Amanda actually seemed to hear me. She nodded. “We didn’t know if it meant we were lesbians or not.” The trance was over for the time being. “No boys had ever touched us. We went down on them. They let us do that. But what Simone and I did to each other on the tape, no one did to us. And it felt good. That didn’t mean anything, did it?”
“No, sweetheart.” I heard myself slip and use the endearment. It didn’t matter, all the tenderness in the world wouldn’t hurt Amanda right now. “It didn’t mean that you were lesbians. Sexuality is very complicated, especially when you’re first discovering it. Is that what Simone thought? That’s not why she took the pills, is it?”
It couldn’t be, I thought. We were living in New York in the twenty-first century. Surely Simone’s parents would have been able to cope with a lesbian daughter.
“No. No, that’s not why. But it made it weirder. It made the whole thing more of a secret. And then we did it sometimes just us, without the camera. To practice, we said. And then Simone saw the cutter. That’s when I got scared. I mean, none of the guys were into that, but Simone liked it. It might have been okay, though…it still might have been okay…”
“Amanda, honey, what happened?”
She closed her eyes. “First you need to promise you won’t tell anyone. No one at school knows this is me. Or that it’s Simone. You can’t show it to anyone at school. I mean the teachers. Timothy knows. But he is the only person who does.”
“Okay.”
“Do you promise?”
I looked at her solemnly. “Yes. As God is my witness.”
“We…we copied what the Web-cam girls were doing and then we sent the movie to Timothy. We didn’t tell him then who we were. He showed it to Hugh and Barry. They couldn’t recognize us. We were wearing masks, like one of the Web-cam girls. That’s where we got the idea. We were going to tell him afterward. First we wanted them to think that these girls were hot. And to want them. But before we had a chance to tell him it was us, after just like two days, we started hearing about it at school. Timothy had e-mailed it to Hugh and Barry and they had e-mailed it to a bunch of other guys. And everyone was passing it around and talking about it. All the guys. Everyone was watching it and trying to guess who the girls were. It got really awful. Someone downloaded it onto one of the computers at school. I don’t know how many people finally saw it.” She blinked back tears. She was too busy explaining to stop and cry.
“Timothy got suspended for two weeks. So did a few other guys. The headmaster threatened to expel them if they didn’t tell who the girls were. But they couldn’t tell. We’d never told them. They really didn’t know. At least not then.”
“What happened next?”
“We were safe. Or we thought we were. But then Simone’s mom found the video file on her computer. She recognized her and went crazy. She grounded her and started picking her up at school every day and dropping her off every morning and she took away her phone and her Internet connection. She made her life miserable. She threatened to go to the headmaster if Simone didn’t tell her who the other girl was. But she wouldn’t. That made her mother even crazier. She saw what we’d done like it was this major crime that we’d-that Simone-had committed against her. Against her. Like Simone had done it to her on purpose, and she kept talking to her about how demeaning it was and how pathetic we were…I mean, I know it would have bothered most parents, but she acted as if Simone had done it just to embarrass her. But we didn’t. We did it because we wanted to get the guys to pay attention to us. To us. Not to those fake girls. We wanted them to know we could do the same stuff.”
She swallowed another sob. I could tell from how fast her words were coming that she was almost done and that she needed to get it all out now, as if it was poison rotting her insides. “Dr. Snow, you know about the girls who are getting killed? The Web-cam girls?”
“Yes.”
“The ones who got killed…all of them are the girls we copied. The same ones. And in the same order that we copied them in our movie. They’ve all gotten killed. Except the last one. The fifth one. The girl who wore the mask.”
Seventy-Six
Finally, Amanda held out the CD, offering it to me. I took it but she did not let go. “You can’t show it to anyone, though. You’re the only one who can see it.”
“If I am going to help save the last girl, I’m going to have to show it to the police.”
“Can’t you just tell them about it?”
“I don’t think so. Will you let me show it to them?”
She shook her head. “My parents don’t know.”
“How about this? Let me take it for now. You think about it overnight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll call you and get your permission before I do anything.”
She was shaking her head. “There’s no way it will stay a secret if you give it to the police. Do you know what it would be like if anyone found out this was me? What my parents would do to me?”
The organ music stopped. It wasn’t silent right away-the chords lingered-and then it was so quiet in the temple that I could hear Amanda’s breathing.
“It’s our fault. Simone’s fault and mine. If we hadn’t made this, Simone wouldn’t be dead, and none of those women would be dead now.”
“No, it’s not your fault. You didn’t do this on purpose. You didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“But so many people have been.”
She heard the footsteps before I did and was up and walking toward the front doors in seconds. I grabbed my coat and, holding the disk, rushed after her.
“Wait,” I said.
“Who’s there?” A man’s voice echoed from behind me.
I didn’t answer as I rushed after Amanda.
“Can I help you?” he called.
Seventy-Seven
I’d been with Amanda for fifty-five minutes and only had a few minutes left to get back to the office for my next patient. Not long enough to figure out the ramifications of what Amanda had told me, or even to ask myself what my real obligations were. I wanted to call Noah right then and tell him everything. But could I?
There is nothing more difficult than doing the wrong thing for the right reason. I had an obligation to a human being who had entrusted me with her secret. And I had an obligation to try to save a life if it was in my power to do that.
I didn’t get another break until seven that night, at which point I popped some vitamin C pills, hoping they’d do something for my cold, made some tea and sat down in front of my computer with the CD Amanda had given me.
The institute was quiet but not empty; two therapists had group sessions in progress and Nina had patients until nine. I shut my door, returned to my desk, looked for the CD icon on my desktop and then clicked on it.
There’s not much about the Web and pornography that those of us at the institute don’t know about. We have to understand what stimulates our patients. We need to know what their addictions are. I’m aware that there is film online of every kind of perverse and sadistic fetish known to the human imagination. But of all the porn I’ve seen, I’d never wept watching it until I viewed Amanda’s movie. My heart ached for these two beautiful sixteen-year-old girls who were so confused and desperate for the boys at school to notice them that they’d done this.
There were four segments, each identified simply with a red Roman numeral on a black screen.
Number one had to be Simone because she had blond hair and Amanda’s hair was dark, almost as dark as Dulcie’s. I couldn’t see any of Simone’s face because she was wearing a red silk mask over her eyes. Her hand was between her legs and she was using a dildo on herself.