“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.”