“Thanks so much.” I gulp in the fresh air as I clamber out.
All these years in DC, and this will be my first time on the Georgetown University campus. I check the map on my phone. I’m at the O Street entrance, so the Lauinger Library—where the archives are housed—should be impossible to miss.
It’s almost nine thirty on Wednesday morning. Eight days to go till the house is listed. As in, one week, one day. As in, I’d better dig up a fucking lead about Curt here or I’m about to lose everything.
Students crisscross the sprawling green in front of me like lines of ants in Doc Martens and backpacks. None of them look old enough to me to be in college, which means I must look prehistoric. The overcast sky makes the Gothic building looming just beyond the grass seem especially dreary. According to my map, that’s Healy Hall. Why do expensive private schools always look so haunted?
The library is off to the left, as I anticipated, and nothing like the architecture around it—a brutalist 1970s fortress plunked conspicuously among Victorian spires and stonework. I head straight for it.
Inside the special-collections wing on the fifth floor—where the archives are kept—a girl with an eyebrow ring sits at the front desk, reading a bent-up copy ofA Room of One’s Own.
“Hey there,” I say, smiling. “I’m hoping to see an old university yearbook.”
She lifts her eyes—but not her face. “Domesday book” is the only thing she says.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what they’re called here. Not yearbooks.”
Right. Some kind of weird old-money bullshit.
“Sure, that’s what I meant,” I say, the smile still in place. “I’d like to see the Domesday book from 2019, please.”
She nods and scribbles something on a yellow slip of paper. “The reading room is that way,” she says, gesturing around her desk. “You can wait in there.”
I walk down the hall till I reach a glass door, leading to an empty room with a long table in the center. The space is brightly lit and sterile-feeling. More hospital than Hogwarts—not at all how I imagined the Georgetown archives would look while I lay awake in bed last night, puzzling together this plan. I envisioned being led into a two-hundred-year-old candlelit cavern with millions of leather-bound volumes stacked all the way to the ceiling. (Omnipresent Harry Potter references are the cross I bear as a geriatric millennial.)
The yearbook idea occurred to me right after I got into bed. Ian was already passed out and I’d just switched off the TV. He snored next to me while I reread the email from nobody.noone97. The most promising clue I had, other than the location of the IP address, seemed to be those two digits at the end of the account name. I figured it could be a birth year, so I opened the calculator on myphone and did the math. Someone born in 1997 would have been a college senior in 2019.
It only took a few more minutes of sleuthing to confirm that Georgetown does, in fact, have yearbooks—I found an online order form for this year’s edition, which included a blurb with the stat that they’ve been published since 1908. Within a half hour, I’d figured out that every edition is kept in the campus archives, which, with the exception of the rarest items, are open to the public for research.
The longer I lay there considering it, the more likely it seemed that a young person, and not some crusty professor, would be emotional enough to fire off anonymous vitriol not once, but twice. And it’s safer to start with ex-students anyway. If I snoop around the wrong faculty member—someone who’s loyal to Curt—they’ll surely rat me out to him. I’ll take that risk if I have to. But not before trying this.
The girl appears, holding a thick book with a watercolor image on the cover that I recognize as Healy Hall. The words “Ye Domesday Booke 2019” are printed across it in an elaborate Old English font.
“Thanks,” I say, as she places it on the table in front of me. “Can I make copies of the pages somewhere?”
She offers a one-word reply—“No”—then turns to go.
“Uh, why not?” My question elicits an annoyed sigh.
“We don’t allow copies of archived materials. It can deteriorate them.”
Jesus Christ, it’s a three-year-old yearbook, not a first fucking edition. This is going to take way longer than I expected. As she leaves, I consider just stuffing the thing in my bag and walking out with it. But a fancy-ass school like this is probably wired to the tits with security cameras.
The yearbook is front-loaded with collages of student life. I flip quickly through basketball and field hockey games, kids huddledin self-serious-looking discussions, students lounging on the lawn on nice days. In short: images of freedom. Not that these kids likely had very much to be liberated from. Maybe an overbearing cello instructor. But that’s what I remember most about those glorious early days of college—the clean slate of it all, the feeling that I could finally make my own luck now that I was on my own.
In back, I find pages filled with thumbnail-size individual portraits, arranged by class. Judging by the student population numbers I saw online, there should be about fifteen hundred seniors. Unsurprisingly, not all of them sat for photos; some of the thumbnails are just gray placeholder boxes.
But the important details are all here. Beneath each one, whether it’s empty or filled with an eager face, both the student’s name and area of study are listed. The first of the lot that I’m interested in appears right away: Peter Abdo, Economics.He’s out of central casting for a future master-of-the-universe type—blond, broad-shouldered, blue-and-white gingham button-up. I jot his name down as fast as I can in my notepad, and wonder briefly about the acts of terrorism he and his frat bros probably committed.
In a little over an hour, having read every entry twice, I’m satisfied that I haven’t missed anyone. I have twenty-eight names on my list of economics majors who graduated in the year 2019—if I start today, and I eat in front of my computer, I should be able to track them all down well before the weekend.
I’m tucking my notepad back into my bag when my alarm blasts from inside of it, making me jump. I retrieve my phone from the side pocket, struggling to remember why I set it for 10:55, when a calendar notification displays the reason:Call Jordana!!
Right. How could I forget? I’m only supposed to save my job in five minutes.
I shut the yearbook and throw my bag over my shoulder. I speed-walk back down the hall and out of the special-collections wing; then I jog down the stairs because they’re a surer bet than waitingfor the elevator. Outside, it’s begun to lightly drizzle. I glance at my phone, still in my hand, just as it flips to 10:58. Plenty of time.
