Lost Girls

''Uh-huh.''

''So. Were they popular?'' I ask, forcing myself to focus on Laird alone.

''Oh, yeah. Guys wanted them and girls wanted to be like them. But I don't think Ashley or Krystal gave a shit one way or the other. Still, you should've seen when they called an assembly in the gym at the beginning of term and the principal got up and told everyone that the school was undergoing a mourning process--man, the whole place broke down. I've never seen so much hugging and crying and snot in one place. Mostly the girls, right, all of them pretending that they were best friends with Krystal or Ashley. It even got kind of competitive.''

''How do you mean?''

''Like everyone's going around with these just-add-water personal memories, like 'Krystal told me this big secret once' or 'Ashley said me and her would be best friends forever' and other crap like that. For the first fifteen minutes everyone was sad, and then they all had to be the most sad of all. It got so bad they brought in like half a dozen shrinks to calm everybody down. Guys, too, and some of the teachers even. Everybody saying how much they knew Tripp was the type, saw it coming a mile away, somebody should have done something. All of it such shit.''

''Thanks, Laird. I'll leave you to your doughnut.''

I tuck my notepad back into my case and pull my legs out from under the table to leave, but the kid raises his hand for me to wait.

''I brought this along,'' he says. From his backpack on the floor he pulls out a crumpled folder and lays it on the table. Then he sticks his hand in and slides the bundled contents halfway out: a collection of handwritten notes with either ASHLEY or KRYSTAL printed at the top, clippings from the school paper with the names of the girls highlighted, photographs of them talking together in front of an open classroom door or kicking a soccer ball between them at the front of two lines of other girls in lime-green gym shorts, all taken with instant, develops- before-your-eyes film.

''I thought you might want to use this.''

''What is it?''

''I dunno. A collection of souvenirs, I guess. It's all about them. I started out collecting things separately, one for Krystal and one for Ashley, but it didn't work out because they were like a team really, not individual people. You know how some girls can be like that?''

''You collected this stuff yourself just on these two?''

''No, man. That would be weird.'' He shakes his head, and the glasses slip down to the very precipice of his nose. ''I keep a file on all the hot girls.''

I push the papers back into the folder, the barren light of the doughnut shop too garish for their inspection. Or maybe it's only that I don't want the girls at the window to see me lingering here with the school nerd and flipping through his masturbatory archives.

''Can I keep it?'' I ask, already tucking the folder into my bag. At the same time turning to look behind me down the hall. Yes. A back door.

''Sure, man, it's yours. I don't have any use for it anymore,'' Laird says, and throws the last nugget of cruller down his throat. ''I mean they're both dead and shit now, right?''

chapter 14

The next night I enter sleep easily for the first time since arriving in Murdoch. Amazing, really, what one evening free of the white stuff will do. Within seconds of pulling the covers up I'm off into that nearly forgotten zone of solid nothingness, all thought and image and word emptying out and I'm gone. . . .

Until the tin bell of the front desk phone brings me back. One, two, three rings, the echo after each hanging in the air and then diminishing, promising it's all over-- and then another, more insistent than the one before.

I pull on the boxers, suit jacket, and socks lying on the floor next to the bed and go out into the hallway, where the ringing seems to come from more than one source, out from under the doors of neighboring rooms and through the air vents above and below. This time I'm definitely going to pick up. And when I'm done telling the caller which particular circle of hell to go to, I'm going to deep-six the thing out in the woods where it can make all the noise it wants and keep the slugs awake at night.

Slip down the hall to the top of the stairs, my head lowered to watch my footing in the sparse light of the wall lamps, and take the first steps down. The gaslight chandelier below dimmed to a useless flicker, dark sliding up the walls below. The air clotted shadow in my mouth.

And stop halfway down. On the step below, another's leather shoes. Stand there for the length of an entire ring and the trace of it that follows before looking up.

''We meet again.''

It's the peeler from the Lord Byron Cocktail Lounge, the young one from the other night. A glimpse of smile as she turns her head to me.

''Again. Yes.''

Another ring before I realize that I must look ridiculous, padding around a hotel in nothing but blazer and paisley boxers.

''I was just coming down to unhook that goddamn phone,'' I say, hands searching for pockets that aren't there.

''Someone must want to talk to somebody pretty bad.''

''Must be.''

She doesn't move.

''You stay in the hotel?'' I say. ''To do your work?''

''I have a room.''

We stand there for the duration of another ring, then I squeeze myself flat against the banister to move past her.

''It's bad luck,'' she says. ''Crossing on the stairs.''

''I don't have much choice.''

''You could go back up with me.''

Then she takes my elbow and we ascend the stairs together, leaving the phone still ringing at the desk below. At the top she guides me down the hall to the opposite end from the honeymoon suite, unlocks the door to her room. Slightly smaller than mine, but the window just as tall, its pane lifted open and the night's rain blowing in.

''Your window's open,'' I say, but she pretends not to hear. Directs me over to the bed where, sitting on its edge, she pulls herself out of her loose cotton sweater and skirt and lies back on the rain-soaked sheets. Despite the hard bites of water against her body she remains still, legs outstretched and arms haloed around her head. Skin nubbled with a layer of sand, pale as talcum. All of it washing away to expose an emerging web of ochre veins.

It doesn't occur to me to leave. To do anything but throw my jacket off, step out of my underwear, and lie next to her on the bed. But even in the few seconds it takes me to reach her the air has grown colder. The rain now spraying over the entire room, the walls, the length of our bodies.

''Shouldn't we--'' I start, but her kiss cuts off my words. Her strength surprises me, and although I don't resist I know that if I tried I couldn't pull myself away from the arms that lie over my back, fingers linked together at the spine. Her limbs chiseled bone over my skin.

But something's happening.

Without her hands leaving my back or any movement of my own I'm inside her, and she slides beneath me in the growing puddle the weight of our bodies has created on the bed. Even when she rolls us both over the edge of the mattress, splashing into the half foot of water collected on the wooden floor beneath the window, I can't push her back or rise up to meet her. Raises herself at the hip and a shaft of muddy streetlight casts across the side of her head. The smile still there, jagged and glistening.

I try to shout something and when I open my mouth it fills with the water that has risen farther and now