how possessive, violent, and angry he can be. As Thalia throws Hamlet on her desk, Makkai’s implied message becomes clear. Robbie performs, and, like Hamlet, acts cruelly toward his romantic partner, who then dies in the water, just like Ophelia.

“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.”

Bodie remembers reading a message in Thalia’s yearbook to D.B., and later realizes that it’s a quotation from Oklahoma! that proves that Bloch and Thalia were having an affair. She only sees “Don’t start collecting things,” before she recalls that the music teacher would have understood the musical reference.

“I did it myself. I don’t remember it. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I did it in a fit of jealousy and I blocked it from my mind completely, and all the subconscious tugs bringing me back to Granby, leading me to this moment, came from the molten core of guilt in my soul.”

Bodie narrates the novel as though she’s speaking directly to Bloch and makes it a point to imagine how different suspects might have killed Thalia. This particular quotation is taken from a section in which Bodie whimsically imagines herself as Thalia’s murderer, although it isn’t so. While this vision remains the most far-fetched, it nevertheless points to the complicity that many feel at Granby, unwilling to see or help Thalia until it’s too late.

“Loose ends on the Rita Hayworth episodes I might never finish. The way her flamenco dancer father took her on the road at age four, abusing her physically and sexually, setting her up for a lifetime of terrible relationships.”

Avoiding Twitter, Bodie recalls all the things she could and should do. Although Bodie worries that her actions have irreparably damaged her podcast with Lance, she still imagines that she might be able to complete her episode on Rita Hayworth. Calling attention to Hayworth’s abuse from her father, Bodie links Hayworth’s situation to Thalia and others at Granby. Like Hayworth who dances to escape the pain she experienced dancing, Granby represents both prison and escape.

“Maybe I was falling into that thinking again, but the universe seemed to be pointing me in such an obvious direction: Bring me back to Granby, throw Britt and Alder in my path, take away Yahav, take away any stability Jerome had once provided. Give me Thalia’s yearbook quote and the dots in her planner and show me Beth Docherty’s flask. And what was left in front of me but one clear path?”

Bodie describes her time at Granby to Oliver, the visiting teacher, and starts to see a deeper purpose in her own return. As her life falls apart, Bodie sees an earlier echo of her disordered life at Granby, entertaining the notion that perhaps these events are fated.

“She reached into the tote bag hanging on her chair and pulled out an ancient spiral bound Granby planner, the green cover worn to pulp. I received it gently, worried it would disintegrate. Inside, though, everything looked brand new, as if Thalia might at any moment cross off one commitment and enter another in her neat, loopy writing.”

Meeting Thalia’s younger sister Vanessa at a coffee shop in Lowell, Massachusetts, Bodie examines Thalia’s Granby planner. The planner seems frozen in time, except for the decayed and worn cover, and Bodie expects to see Thalia write in it at any moment. As a metaphor for Thalia’s battered body and preserved presence, the planner conveys how Thalia’s life ends suddenly and prematurely.

“You shower, something you often do at night because you prefer to fall asleep with your hair wet like you did as a child. You return to bed, curl yourself around her body, hold her like a buoy.”

As Bodie imagines a scenario in which Bloch kills Thalia, she retraces his hypothetical steps after the murder. In Bodie’s imagination, Bloch leaves Thalia’s body in a pool and returns home to shower and hold onto his wife, like a buoy to keep himself from drowning. Thus, water symbolizes not only Thalia’s resting place and Bloch’s potential guilt but also his attempts to wash that guilt away.

“The hell of imprisonment isn’t the terrible food, it’s the lack of choice of food. It isn’t the cold, wet floors, it’s that you can’t choose another place to stand. It isn’t the confinement so much as the fact of never running, never getting in your car and speeding off, as Omar loved to do.”

As Bodie considers what Bloch has taken from Omar, she catalogues the smallness of Omar’s existence and the restrictions that define it. Highlighting the fact that Bloch remains free, her characterization of confinement also stresses that Bloch may possibly go on to prey on students again.

“He had the wild eyebrows of an aging man, long gray strands emerging from the dark ones in a way that oddly suited him. His brow ridge, the one Fran used to call Neanderthal, was now marked by a deep skin crease. But he looked somehow cheesy overall, too handsome to take seriously.”

