“Someone needs to do something about that guy,” Rob said when he and Eileen were back in the car, driving home.

  “What do you mean, ‘do something’?” Eileen asked.

  “We should talk it over with Mrs. Winslow on Monday.”

  *

  Eustacia Winslow—instructor of English and journalism, faculty adviser of the North Shore Herald—was the only high school teacher whom Rob deemed worthy of respect, the only instructor to whose name Rob appended a title. To Rob, “Ty-Ty” was simply “Densmore”; his French teacher was “DuPree”; calculus was taught by “Sweat Stain Stepaniak”; and his PE teacher was “that pathetic, drunk motherfucker.”

  Mrs. Winslow, a former editor of the Chicago Defender who started teaching at North Shore after she retired from journalism, seemed to be the only teacher who was there because she felt a calling, not because something better hadn’t worked out. Eileen was terrified of her and still remembered the harsh way the teacher had dismissed her portfolio when she had applied to be the Herald’s sports photographer. “Photography is an art and a skill that needs to be mastered, Ms. Muldoon,” Mrs. Winslow had said. “It’s no place for amateurs who want to ogle boys in locker rooms; if that’s what interests you, I’m sure there’s a place for you on the yearbook.”

  Mrs. Winslow was hefting a sealed cardboard box into her office, but when she saw Rob and Eileen, she stopped, put down the box, and eyed the two of them as if their visit portended trouble. “To what do I owe this peculiar pleasure?” she asked.

  “We’d like to approach you with a hypothetical story,” said Rob.

  “Every story is hypothetical before it is written, Mr. Rubicoff,” Mrs. Winslow said. “Especially since whatever you think a story might be is rarely the one it becomes.” She took off her glasses and put them on her desk atop a paper that had a C– underlined three times on it in red. “And what might this hypothetical story be?”

  “Well,” Rob began, “let’s say that a certain high school instructor has taken certain sexual liberties with certain students under his supervision.” He detailed the events Eileen had reported to him, adding embellishments and terms such as “possibly engaging in fellatio” and “in a visibly turgid state.”

  When Rob was done, Mrs. Winslow asked, “Might this ‘hypothetical individual’ be on staff here?”

  “He might be,” Rob said.

  “And,” Mrs. Winslow asked, “might the initials of this individual be T.D.?”

  “Hypothetically, they might,” said Rob.

  Mrs. Winslow shook her head, a blend of disgust and resignation. “The bastard’s still at it, is he?”

  “You’ve heard stories like this?” Rob asked.

  “Every year since I got here,” said Mrs. Winslow. “There’s always some rumor: someone saw him at the opera with a student; someone heard something happened when he gave a kid a ride home. He takes kids with him to New York and Lord only knows what happens there. Every faculty party, he shows up reeking of gin, insulting people’s husbands, flirting with their wives, making a general ass of himself. Everybody talks about him after he leaves, but no one actually does anything. They laugh it off—‘Oh, that’s just Tyrus being Tyrus.’ ”

  “So,” Rob said, “you’re saying there’s a story there.”

  “I have no doubt that there is,” Mrs. Winslow said. “But I guarantee you one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “No one will ever print it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because no one will ever go on record, Mr. Rubicoff,” Mrs. Winslow said, “and when no one goes on record, there’s no story, only innuendo. Innuendo without proper sourcing is a minefield for lit-i-ga-tion”—she stretched the word out. “Someday, someone might get that story, but by then I’ll be dead and Tyrus Densmore will be an old man.”

  “Well,” Rob said to Eileen after they left Winslow’s office, “then we’ll just have to catch the bastard in flagrante.”

  “Is that like fellatio?” Eileen asked.

  “More or less.” Rob led her by the hand to a stairwell, still empty this early in the day. “Would you care to find out?”

  Eileen felt heat rush to her cheeks. “Maybe,” she said.

  Mrs. Frank

  Probably Judith Nagorsky shouldn’t have been so flippant. Probably if she had any inkling of the foul plans Rob and Eileen had started to concoct and what the pair of them would wind up doing that year and with the rest of their lives, she could have tried to figure out a way to stop them. But she was in a piss-poor mood and had no time for anyone else’s shit, particularly Rob’s. So the moment he came skulking around the craptacular Annex vending machines after rehearsal, playing deadline reporter with Eileen in tow and asking if Judith had ever seen Mr. Densmore “engaging in improper behavior,” she wasn’t sure whether to laugh out loud or beat the shit out of Rob’s stupid, presumptuous, scheming ass.

