“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!”
“That 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.”