“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.
“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.