Bodie contemplates Mike’s appearance as an older man, noting that the same attributes that seemed perfect and attractive when he was young now appear silly and almost too perfect. Thus, the inherent inauthenticity of his physical appearance calls his good guy persona into question, for just like his looks, the characterization does not fit the hidden reality of who and what he is: a complicit member of the corrupt institutions that condemned Omar and shielded Robbie for the crime of Thalia’s murder.

“It did, it mattered to me, because I could still feel Peewee Walcott’s fingers digging into my right breast. Which meant he’d grabbed Carlotta’s left breast. And although it made no sense at all, I knew he had damaged her, had planted something in her that would, twenty-five years later, mutate her cells, turn her body against itself. It was impossible, but it was true.”

Carlotta develops inoperable breast cancer, and Bodie irrationally links the onset of this disease to the abuse and harassment that she and Carlotta experienced at Granby. Thinking back specifically to Peewee’s physical violation of them, Bodie compares the toxic masculinity at Granby to a disease and infection that kills women both quickly and slowly.

“Your name had been sitting in my throat for four years, waiting to get out. I’d been waiting four years to see Omar, to look him in the eyes. I didn’t want or expect anything from him; I just wanted to see his face.”

Bodie wants to go to the courtroom during the hearing for a new trial, to see Omar. Feeling guilty and complicit in his unjust confinement, Bodie seeks to face the consequences of her teenage self.

“I told him the story, which he’d surely once known: I’d been hanging out in the art studio as she finished a clay bust of Frida Kahlo, when Dorian Culler invited himself in, sat on the edge of the big metal table, tried juggling some of the thick acrylic paint tubes. We ignored him as we’d ignore a mountain lion we met in the woods, hoping our silence would cloud our scent.”

As Carlotta works on a clay bust of a famous female Mexican painter, she takes revenge on Bodie’s tormenter, painting his face blue, marking him literally as different and an outsider. Before Carlotta paints Dorian’s face, Bodie remembers their interactions as tense and calm, viewing him as animalistic and dangerous.

“I’d believed for so many years that it was Omar, that it was settled, even as my doubts about the case against him—and my suspicions about you—started pecking at me, a bird ready to escape its shell. And then the shell cracked, it fell to pieces, and the only plausible explanation was it was you.”

Bodie reflects on her own inner transformation as she ceases to believe in Omar’s guilt and in Bloch’s innocence. Imagining this change as a birth or maturation, Bodie employs a metaphor of a baby bird escaping its shell.

“I deployed myself that night as a weapon. A spy, in the grand tradition of women who trade sex, or the promise of sex, for secrets. Only I was wearing pajama pants and a USC sweatshirt, and all I did was text Mike Stiles.”

Preparing to meet Mike Stiles in her hotel for a drink, Bodie half-jokingly pretends to be a spy, moving figuratively from the backstage to a key role in the action. In this new role, Bodie prepares to flirt with Mike, who was an actor while at Granby and still performs the role of a good guy interested only in justice. In this scene, Bodie is fully prepared to compromise her own ethics to find the truth.

“I thought of a friend in LA who’d said recently, of her own daughter, ‘It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming. Seventh grade’s gonna hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter.”

Regardless of the strides women have made in a post-#MeToo world, Bodie recognizes the danger and the structural issues of abuse and harassment that await her daughter as she grows up. Recalling that a friend in LA admitted some complicity in not preparing her own daughter for the hell that awaits, Bodie imagines how the world sacrifices and consumes women, from Rita Hayworth to Beth, Bodie, and Thalia.

“There are things I can’t stop imagining: Robbie’s face turning red with rage. His pupils, dilated huge in the dark. The sound of a cracking skull. The look of horror and desperation on her face. The weight of a body, even one that thin. Her regaining a moment of consciousness when he dropped her in the water. Her knowing this was it, this was the whole world leaving her.”

Bodie’s final scenario of Thalia’s death, the second that involves Robbie, terrifies her as she compares their faces and describes the images and sounds of Thalia’s murder. Stressing the brutality of Thalia’s murder, Bodie speculates that Thalia awakens from her beating as she hits the water and recognizes that her death is imminent.