down at his plate, avoiding her deadly pout. Picking at the remnants of his asian chicken salad, he says, “I’m not trying to manipulate you, Carolyn. I just need a few days to work a couple things out. I’ll tell you everything. Soon. I promise.”
33/ WAS WHAT IT WAS
May 11, 2007—5:28 p.m.
WHEN HE’S “CHILLING” IN HIS BED, LIKE HE’S DOING NOW, or at the gym lifting weights, or just walking alone between classes, it comes to him in little flashbacks, like the ones he’s used to seeing in movies: Watkins’s maniacal smile, Kristen’s lifeless face, the stain on the bed sheet, the pounding beat of the Chemical Brothers. They appear for an instant, solitary and fleeting.
The flashbacks don’t haunt him exactly. No, he concludes, they don’t rack him with guilt, because when someone kills herself, you feel the worst about what you last said to her, less about what came before. But in recent days, the flashbacks have come more frequently and intensely; the thought that they’re there, suddenly indelible and inescapable, makes him think of what Watkins said, that the dead don’t remember—but they have a habit of making people not forget.
The other day he watched enviously as Fleischman used the video-editing program on his Mac to slice and dice footage he’d shot with his camcorder. Fleischman showed him how you dragged the marker to a certain point on the story line, hit your mouse button, dragged it to another point, hit the mouse button again, then the delete key, and presto, the section was gone, instantly eliminated.
He imagined that instead of Fleischman’s footage in the computer, they were working on his. A couple of cuts later, just a five-minute sequence here, a two-minute sequence there, and everything would have been fine, the way it should have been—though, of course, there was no way to erase what happened later at the doctor’s home. He didn’t own that footage.
If you asked Watkins, he’d say it was just a question of how you looked at the tape. If he really had the footage there in front of him, he’d say look, she initiated the action. She kissed him. And while she may have been out of it, she wasn’t really unconscious. Not totally anyway.
He’d sometimes wanted to tell her. If he kept Watkins out of it, he thought he could somehow make it OK. He’d even suggested that to Watkins, to try to get him off his back. “If she doesn’t remember,” he said, “why can’t I make the memory for her? I’ll say we hooked up. I’ll make it nice. It’ll be between her and me. You’ll be out of it.”
Watkins didn’t trust him to pull it off. He’d fuck it up somehow. And furthermore, he didn’t see the point. It was an unnecessary risk. Nothing happened. It was as simple as that.
He was right. But just a week before she died, he couldn’t resist making an impetuous foray.
“I want to ask you something personal,” he’d said to Kristen. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.”
They were sitting in his car in front of her house. It was early evening and still light out.
“Ask,” she replied, “and I’ll decide.”
He put his hands on the steering wheel, gripping it tightly. “When you were a kid, how did you think you’d lose your virginity?”
She smiled. “I don’t know. I guess I was of the romantic school. The long-term boyfriend thing. But I wasn’t all obsessed by it or anything.”
He nodded, plotting his next question, but before he could formulate it, she asked, “How about you, how’d you think you’d lose it?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Lots of ways, I guess. I wasn’t picky.”
He must have turned red because she laughed and said, “You’re blushing. How cute. So, how’d you lose it?”
And there it was. The opening. The question he wanted, asked in just the right way.
“Oh, you know,” he said, looking straight ahead, out the windshield. “One of the guys at the frat hooked me up. I was pretty wasted and he got this girl to go up to his room with me. I actually don’t remember much. Just that it was kind of awkward and not all that long.”
He didn’t look over at her as he spoke, but even in profile, he must have appeared tense, because he heard her say, “You don’t seem OK with it.”
“It was what it was.”
“Did you ever speak to her again?”
Now he looked at her. He was at the edge. He was there, staring