up for classes in yoga and modern dance when Jocelyn had, that Jocelyn had been the one behind their request to room together in Heward Hall. It didn’t quite make Miranda out to be a doe-eyed follower and Jocelyn some sort of Svengali, but Jocelyn had tended to dominate in the relationship.
And what sort of relationship had it been? Some of the girls’ peers hadn’t hesitated to speculate. Neither Miranda nor Jocelyn seemed to date much or to date any one boy for long. They preferred spending time together. It wouldn’t have been the first fling between two girls on the Rianon campus, and it’s not surprising that some people drew that conclusion. But as far as Serner could find, there was no evidence one way or the other.
I set the first file aside and started flipping through the second. There was more material here than I could read sitting in Bill’s office, and I asked him whether there was a conference room I could use.
“There is,” he said, “but you don’t have to do that. Those are all copies, except for the photo, which we’ll need to keep here. Sign them out and you can take them back to your office.”
“Leo’ll think you’re coming after me again if he sees your files on my desk.”
“Let him think it,” Bill said. “Maybe he’ll give you a raise.”
I shook my head. “He’s paying me what he can.”
“I hope you realize you’re too good to be wasted in a little two-man operation like that.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were coming after me again.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Listen,” I said, “I didn’t see anything here about Miranda’s dancing in any of the local strip clubs. I don’t know when she started, but I was assuming it was around the time her mother died, which would have been before she left school. Do you know if anyone mentioned anything along those lines?”
“It’s not a question we asked.”
“Yeah, well, why would you? All I’m saying is, she must have started sometime. Am I going to find anything about it in here?”
“No,” he said. “Believe me, if we’d heard a breath of it, we would have followed up on it.”
It was disappointing, but not a surprise.
“Still, maybe you’ll find something useful in there.” He handed me their form non-disclosure agreement, and I signed it. “God knows we never did.”
We were lying on her bed, in the apartment on Eightyfourth Street, the one that was now home to the Bakers and next door to a youth center instead of a synagogue. Her mother was at work, and would be for two hours still, which was plenty of time to finish our math homework, or would have been if we could keep our hands off each other. She’d just discovered what it did to me when she put her tongue in my ear, and so had I, and both of us liked it more than trigonometry. Her shirt and bra were on the floor, on top of my shirt, which had come off first, and her skirt and my pants were crumpled next to us in the bed. But she still had her panties on and I still wore my Fruit of the Loom briefs, and we both understood it would stay that way throughout, one last concession to the pointless, old-fashioned rules we’d set for ourselves.
It hardly mattered. We couldn’t have enjoyed ourselves more if we’d gone further, and now, thinking back on it, I remembered that afternoon more fondly than any of the encounters I’d had later, first at NYU and then, after graduating, with girls I met through friends or at parties. There had been women since Miranda – but none I’d loved, not even for a night.
We lay in her bed, my fingers tracing the line of her sex through her underwear, and she told me about Rianon College, with its ophthalmology-focused pre-med program, one of the oldest in the country, and its campus, so green and open, so different from anything we’d ever known in New York City. They’d accepted her on an Early Decision basis, she said, which meant that for her the college application process was now over. What about me?
What about me.
Thinking back now, I could remember the bed, I could remember the feel of her body under my hand, I could even remember the quality of the light filtering in through her bedroom window, motes of dust dancing slowly over our heads. But I couldn’t remember my answer. I’d known I’d never leave the city, I’d known that since I was a kid – I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But I wouldn’t have told her that, not then. Did I join her in spinning a dream of going away to New Mexico, cutting all our ties to our friends and our homes? Did I tell her I’d go with her, that I’d apply, too, maybe for the program in literature, or history, or God only knows what? And if I did, was it a lie, or did I mean it – maybe only for that afternoon, maybe only for that minute, but with all my heart?
She’d gone. I’d stayed. But all through the years that followed, part of me had gone with her, vicariously enjoying the rolling, green campus when I was riding crammed subways past Washington Square, living with her in a clean suburb when my real life took place in a fourth-story walk-up with windows that didn’t close properly and junkies outside on the sidewalk. Leo was my real life. While she was learning to heal people, he was training me to uncover the worst things about them. But late at night, in bed with the door closed and the blinds drawn and my eyes shut, I’d see through her eyes, and because she was someplace better, so was I.
Only now I knew she wasn’t, that she hadn’t been anywhere better. Everything I’d imagined for her – the happiness, the comfortable life – those were the lie. Somehow she’d fallen into my world.
Chapter 11
There were more than four hundred pages of interviews, and I read them all. Everyone had something to say, and everyone had nothing to say. Jocelyn was a girl like any other, a solid B student who showed no signs of caring about her classes, an unremarkable participant in campus events, and more often than not Miranda was at her side. Then they were gone, and no one missed them for long.
Were there any hints before they left that either girl might be unhappy? You wouldn’t know it from the file. Had they ever gotten in any sort of trouble? Not so as you’d notice. Why would they leave school? The answer Serner had received was a collective shrug.
Had they gone off to Canada, as someone had suggested to me? It was one of two possibilities, the other being that they had gone somewhere else.
I thought about ways I might turn up more information, but none seemed promising – Serner would have tried them, and I wasn’t likely to do better with them after seven years had passed. More promising, it seemed to me, was the idea of working backwards. After all, the one thing I had to work with that Serner hadn’t had is that I knew where the story ended, or at least where half of it did. I knew where Miranda had ended up.
I tried to imagine the two of them, as close as sisters or maybe closer, when the news arrived that Miranda’s mother had died. Jocelyn was at best a decent student and only lightly committed to school. Miranda had cared a great deal about her studies once, but her grades had turned out poor, and maybe she’d felt the dream of medical school slipping away from her anyway. Then the telegram comes, or the phone call, and suddenly she has no family anymore and no source of money. Maybe Jocelyn has been working on her to drop out anyway, and this gives her the final push to do it.
Maybe. It was a plausible picture. But it was still a long way from stripping at the Sin Factory.
They need money – for tuition or just to live, and either Miranda’s inheritance doesn’t supply enough or it would take too long to come, or both. Maybe Jocelyn could get some from her parents, but she’s already not talking to her parents much, and anyway it’s one thing to support your daughter, another thing to support her roommate – especially if maybe she’s more than just a roommate. They’ve been taking modern dance and yoga; they’re free, attractive, and twenty years old; and one day someone tells them about a club, one a town or two over, where no one who knows them ever goes. Or maybe they come across a club during a weekend driving trip and laughingly dare each other to go inside. Maybe it’s amateur night, a quick fifty dollars for any good-looking girl willing to get up on stage and take off her shirt.
Maybe. Maybe the first time it just pays for their gas and their drinks, but the second time it pays for their books and their medical insurance, and before long they’re pulling down four hundred, five hundred a week and the only cost is that dancing to loud music at two in the morning means being too tired to take tests the next day. Maybe they want to get away for a while, so they put in for a leave of absence, pack the contents of their dorm room into a car, and hit the road, paying as they go with this new currency they’ve discovered. There isn’t a town in America of any reasonable size that doesn’t have at least a couple of strip clubs, on the outskirts if not in the town
