Whisper to Me(36)

“Yeah,” said Paris, grinning. “But with the checks from my dad, and my work too, I got this sweet pad. So I’m happy.”

“Do your parents know about … you know. The cam stuff?”

“No, thank God. They don’t check up on me, which is good, because they have some serious problems with my lifestyle choices as it is. We are, what would you say? We are somewhat estranged.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry what?”

“That you’re, I don’t know, estranged.”

She waved this away. “Only one of my many issues.”

“How does it work?” I asked. “The modeling. I mean … do you have, like, an agency?”

Paris laughed. “Cass! It’s the twenty-first century. I have Instagram for promotion, and then I have a website. People subscribe, and they can watch me when I decide to stream a video. Or book me for an event or whatever.”

“People? You mean men?”

“Well, yeah. I guess.”

I remembered her card. “And the bachelor parties?”

“Stripping, basically,” she said. “Private parties. Way more lucrative than the clubs. Five hundred bucks a pop. Julie hates it.”

“Because …”

“Because she thinks it’s not safe. But these are birthday parties, you know? College graduations, bachelor parties.”

“But … what about … safety? Don’t you get scared?”

“I have a no-touching policy,” said Paris. “That puts off the worst creeps, I figure. And Julie drives me if I go to a party. Plus, there’s kind of a network, you know? Someone gets a bit rough, one of the other girls will e-mail about it. Post it on one of the forums—his e-mail address, that kind of thing. We watch out for one another.”

“Wow.” I seemed to keep saying that.

She looked at her watch. It was a men’s Rolex—I recognized it because it was like the one my dad got from the Navy stores, but much newer. A black-bezeled Submariner. A diving watch.

“You dive?” I asked.

“What?”

I pointed at her watch. She laughed again. “No. I just like shiny things. Like a magpie.” That was Paris—always a bird. Light bones, mind flitting from place to place, acquiring things. Something tailored from wind, unanchored in the sky. She walked over to a big flat-screen TV. “Anyway, we have forty minutes. Just enough time for Project Runway before we go. I DVRed it.”





We walked to the bowling alley. The place was kind of run-down. There was an empty lot next to it, full of weeds, cordoned off by a wire fence. I guessed it had been built when Oakwood was still a tourism boomtown, before people started flying to Mexico. A long, flat edifice, warehouse-like, squat.

There was a neon sign out front, still lit, one of those ones with three images kind of overlapping so it looks animated—a guy holding up a ball, then kneeling, then releasing it. Except the third batch of tubes was busted, so the guy was just standing and then kneeling, standing and then kneeling, like he was proposing or something.

Or having a stroke.

Inside, we walked past an empty reception area. The place was closed; I mean, it was closed for bowling. Behind the desks were rows of compartments holding white-soled sneakers in different sizes. We cut right and went past the lanes; the lights above them were off, but screen savers cycled on the computers above them, showing cartoons of shocked-looking pins tumbling end over end, creating flickering shadows. It felt like an introductory scene in a horror movie.

“Spooky, isn’t it?” said Paris.

“Uh-huh.”

The balls gleamed in their racks. Green and blue and black and red, the colors pearlescent, swirling like gasoline in a puddle. They gave me a sick feeling. They reminded me of bruises. I could smell stale popcorn.

“In here,” said Paris. She opened a utilitarian fire door with a letter-sized piece of paper taped to it, saying PRIVATE MEETING IN SESSION VSG SOUTH JERSEY BRANCH.

I followed her in. There was an oldish-looking guy sitting on a cheap plastic chair with steel legs; ten or so empty chairs were arranged in a circle in front of him. The room was bare—against one wall was a table with a paper cloth over it, and a coffeepot and cups.

“I’m hoping someone’s going to bring cookies,” he said. He had gray hair, twinkling eyes. Kind of handsome, in a scruffy, old-guy kind of way. He was wearing Nike sneakers with jeans and a polo shirt. He looked like the antidoctor. He looked like, I don’t know, an advertising executive or something. Not that I know what an advertising executive looks like.

“****,” said Paris. “I baked some. I swear. Then we were watching Project Runway.”

“A valuable use of your time, no doubt,” said the old guy. But he was smiling as he said it. He turned to me. “Dr. Lewis,” he said. “But you can call me Mike. And you must be … what do you prefer? Cassandra? Cass? Cassie?”

I shrugged. “Whatever.”

The voice said,

“Manners, Cass. For ****’s sake.”

“I mean, I don’t mind,” I said. This was weird. The voice wanted me to be polite to this guy? Suddenly I felt scared. I mean, this was the thing that had made me slap myself and inject myself with epinephrine, and it wanted me to play nice with the doctor?