Our student artists often retreat to get their work done. Frankly, they like to binge on isolation. It’s part of their process. So, no, it would not come off as unusual.

She wrote “Watch me” in a note on her laptop. What does that mean to you?

I don’t know. It sounds like a dare. The language. It’s provocative.

You don’t think it’s in reference to the erased files or to the sexual situation she revealed on one of them?

Brenae made some fine artworks in her life. Maybe she wanted people to watch them all.

Do you have any further thoughts about Brenae Brasil that you would like to share?

My heart goes out to her family. I’m very sorry for their loss. And I’m very sorry for ours.

7

INSIDE THE CASE FILE THE next morning, I half expected to find lurid photographs of Brenae’s dead body, like I’d seen from TV crime shows, but if there had been photos, our source hadn’t included them. Instead, I encountered pages and pages of forms in a tiny font. Dates, times, locations, numbers. A lot of numbers. Even the paramedics who’d been called to her studio had had numbers assigned to them.

The file’s chronology followed the detectives from the moment they were given the case to the moment they made their conclusions, noting the reports, interviews, and tips that came to them along the way. Brenae’s suicide boiled down to a series of steps and calculations, her fate and character reconstructed in hindsight. A twenty-two-year-old woman. A woman mostly estranged from her family, except for her musician brother. A student who, according to one witness, “had a talent for controversy.” A student who had been given the world last spring with a rare full scholarship to LAAC, and who had gone from exceeding her professors’ expectations to missing weeks of classes and failing to turn in assignments.

The interview with Hal Giroux halted me for a while. He didn’t sound like a man covering up his own guilt. But what about the guilt of someone else? Why wouldn’t he look harder into the situation that Brenae presented to him, instead of essentially cutting her off? Wasn’t that his job as director of his program? There were interviews with other professors as well, including a female instructor who claimed she’d brought Brenae’s lapses to Hal’s attention, and that Brenae had started catching up on her missed work before she shot herself. “She was digging herself out, but I think when she realized she was going to finish the year with Bs and Cs, she just gave up,” the instructor reflected. “She could only be a star or a failure, and nothing in between.”