  “Improper behavior?” she asked, smacking the pop machine, vainly hoping to get her quarters back. Was he kidding? What year did Rob think he was living in? She had seen just about every member of the high school faculty “engage in improper behavior.” Coach Greg Lerner, who invited girls over for hot tub parties with members of the Chicago Sting soccer team and yelled “Call me after ya graduate!” when he drove past cheerleading practice, engaged in “improper behavior.” So did her French teacher, Monsieur Charles DuPree, when he leapt on his desk, performed stripteases to “Michèle” by Gérard Lenorman, and asked students to shout out the French words for the items of clothing he was whipping off—“La chemise!” When Coach Pootie Hollings swigged Wild Turkey out of a paper bag and sang Rick James in a falsetto while purportedly teaching swimming class, he was also “engaging in improper behavior.”

  And if Rob and Eileen really wanted to get into it—which of course they didn’t, though, why the fuck not, she would—her whole family was guilty of engaging in “improper behavior.” To wit: Dr. Herb Nagorsky, who had ditched his wife (whom he had probably met when she had been his patient) and moved in with his thirty-three-year-old girlfriend (whom he had met when she had been his secretary) and her towheaded son; and Judith’s own mother, Estelle Nagorsky, who had put her fist through her bedroom window and chased Herb down Oakton Street while she was buck naked. Every one of them had “engaged in improper behavior.” And further, Judith told Rob, every time he opened his putrid yap, he was “engaging in improper behavior” too.

  “So I take this to mean you won’t be able to help us out with this,” Rob said.

  “Yuh-huh,” said Judith.

  God, she thought, she was so done with all this petty high school drama shit: the juvenile theater exercises, pretending to be trees, animals, machines—“Boop!” “Beep!” “Boop!” “Beep!”; the clapping, slapping concentration games; the eternal boring gossip about whom Mr. Densmore would take on his vaunted “New York trip,” when everyone knew it was always the best-looking boy with the most fucked-up home life. The Annex was soul-destroying, acting alongside people, half of whom were in it for the attention, not the art; trying to stay in her own circle of concentration when Trey, high on coke, booze, or just his own immaturity, turned every one of Mr. Van Daan’s lines into some dumb sex joke—“Anne, did you see my pipe?”; playing the wife of Rob, who would be the first to crank up the Zyklon-B if a real war broke out. Had it not been for the importance of the play they were performing, she would have blown off the whole thing and picked up as many shifts as she could at the Hollywood Diner, because it was already hard to imagine how she would afford four years at the Goodman Theater School without having to rely on the whims of her father, who never gave her a straight answer as to whether he’d actually pay.

  On her way out of the school, she practically knocked over Declan, who was standing in the damp cold. “Carrie comin’ down soon?” he asked.

  “How the fuck would I know that, Spengler?” Judith said as she headed for the athletic field en route to the el. “I’m not her travel agent, her social secretary, or her wife.”

  Judith had been waiting for a train for nearly five minutes when Fiona strode onto the platform in a belted safari jacket and a beige cap that split the difference between hairnet and snood. She was listening to her Walkman and carrying a thick book wrapped in red Christmas paper.

  Fiona peered over the platform, searching vainly for a train, then ducked into the shelter where Judith was sitting. She lit a cigarette, took a drag, and blew out a thick gust. “Hey there,” Fiona said. “Northbound, are you?”

  “Yep,” said Judith.

  “Smashing. Normally I walk home, but after that rehearsal, well, I’m pretty well knackered, aren’t I?” She proffered her pack of cigarettes. “Care for a fag?”

  This was probably the most unscripted dialogue Judith had heard the girl speak since Anne Frank rehearsals had begun. Fiona spent most of her offstage time reading wrapped books, listening to music, and either ignoring or actually not hearing when Rob and Eileen joked that Densmore had cast Fiona solely because the script called for someone with “great legs.”

