Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane Page B

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.”
    “Not far from where I grew up.”
    “I know.” She tapped the keyboard a couple of times and sat back. “I was a junior at Mount Holyoke when you found her the first time. I was obsessed with the case. I used to hurry back to my dorm to see the six o’clock news every night. We all thought she was dead, that whole long winter and into the spring.”
    “I remember,” I said, wishing I didn’t.
    “And then—wow—you found her. All those months later. And you brought her home.”
    “And what’d you think?”
    “About what you did?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “You did the right thing,” she