“I should get back in there. Kennedy hates being left alone.”
“You know”—I paused, thinking over what I was about to say—“I’m actually going down to OSU tomorrow to do some research. If you give me the title of that book, I could grab it for you.”
“Really?”
“It’s no big deal. Sawyer faculty have borrowing privileges.” I hadn’t planned to visit the archives until I’d had some time with the autobiography, but maybe this was impetus to stop procrastinating. “I could leave it here for you to pick up.”
Tyler looked down, then past me. I wondered if my offer was too much, a gaudy and misplaced eagerness to please. But I felt suddenly important—and I didn’t want the feeling to end.
“I don’t know if this is okay to ask,” Tyler said, “but could I come with you?”
“To Columbus?”
“A change of scenery sounds really nice.” In the moment as I took in his request, a shadow of distress passed over his face. “I shouldn’t have asked. That’s totally weird.”
“No, it’s not weird. It’s fine.” I thought it over. And inside that thought, another pushed through: Don’t think too much. “Sure. Why not?”
“You wouldn’t mind me tagging along?”
“I wouldn’t mind at all.”
At Tyler’s suggestion, we arranged to meet the next morning off-campus—just a few blocks away, but it felt like miles; this was townie territory. An enormous, mostly vacant parking lot surrounded asmall plaza of shops. Side by side sat a liquor store, a doughnut place, a laundromat, and an empty storefront; the punched-out awning above announced its former tenant, a Chinese restaurant. No sign of Tyler. Maybe he wouldn’t show. I checked the time. Just a few minutes late.
And then he stepped out of the doughnut shop, a coffee in each hand. I pushed opened the door—embarrassed a bit by the state of my car, which felt on the brink of another breakdown. Tyler climbed in, laughing. “Thanks.” He raised one of the cups. “I didn’t know if you would want any?”
“That’s nice, thank you.”
Tyler passed it to me and I could smell the scalded heat of it. He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. An orange plastic vial; prescription pills. With just one hand gripping the bottle, he popped the cap, shook out a pill, and tossed it back. He swallowed it dry and looked over at me. My eyes shot away; I felt I’d been watching something I shouldn’t.
But if Tyler cared, he didn’t let on. “Adderall,” he said. “I keep getting off them then going back on.” I wanted to say he didn’t have to explain anything, but before I could speak, he pointed ahead. “Have you ever been inside?”
“The doughnut place? No.”
“It’s kind of crazy in there. It’s covered in posters from Poland, I think. Like tourism posters? But the photos are really awkward and ugly. It doesn’t really make you want to visit.”
“Honestly, I didn’t even know about this place.”
“That’s kind of why I like it. There’s never anyone from Sawyer over here.”
After getting home from the library the night before, I almost emailed Tyler to cancel. But then I worried about creating evidencea plan had even existed. In a panic, I tore through my hall closet for my copy of the faculty handbook—shoved on a high shelf, never opened. Trips with students out of town for academic purposes were fine, and only overnights, for athletic events or conferences or group outings, required prior approval. So we were doing nothing forbidden. But I wondered if the anonymity of our meeting spot was why Tyler had chosen it. Did he mean to keep our day a secret?
I pulled from the lot and drove through town, eyeing the speedometer, driving at exactly the limit. Columbus was almost ninety minutes away and I’d been nervous about the ride; it felt like a lot of time to fill. But Tyler was absolutely at ease. He asked if he could put on the radio and clicked through the buttons, landing for a moment and then punching to another station and settling there. “I love this song.”
We turned onto the freeway and sailed along. Traffic was light; it was always light. The outskirts of Sawyer gave way to smaller towns and Mennonite communities. We passed a stretch of farms, some active, others fallow, and some bought out by agricultural giants only to be shut down.
“You’re going to do some research today?” he asked, and I nodded. “What about?”
I explained my book was about popular narratives of murder cases involving gay suspects. My research kind of jumped around in time and place, which made it feel a bit unwieldy. But I was trying to track something about shifts in how we think about queerness. He asked for an example of what I meant. “Like Andrew Cunanan—do you know who that is?” He shook his head no. “He killed this fashion designer, Gianni Versace. Shot him dead in front of his mansion in Miami Beach.” I explained this was 1997, when there was still all this early panic about AIDS, mixed up with racistanti-immigrant discourse. “All that kind of shaped how Cunanan’s story was told. There was this totally fabricated theory that he found out he had HIV and so went on this killing spree. And the media was obsessed with his so-called ‘inscrutable ethnicity,’ like that was a crime, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“People couldn’t immediately tell what his background was. And he made up different versions, for different places. For a while he was telling everyone he was Jewish. He kind of messed with people’s assumptions.”
Tyler laughed. “He sounds like a Tom Ripley.”
I smiled. “He was a bit.” In fact, I was writing about parallels between the Highsmith novel and Cunanan’s story. I was pleased Tyler picked up on the connection.
“That’s cool,” he said. “I mean, not the murdering.” He laughed. “But the project. I hope it’s okay that I asked.”