  Judith took a cigarette. Fiona lit it with a Zippo; she had taken her headphones off, and Judith could hear screaming, whiny treble, and propulsive drumming. “What on earth are you listening to?” Judith asked.

  “The New Christs.” Fiona handed the Walkman to Judith. The music was louder and more aggressive than the Joni Mitchell and Marianne Faithfull tunes Judith tended to cry herself to sleep with. She made a face and handed back the headphones.

  “Yeah, it’s a little rough, isn’t it?” Fiona said. “But sometimes one needs to listen to music like that to drown out everything else around you. Donnell turned me on to them—my brother. He’s pretty much a half-wit and a fuck-up, isn’t he? But he has decent taste in music.”

  “The New Christs,” Judith said. “They’re British?”

  “Australian.”

  “You’re Australian?”

  “No, British,” Fiona said. “Also Canadian, South African, German, Hong Kongese, and just about anything else you can imagine.”

  “Military brat?” Judith asked.

  “Diplomat’s bitch.”

  On the train, Judith sat beside Fiona, who read her wrapped book; it seemed to be an advanced chemistry text, filled with numbers and symbols that looked like hieroglyphics to Judith, but Fiona whipped through it as if it were an Agatha Christie thriller.

  “Is that homework?” Judith asked.

  “’Tisn’t. But science and maths at school, well, they’re pretty much shit, aren’t they? And one has to do one’s best to keep one’s mind alive.”

  “And the wrapping paper—uh, why?”

  “Because impertinent buggers tend to make annoying, patronizing remarks when they see a bird reading something intellectual, don’t they?”

  Judith briefly reran the entirety of the conversation they had just had, trying to determine if she’d said anything that could have been misinterpreted—or interpreted all too accurately. When she had first seen Fiona, she had associated the girl with the vacuous Breck shampoo and Serta mattress models she resembled, and when she had first heard Fiona’s accent, Judith thought she sounded like an upper-class twat on a BBC period drama.

  “Have I said anything annoying or patronizing?” Judith asked.

  “Oh, no, of course not. You’re aces,” said Fiona. “What you said to that vile Robert Rubicoff git, it was bloody heroic, wasn’t it?”

  “I was just saying what I felt,” said Judith.

  “That’s what I mean.”

  The train proceeded north. Out the window, Judith could see the roof of Beth Shalom, where she had attended Hebrew school and Rabbi Jeremy Horvath had arranged for her Bat Mitzvah to coincide with a Torah portion in which Judah mistakes his daughter-in-law for a prostitute because, according to the rabbi, she was the only one in his class who could handle such mature material.

  They got off the train at Central Street and made their way downstairs. Judith said she was headed west and asked if Fiona was going the same way.

  “Alas, not.” Fiona jutted her head in the direction of Lake Michigan.

  “Don’t tell me you live in one of those lavish lakefront mansions,” Judith said.

  “Yes and no,” said Fiona. “The house where we’re staying—well, yes, it’s quite posh. It’s not ours, though. We’re just living in it for a year or so amid someone else’s rubbish. We had to get out of England so fast, we didn’t really have time to arrange a proper place to stay.”

  “Sounds like some serious drama must’ve been playing out in England,” Judith said.

  “Yes,” said Fiona. “I believe you might refer to it as ‘improper behavior.’ ”

  At street level, there was a station diner called Granny’s Kitchen, a dive of a place with a grill, a counter, and wobbly barstools. Fiona suggested they wait there for a while to “have a cuppa and a wee chat” and see if the rain would let up. They sat there drinking coffees and watching the traffic through rain-spattered windows as Fiona told Judith why she had left England. Apparently, her classics teacher, “Lloyd,” had become “a trifle obsessed” with her, she said—complimented her essays about Aeschylus and Euripides, invited her out for coffee and films, took her to shows at the Tate Gallery, exhibits at the British Museum, “that sort of rot.” She said she had liked the attention for a while; boys in her form were predominantly “wankers,” “poofs,” “wankers ashamed they were poofs,” or “poofs blissfully unaware that poofs could still be wankers.” But, after the first time she had “shagged” Lloyd, he had gotten all “barmy”—called her all the time, sent her love notes, chocolates, flowers. When he took to sleeping in his car in her driveway, Fiona’s parents had seen only two choices: call bloody Scotland Yard or move across the ocean and hope Lloyd would find another poor girl to terrorize—failing to understand that America had telephones and a postal service too.

