Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of suicide, self-harm, disordered eating, and sexual assault.

“For the journalists of the future, it would mean endless easy metaphors. Boarding school as kingdom in the woods, Thalia as enchantress, Thalia as princess, Thalia as martyr. What could be more romantic? What’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.”

As Bodie remembers Thalia Keith’s death and her last performance of Camelot at Granby, she links Thalia’s multiple roles to the way the murdered student will ultimately be remembered. As the novel makes clear, part of the mystery about Thalia’s death revolves around who she was in life. Her true self can never really be known, for just as Kurt Cobain is frozen forever in the 1990s, Thalia’s life is frozen at Granby. The roles she played in the theater production on the last night of her life serve as a fitting metaphor for how victims of sexual assault, murder, and violence are memorialized: reduced to embodying simplistic labels of innocent or guilty, or else functioning as vessels for the memories and feelings of those who remain alive.

“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,