The Gilman had changed a bit since 1843. It still catered to the wealthy, but its student body had become known less for their manners than for their lack of them. Now, if you had the money and connections to send a child to the Winsor or St. Paul’s but the child had a history of either significant underachievement or, worse, behavioral problems—you sent her to the Gilman.
“We don’t like being characterized, however charitably, as a ‘therapeutic’ school,” the principal, Mai Nghiem, told me as she led me to her office. “We’d prefer to think we’re the last outpost before that option. A good number of our young women will go on to Ivies or the Seven Sisters; their journeys are just a bit less traditional than those of some of their counterparts. And because we do get results, we get healthy funding, which allows us to enroll intelligent young women from less privileged backgrounds.”
“Like Amanda McCready.”
Mai Nghiem nodded and led me into her office. She was in her mid-thirties, a small woman with long, straight hair so black it was nearly blue. She moved as if the floor beneath her feet was softer and smoother than the floor beneath mine. She wore an ivory off-the-shoulder blouse over a black skirt and pointed me to a seat as she walked behind her desk. When Beatrice had called her at home last night to arrange this appointment, she’d been reluctant, but as I knew from personal experience, Beatrice could wear reluctance down pretty quick.
“Beatrice is the mother Amanda should have had,” Mai Nghiem said. “Woman’s a saint.”
“Preaching to the choir.”
“I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m going to have to multitask during this conversation.” Mai Nghiem scowled at her computer screen and tapped a couple of keys.
“Not a problem,” I said.
“Amanda’s mother called us and said Amanda’d be out of school a couple of weeks because she’d gone to visit her father.”
“I wasn’t aware she knew her father.”
Mai’s dark eyes left the screen for a moment, a grim smile on her face. “She doesn’t. Helene’s story was BS, but unless a parent has shown violent proclivities toward a child—and we’ve documented those proclivities—there’s not a lot we can do but take them at their word.”
“Do you think Amanda could have run away?”
She gave it some thought and shook her head. “This is not a kid who runs away,” she said. “This is a kid who wins awards and more awards and gets a scholarship to a great school. And flourishes.”
“So she flourished here.”
“On an academic level, absolutely.”
“On a nonacademic level?”
Her eyes went back to the screen and she blasted out a few sentences on the keyboard using only one hand. “What do you need to know?”
“Everything. Anything.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Sounds like she was a practical kid.”
“Very.”
“Rational?”
“Exceptionally.”
“Hobbies?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Hobbies. Things she liked to do besides be rational all the time.”
She hit RETURN and sat back for a moment. She tapped a pen on her desk and looked up at the ceiling. “She liked dogs.”
“Dogs.”
“Any kind, any shape. She volunteered at Animal Rescue in East Cambridge. An act of community service is a prerequisite for graduation.”
“What about the pressure to fit in? She’s a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. The girls here drive Daddy’s Lex. She doesn’t even get Daddy’s bus pass.”
She nodded. “Her freshman year, I seem to remember, some of the girls got a little cruel. They taunted her about her lack of jewelry, her clothes.”
“Her clothes.”
“They were perfectly acceptable, don’t get me wrong. But they were from Gap or Aéropostale, not Nordstrom or Barneys. Her sunglasses were Polaroids you’d buy at CVS. Her classmates wore Maui Jim and D&G. Amanda’s bag was Old Navy . . .”
“The other girls had Gucci.”
She smiled and shook her head. “More like Fendi or Marc Jacobs, maybe Juicy Couture. Gucci skews a bit older.”
“How tragically unhip of me.”
Another smile. “That’s the thing—we can joke about it. To us, it’s silly. To fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls, though?”
“Life and death.”
“Pretty much.”
I thought of Gabby. Was this the world I was raising her for?
She said, “But then the harassment just stopped.”
“Just stopped.”
Another nod. “Amanda’s one of those rare kids who truly doesn’t seem to care what you think. Compliment her or criticize her, you get the same even gaze coming back at you. I wonder if the other girls got tired of throwing paint at her when none of it would stick.” A bell rang and she looked out her window for a moment as a dozen teenage girls flowed past. “You know, I misspoke at the outset.”
“How so?”
“I said Amanda wouldn’t run away and I believe that she wouldn’t physically run away. But . . . well, she was, in another sense, running away all the time. That’s what brought her here. That’s what got her straight A’s. She was putting more distance between herself and her mother every day of her life. Are you aware that Amanda orchestrated her own admission to this school?”
I shook my head.
“She applied, she filled out the financial aid forms, even applied for some rare and rather obscure federal grants. She started doing all her prep work in the seventh grade. Her mother never had a clue.”
“That could be Helene’s epitaph.”
She gave Helene’s name a soft roll of her eyes. “When I met with Amanda and her mother for the first time, Helene was actually annoyed. Here was her daughter, set to attend a reasonably prestigious prep school on full financial aid, and Helene looked around this office and said, ‘Public school was good enough for me.’ ”
“Sure, she’s a poster child for Boston public schools, ol’ Helene is.”
