"I saw some diaphanous gowns in Better Dresses at the Marshall Fields on Michigan Avenue ," one of the students offered.
Dorsey and Ms. Jennings both eyed the girl intently, the former with much disappointment, the latter with much hope.
"Thirty percent off," the other girl added. "But only through Sunday."
At the announcement, everyone in the classroom opened her notebook—for the first time that morning, Dorsey couldn't help but realize—and hastily jotted down the information. As Dorsey studied the student offering up shopping tips, her attention inescapably fell to the open backpack leaning against the student's desk. Sure enough, stuck haphazardly in the side pocket was a copy of How to Trap a Tycoon. Dorsey bit back an exasperated sigh and glanced once again at the copy she held in her hands, contemplating the chapter headings in the table of contents.
"'Identifying the Tycoon's Lair,'" she read aloud. "'Stalking the Wild Tycoon. Keeping the Tycoon in Captivity.' Goodness," she added, "one would expect a chapter on 'Stuffing and Mounting the Tycoon,' so clear is the author's intent to have every rich man in America taken to the taxidermist and turned into a trophy for whichever desperate female most perseveres in the hunt."
She closed the book, then pretended to study its cover with great interest. "You know," she said, "the fact that the author clearly took a pseudonym should tell you everything you need to know. For example… Oh, I don't know… Maybe the fact that she's ashamed to admit she's responsible for writing such tripe."
"Nuh-uh," Ms. Tiffany Jennings countered. "She's a career mistress, and she's spilling trade secrets. And she's afraid she'll be sued if she writes under her own name. She's been with a lot of tycoons. It's all there in the introduction. That's why she took the fake name. She just doesn't want anyone coming after her."
"She took the pseudonym," Dorsey corrected the girl, "because she knows that what she's penned here is sensationalistic claptrap that panders to the masses."
"Yeah, and she's gonna make a fortune off it, too," Ms. Jennings said, "because every woman on campus is reading that book. You can't log on the Internet anymore without seeing it mentioned a dozen times. Every chat room I've been in lately, sooner or later, the conversation turns to How to Trap a Tycoon. Even my mom wants to read it after I'm done."
Dorsey digested the information with a response that was rather mixed. And with results that were rather mixed, too, seeing as how her stomach pitched and rolled upon hearing it.
She closed the book, handed it back to Ms. Jennings, and replied, "Yes, well, do please try to keep your tycoon hunting for after class. That shouldn't be a problem, seeing as how Severn is just swarming with them, after all."
That last was added dryly, of course, because in addition to there being no men among the student body at Severn , there were few tycoons to be had there. Or any tycoons, for that matter. Virtually all the students were here on academic scholarship, and few of them would have been able to afford a similar education elsewhere.
Dorsey was like any other Severn student. It was her brain that had landed her in her current position. She had no background or money—or even family, unless she counted her mother, which she only did on days when her mother wasn't driving her crazy, which meant that today, as usual, Dorsey had no family to speak of.
Even after returning the book to Ms. Jennings, she was left feeling a bit troubled by the episode. Shrugging off her anxiety as best she could, Dorsey continued with her class—and her day—in the usual fashion. She taught dozing, uninterested students things they would remember only long enough to record them in a blue book come midterm—if they remembered them at all. And, eventually, she really did stop dwelling upon the episode with the tycoon book.
Until the second time.
Which came when Dorsey was standing in line at the Severn College bookstore, waiting to pay for her lunch—a mondo-sized Snickers bar and a Diet Pepsi. How to Trap a Tycoon was displayed in an enormous cardboard contraption at the front of the campus bookstore, and the enormous sign on top of the enormous cardboard contraption fairly shrieked its presence in enormous red letters. And three Severn students were gathered about the enormous thing, perusing the book in question with much—dare she say enormous?—interest.
Honestly, Dorsey thought, there was no accounting for tastes. She shook her head with disbelief as, after a few moments of animated conversation and giggling, all three of those students took their copies of the book to the cash register and plunked down good money for them.
The third, charmed, event likewise took place that day, while Dorsey was riding the El to her second job. She glanced up from a new biography of Ghandi, which she had been anticipating for months, only to find herself staring at yet another copy of How to Trap a Tycoon. The reader was, yet again, a young woman of college age, and she was reading the book hungrily, as if it offered answers to the darkest mysteries of the universe.
Dorsey sighed in bemusement, swallowed what tasted very much like fear, and went back to reading about nonviolent passive resistance. However, she was beginning to feel anything but nonviolent or passive or even resistant, for that matter. No, what she was beginning to feel was homicidal. Or perhaps suicidal. She hadn't quite decided yet who she wanted to kill—Lauren Grable-Monroe or herself.
It was a quandary that continued to bother her right up until the fourth, and attention-getting, episode.
After alighting from the El inside the Loop
