Love in the Time of Serial Killers(12)

Still, twenty-five minutes could be the difference between best friends forever and barely acquaintances when you didn’t drive yet. Alison and I had done our best to stay in touch, mostly by texting or through the phone, and I tried to see her in person when I could. But it wasn’t the same.

I also always had the feeling that her parents didn’t like her hanging out with me as much once my parents got divorced. Alison’s parents had doted on her—I don’t know if it was an only-child thing, or an adopted-child thing, or simply the right combination of neurotic parents with a child who never gave them any actual trouble. But they were very protective. They didn’t like Alison watching Disney Channel shows because they said that there weren’t strong enough parental figures in them.

And then there had been the Incident.

I’d been spending the weekend at my dad’s. Pretty much that meant I was holed up in my room, switching between fan fiction and Murderpedia tabs while I messaged back and forth with Alison. I didn’t even know how it had come up, but I’d made some joke about how I was going to swallow a bottle of pills.

Obviously, I know now that it’s really insensitive and shitty to joke about something like that. But at the time, I’d meant it as a dramatic way to say I was bored, or restless, or sick of something. It definitely hadn’t been an actual plan.

But I guessed something made Alison take it that way. She called my mom, my mom called my dad, and not long after that I’d convinced my mom that maybe I didn’t need to go over to my dad’s twice a month, or even at all.

I shouldn’t have made the joke. I knew that. And Alison had been trying to be a good friend. But I couldn’t help but be angry at the way she’d reacted—the way she’d overreacted, in my mind—and the sequence of events it had set in motion. Maybe that wasn’t fair. It didn’t change the way I’d felt then.

I closed the box and put it back up on the closet shelf. I’d look through it later, when I went through the room to clean it out. For now, I didn’t have the energy to excavate any more of the past.





FIVE





MY ADVISOR HAD wanted to have a call before I turned in my next chapter, so after I’d worked on weaving a few more quotes and examples throughout, I emailed her to set up a time. To my surprise, she got back to me right away with Now works for me.

Dr. Nilsson was intimidating as hell. She’d taught that first-year bibliography class we all had to take, and had a reputation for taking absolutely no shit. I’d seen her glance at her watch while you were rambling around a point. I’d seen some of the most articulate scholars I knew—people who made me feel like an imposter, like there’d been some mix-up in the mail system and someone had sent Billy Madison to grad school—start stammering and going red in the face as they lost the thread of their argument under her withering stare. Her expertise was in Virginia Woolf, and our final project had been a scavenger hunt around the university library to find answers to all these esoteric questions about Woolf texts, like how many copies of this were in existence or what edition contained this annotation or where were the original letters she wrote to this person housed.

I’d barely eked out the B-minus I needed in the class to keep my GPA up, but she had once written on a response paper of mine that it was freewheeling in a way that seemed like a compliment. So when I was searching the department for someone—anyone—who might be willing to let me study true crime for my dissertation, she’d come to mind.

“Dr. Nilsson, hi,” I said, adjusting my earbuds to make sure the mic part was close enough to my mouth. The longer I’d known Dr. Nilsson, the more I suspected that some of her what are you talking about faces in class were due to hearing difficulties rather than just her being difficult. “It’s Phoebe Walsh.”

“Phoebe,” she said in her cool, cutting voice. “I understand you have another chapter for me. What did you want to discuss?”

This was what she did every time, without fail. She asked me for a call, and then immediately put me on the spot, as though I’d asked for it. This set me up beautifully for inevitably disappointing her with my inarticulate and ill-thought-out questions. I could almost hear her thinking, Why did she call for a meeting if she wasn’t prepared?

“Well,” I said, searching for something that hopefully sounded reasonably intelligent. “I really focus on Bugliosi’s book in this one—remember, he was the prosecutor in the Manson trial. But I didn’t know if I should weave in my analysis of the Gacy book, the one written by his defense lawyer, to contrast their approaches. Or if I should include more from the book by the prosecutor in the Avery case. That one editorializes so much more, it’s wild, but I guess that’s what happens when Nancy Grace writes your foreword—”

“I’ll have to read it,” Dr. Nilsson said, cutting me off. “And then I can give you more feedback on your approach.”

It took all my strength not to say That’s exactly why I didn’t need this call in the first place. Instead, I just clicked “send” on the email with the draft attached. “Okay,” I said. “Sounds good. You should have the draft in your inbox.”

“Excellent,” she said, but she already sounded distracted. “Now let’s talk about your job application materials. What do you have ready—your CV, your teaching philosophy, sample student syllabi and assignments . . . ?”