Mai Nghiem smiled. “Financial aid, scholarships—they cover just about everything if you know how to look for the applicable ones, and Amanda did. Tuition, books, covered. But never fees. And fees add up. Amanda paid hers every term in cash. I remember one year, forty dollars of it was paid in coins she’d earned from a tip jar at a doughnut shop. I’ve met few students in my career who were given less by their parents yet worked so hard you knew nothing would stop them.”
“But something has derailed her. At least recently.”
“That’s what troubles me. She was going to Harvard. On a full ride. Or Yale. Brown. Take your pick. Now, unless she comes back real quick, and erases three weeks of missed exams, missed papers, gets her GPA all the way back up to above-flawless, where’s she going to go?” Another shake of her head. “She didn’t run.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate.”
She nodded. “Because now you have to assume she was taken. Again.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Again.”
An incoming mail message dinged on her computer and she glanced at the screen, gave whatever she saw there an almost imperceptible head shake. She looked back at me. “I grew up in Dorchester, you know. Just off the Ave. In between Savin Hill and Fields Corner.”
“Not far from where I grew up.”
“I know.” She tapped the keyboard a couple of times and sat back. “I was a junior at Mount Holyoke when you found her the first time. I was obsessed with the case. I used to hurry back to my dorm to see the six o’clock news every night. We all thought she was dead, that whole long winter and into the spring.”
“I remember,” I said, wishing I didn’t.
“And then—wow—you found her. All those months later. And you brought her home.”
“And what’d you think?”
“About what you did?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You did the right thing,” she said.
r /> “Oh.” I almost smiled in gratitude.
She met my eyes. “But you were still wrong.”
• • •
At Amanda’s locker, I stared at textbooks that were stacked tallest to shortest, the edges of their spines precisely aligned to the edge of the shelf. A Red Sox jersey hung from a hook on the door, dark blue with red piping, a red 19 on the back. Otherwise, nothing. No pictures taped to the door, no decals on the wall, no array of lip gloss or bracelets.
“So she likes dogs and the Red Sox,” I said.
“Why do you say the Red Sox?” Mai asked.
“She’s wearing a Sox warm-up jacket in a photo I have.”
“I’ve seen her wear this jersey a lot. Sometimes a T-shirt. And I’ve seen the warm-up jacket. But I’m a fan, you know? I can talk till I’m blue about the farm system and the logic—or lack thereof—behind Theo’s latest trade, et cetera.”
I smiled. “Me, too.”
“Amanda, though? Couldn’t. I tried to engage her half a dozen times until I realized, looking in her eyes one day, that she couldn’t name the starting rotation. She couldn’t tell you how many seasons Wakefield was with the team or even how many games out of first they were this week.”
“So a fair-weather fan?”
“Worse,” she said, “a fashion fan. She liked wearing the colors. That’s all.”
“The heathen,” I said.
• • •
“She was the perfect student,” Stephanie Tyler said. “I mean, per-fect.” Miss Tyler taught AP European History. She was about twenty-eight. She had ash-blond hair cut in a bob and not a strand of it out of place. She had the look of someone used to being tended to. “She never spoke out of turn and always came to class prepared. You never caught her tweeting or texting in class, playing video games on her BlackBerry or what-have-you.”
“She had a BlackBerry?”
She gave it some thought. “Amanda, no, come to think of it. She had a regular old cell. But you’d be amazed how many of these girls have BlackBerrys. Freshmen, too. Some have cell phones and BlackBerrys. The juniors and seniors drive BMW 5 series and Jaguars.” The outrage made her lean forward, as if we were conspiring. “High school’s a whole new world, don’t you find?”
I kept my face noncommittal. I wasn’t sure if high school was much different than it had ever been; only the accessories were.
“So Amanda . . .”
“Per-fect,” Miss Tyler said again. “Showed up every day, answered when called upon, usually correctly, went home at day’s end, and prepared for tomorrow. You can’t ask for more.”
“Any friends?”
“Just Sophie.”
“Sophie?” I said.
“Sophie Corliss. Her father’s the local fitness guy? Brian Corliss. He gives advice on the Channel 5 news sometimes.”
I shook my head. “I only watch The Daily Show.”
“So how do you get your news?”
“I read it.”
“Right,” she said with a sudden glazing of the eyes. “Anyway, a lot of people know who he is.”
“Uh, okay,” I said. “And his daughter?”
“Sophie. She and Amanda were like twins.”
“They looked alike?”
Stephanie Tyler cocked her head slightly. “No, but I had to remind myself who was who. Isn’t that strange? Amanda was shorter and fairer-skinned, Sophie was darker and much taller, but I had to keep remembering those differences.”
“So they were tight.”
“Since first period, first day, freshman year.”
“What did they bond over?”
“They were both iconoclasts, though with Sophie, I think it was more a matter of fashion than nature. It was like . . . Amanda’s an outsider because she doesn’t know any other way to be, which makes other kids respect her. Sophie, though, she chose to define herself as an outsider, which makes her . . .”