  “Sounds like a lot for you to deal with,” said Judith.

  “Sounds like rather more for Lloyd’s wife,” Fiona said. “For me, it’s just a bit of a bugger.”

  Judith laughed. “Can I just say, I know this might be annoying or patronizing, but I kind of love listening to you—all the ‘flats’ and ‘wankers’ and ‘buggers.’ ”

  “That’s funny,” Fiona said. “No one I know really talks quite this way back in England; I guess moving all the time and never having a permanent home is forcing me to create some identity for myself, isn’t it?”

  They had another cigarette under the viaduct. The rain showed no signs of letting up; it just came down harder. “Maybe we could hang out sometime,” Fiona said. “You could come over; we’d have a glass of wine or two, watch a film. I believe you’re the one person in Anne Frank I can actually talk to.”

  It was just a simple statement, but it brought tears to Judith’s eyes—the tears she could never summon in rehearsal when she was playing Mrs. Frank opposite Rob. How lovely Fiona’s invitation sounded in comparison to her real life: the stiff, formal dinners with her father, stepbrother, and evil stepmother in their posh Central Street condo; the guilt she felt when she thought of her mother alone in her tatty Skokie tenement.

  Fiona wrote down her phone number on the back of a receipt and Judith stuffed it in a pocket of her jacket. She would have liked to stay with Fiona longer—would have liked, more than anything, to spend the evening in her posh mansion, drinking fab wine and blasting the New Christs while Fiona spoke in her preposterous accent. But the alimony and child support checks were waiting for her at her dad’s condo, and her mother was waiting for her at home. So she let Fiona kiss her cheek, told her “Thanks for the fag” but she had to “bugger off” now. “How about Saturday?” she asked.

  “That would be smashing,” said Fiona.

  *

  When Judith arrived at her father and Lorna Jessy’s condo and found the place empty and the dining room table set for one, as if Alfred Hitchcock were staging the homecoming of Miss Lonelyhearts, Judith wasn’t sure whether to feel pissed or relieved that her father had excluded her once again. A note—purportedly from her dad but written in his wife’s juvenile scrawl—explained that he had forgotten he had scheduled a dinner at his club downtown. Paper-clipped to the note were the alimony and child support checks, twenty dollars for a cab ride home, and a pair of tickets to Kabuki Macbeth at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre; Judith’s dad said that he and Lorna had plans to see Georg Solti conduct the Chicago Symphony on the same night, and besides, the Macbeth play sounded like the weird sort of thing Judith might enjoy more than he would.

  If Judith had half the inner fortitude her classmates assumed she did, she would have torn up the note, the checks, the cash, and the tickets, and hurled the dinner Lorna had made down the disposal. But she and her mother actually needed the money, and if she returned every theater and concert ticket her father slipped her, she would never see any shows. And as for the pasta primavera and chilled tomato soup, the only time Judith had a decent meal was when Lorna prepared it, so she ate everything, even though it made her feel just as queasy as the theater tickets she was taking.

  She cleaned her dishes, left an embarrassingly obsequious thank-you note, and, on her way out, paused in the doorway of what could have been her bedroom had she decided to live with her father: pink sheets and a matching lace canopy; a spotless mirror over an empty dresser; framed on a wall, a picture she had drawn when she was a child—a stick figure girl holding hands with a stick figure mom and dad. The room seemed so achingly lonely without anyone in it that Judith couldn’t help but wish for a moment that she lived there instead of in Skokie with her mother. But Judith knew her dad too well to feel too much longing in this bedroom that did and didn’t belong to her. Had she actually told her father she wanted to abandon her mom and live with him, she would have been, at best, relegated to a couch in the living room. Just as the only time Judith’s father slipped her extra cash was when she didn’t ask for it. She wouldn’t spend that twenty he had left her on a taxi, though; she’d use it to buy dinner when she saw Fiona on Saturday, and meanwhile she’d take the train back south, then ride the bus to the home she referred to as Depressive Manor.