THE WORLD HARVARD OFFERED WASN’T mine to keep. After graduating in late 2010 in an unmajestic off-cycle ceremony, I walked away from Jane’s story for almost two years.
I wanted to work in an office and to make a home for myself that fit better than Queens ever had. I moved away as far as I could, hoping that the sense of dislocation I had felt since I was a child could be relieved by something as simple as moving to the right city. But as much as a part of me ached to make this new city home, another part of me refused to let it become comfortable. I would go out on the weekends with a mission to buy pillows, and each time I’d come home with something more uncomfortable than the last: Glass Tupperware. A set of knives. It was as if I was playing a game with myself: unable to admit that this wasn’t the right place or the right time, I instead did everything I could to kick myself out. It worked.
Six months later, I moved back in with my parents, into the apartment that I’d promised myself before that first day of college that I would never live in again. And it was there—free of the constraints of what I should do, contemplating instead notions of connection and lostness—that I turned back to Jane.
It wasn’t heroic. There was no sense of embarking on a grand quest. It was just that I had no idea how to move on or to move out, and Jane’s story seemed as good a direction as any.
It seems obvious in retrospect that Jane was still waiting there for me. In the intervening time, I had silently gotten older than her without realizing it. I was now twenty-four, and she, as she always would be, was twenty-three. I didn’t know how far I would get with her story, but I knew I had to try.
I resumed my online sleuthing. Within a few months—by late summer 2012—I had learned that Jill and Don Mitchell had been anthropology professors at Buffalo State, Jane’s parents had both passed away, and Jim Humphries, the boyfriend, had withdrawn from Harvard a few years after Jane’s death. Now he was nowhere to be found. From Harvard’s online course catalog, to which my old Harvard ID still gave me access, I learned that Professor Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky would be teaching a class that fall: Anthropology 1065: The Ancient Near East. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 a.m. in the Peabody Museum Room 57-E, the listing said. I knew that almost anyone could sit in on a class during Shopping Week—the first week of classes when students are still deciding what to take, and professors have no sense of who’s supposed to be there—so I could slip in unnoticed. It was a few weeks away. If I really was going to do it, this was my chance.