“A poseur,” I said.
“A bit, yeah.”
“So other kids respected Amanda.”
Miss Tyler nodded.
“Did they like her?”
“No one disliked her.”
“But.”
“But no one really knew her either. I mean, other than Sophie. At least, no one I can think of. That kid’s an island.”
• • •
“Great student,” Tom Dannal said. Dannal taught AP Macroeconomics but looked like the football coach. “One in a million, really. Everything we say we want our kids to be, you know? Polite, focused, smart as a whip. Never acted up or gave anyone a minute’s trouble.”
“I keep hearing this,” I said. “The perfect kid.”
“Right,” he said. “And who the fuck wants that?”
“Tommy,” Mai Nghiem said to him.
“No, no, really.” He held up a hand. “I mean, Amanda, okay, she was nice. She could be pleasant and personable. But, you know that saying about there being no there there? That’s her. I had her in microec last year and macroec now, and she was my best student in both. And yet? Couldn’t tell you thing-one about her outside of her work. Not one. You ask her a personal question, she turns it back on you. Ask her how things are going, you get, ‘Fine. You?’ And she always seemed fine. She did. Always seemed content. But you’d look in her eyes and you’d get the impression she was approximating human behavior. She’d studied people, learned how to walk and talk like one, but she was still outside looking in.”
“You’re saying she was an alien.”
“I’m saying she was one of the loneliest people I’ve ever known.”
“What about her friend?”
“Sophie?” A cold chuckle. “ ‘Friend’ is a generous word.”
I looked over at Principal Nghiem. She gave me a small shrug.
“I heard from another faculty member that Amanda and Sophie were pretty much joined at the hip.”
“I’m not saying they weren’t. I just said ‘friends’ wasn’t how I’d describe the relationship. It was a bit more Single White Female than that.”
“On whose end?”
“Sophie’s,” Mai Nghiem said, nodding to herself. “Yeah, now that Tom mentions it. Amanda was oblivious, I think, but Sophie clearly idolized her.”
“And the more Amanda didn’t notice,” Tom Dannal said, “the higher Sophie pushed her up the pedestal.”
I said, “So, I guess I got a new million-dollar question.”
Tom nodded. “Where’s Sophie? Right?”
I looked over at Principal Nghiem.
“She dropped out.”
My eyes widened. “When?”
“Beginning of the school year.”
“And you don’t think there could be a connection?”
“Between Sophie Corliss deciding not to come back for senior year and Amanda McCready not showing up for classes after Thanksgiving?”
I looked around the empty classroom and tried not to let my frustration show. “Anyone else I can talk to?”
• • •
In the student lounge, I met with seven homeroom classmates of Amanda and Sophie. Principal Nghiem and I sat in the center of the room with the girls arrayed before us in a half-circle.
“Amanda was just, ya know,” Reilly Moore said.
“I don’t,” I said.
Giggles.
“Like, ya know.”
Eye rolls. More giggles.
“Oh,” I said, “she was like ya know. Now I get it.”
Blank stares, no giggles.
“It’s, like, if you were talking to her,” Brooklyn Doone said, “she, like, listened? But if you waited for her to tell you stuff, like, who she dug or what apps were on her iPad or like that? You’d, like, wait a long time.”
The girl beside her, Coral or Crystal, rolled her eyes. “For, like, ever.”
“Like, ev-er,” another girl said, and they all nodded in agreement.
“What about her friend, Sophie?” I asked.
“Ewww!”
“Tha
t daggy bee-atch?”
“That chick was wannabe-dot-com.”
“Dot-org.”
“I’m sayin’.”
“I heard she, like, tried to list you as her friend on her Face-book page.”
“Ewww!”
“I’m sayin’.”
After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.
Five thousand years of civilization, more or less, twenty-three hundred years since the libraries of Alexandria, over a hundred years since the invention of flight, wafer-thin computers at our fingertips, which can access the intellectual riches of the globe, and judging by the girls in that room, the only advance we’d made since the invention of fire was turning like into an omni-word, useful as a verb, a noun, an article, the whole sentence if need be.
“So none of you knew either of them well?” I tried.
Seven blank stares.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
The world’s longest silence broken only by some fidgeting.
“ ’Member that guy?” Brooklyn said eventually. “He looked kinda like Joe Jonas.”
“Like, he’s so, like, hot.”
“The guy?”
“Joe Jonas. Duh.”
“I think he looks, like, so queer.”
“Uh-ah.”
“Uh-huh.”
I focused on the one who’d brought it up. “This guy—he was Amanda’s boyfriend?”
Brooklyn shrugged. “I dunno.”
“What do you know?”
This annoyed her. Sunshine probably annoyed her. “I dunno. I just saw her with some guy once at South Shore.”
“South Shore Plaza? The mall?”
“Uh,” she pulsed her eyes at my cluelessness, “yeah.”
“So you were at the mall and—”
“Yeah, like, me and Tisha and Reilly.” She indicated two of the other girls. “And we ran into them coming out of Diesel. They didn’t buy anything, though.”