It’s early afternoon, sunny and cool, and quite a few people are out, some sitting on benches and lawns, others strolling around the various quads-most, it appears, in small groups, self-contained, cocooned.
Striking up a casual conversation out here isn’t going to be easy, so she decides to head for the main dining hall. The logic isn’t exactly airtight, but she imagines that standing in line for food could well generate an opening gambit or two.
Besides, she’s hungry.
She heads for the Cabbage Patch. There actually isn’t much of a line here, but she starts eyeing the salads on offer anyway.
“Check out the Avocado Wasabi.”
That was quick.
Ellen turns to her left.
“Good?”
“Oh my.”
The girl is early twenties, younger even, and quite geeky. She’s in glasses, jeans, and a T-shirt that has a cartoony graphic of a computer keyboard on it… geeky, that is, except for the small tattoo on the side of her neck, which Ellen now sees-as the girl turns around slightly-may well be part of a much bigger one all down her shoulder, or even her back.
Ellen takes the salad from the display and looks at the girl. “Twenty years ago, when I was a student? Wasabi? I don’t fucking think so. You do pretty well here.”
The girl draws back a little. “Twenty years ago? You’re kidding, right?”
Shaking her head, but saying nothing, Ellen reaches for a bottle of water.
“Here?”
“No, at Cartwright.”
“Wow. I’m at the wrong school.”
Moving her tray along the counter, Ellen glances back. “What are you studying?”
The girl pauses, maintaining eye contact and pursing her lips. “You mean right now?”
Ellen feels like telling her there’s a speed limit in this state, but she plays along, and within five minutes they’ve been joined at a table by two of Geek Girl’s friends and Ellen is pumping them hard for information, so hard in fact that she eventually has no choice but to partially blow her cover and tell them she’s a journalist.
One of them has heard of her and is wildly impressed.
But not a lot comes of it. She explains that she’s researching student activism post-Occupy and would like to identify any sources of radicalism in the college. Not wanting to freak them out or scare them off, she quickly adds that she isn’t looking for names or anything, which is a lie, of course, but she also gets the impression that if they had any such names, giving them out wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for these girls, and not because of any latent McCarthyite tendencies they might have, but rather because it just wouldn’t occur to them that anyone could possibly object.
Going by their ages, which probably average out at about twenty, it’s a safe bet to assume that these girls have fully recorded and documented their lives online, at least from the start of adolescence, and that it’s all still out there-every last confession, playlist, and photo, and for anyone at all to see, at any time-on Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo. It’s the great fault line of the new generation gap, the end of privacy-and it’s what makes Max Daitch (for example) such a dinosaur. He thinks, why would you do such a thing? They think, why wouldn’t you?
It’s just that right now, for Ellen, none of this is of any use, because it turns out that Geek Girl here and her friends are about as politically aware as, she doesn’t know… the Smurfs. Or the Bratz.
One of them, however-the Smart One-does make a useful suggestion.
Ellen should check out a few past numbers of the Atherton Chronicle. She’ll find a pile of them in the main library. And she should probably also listen back to some of the talk stuff they do on the college radio station-some of that shit, apparently, can get very political. She’ll find it all archived online.
Before Ellen leaves the Cabbage Patch to head for the library, she vacuums some personal details up from around the table-phone numbers, e-mail and Web addresses, usernames, handles, hash tags-info she may find useful later on, if it turns out she needs a quick route into the Atherton College social mediasphere.
The girls, of course, are only too willing to hand over anything she asks for.
“She did say one thing, now that I remember.”
Frank looks at Rachel. Whatever this is, she’s pretending she’s only just remembered it-Frank can see that clearly, and he’s annoyed-but at this stage the information is what counts, nothing else.
“What is it?”
“Before she left, she said there’d be radio silence for a while. That’s what she called it.”
“Radio silence.”
“Yeah.”
“Meaning?”
Rachel swallows, uncomfortable now. “I guess that, yeah, she wouldn’t be answering her phone, or tweeting, that kind of stuff.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Bishop. She didn’t elaborate. Lizzie isn’t that forthcoming.”
He also finds it annoying being told what his daughter is supposedly like. “You didn’t ask?”
Rachel shuffles for a bit-in her bare feet, which Frank has just noticed-and then adjusts her glasses. “No, I didn’t. She’s not big on social media, she’s not an obsessive like I am, or like most people these days, so it didn’t seem like such a big deal, you know? Things can get pretty intense around here, and I just figured she and Alex maybe needed to, I don’t know, zone out for a bit.”
Alex.
She didn’t have much to say about him either. Sally Peake is currently out in the hallway trying to see who she can scare up that might have a little more to say about him.
Frank feels he’s getting something of a mixed message from these two. On the one hand, it’s obvious they think he’s a nutjob, and that he didn’t get-or read-the memo about how his daughter going to college meant that SHE WAS LEAVING HOME. On the other hand, he senses a slight nervousness, especially on Sally’s part, a desire to wrap this up, to contain it before security has to be called in.
“Around here,” Frank then says to Rachel. “You said things can get pretty intense. You mean specifically at Atherton?”
“Yes. There’s a lot of academic pressure, a lot of competitiveness.”
Frank nods. Now that he thinks about it, Lizzie is actually a very good student. She’s always done well and gotten good grades. She’s focused and works hard. She got a part scholarship to this place.
So maybe she did just need a break.
And maybe her old man is a fucking nutjob, who could do with seeing a psychiatrist.
Sally Peake reappears in the doorway, again holding up her phone. “Friend of Alex, guy who knows him pretty well? He’s just coming out of the VLA, says he’ll meet us at the Spoon in ten.”
Frank nods at Rachel and says, “Thanks.”
She nods back.
As he’s walking out of the room, he sees her lifting up her phone and starting to text.
The Spoon is a section of the main dining hall, which itself is more like a food court in a suburban mall, not unlike the one in Winterbrook, in fact-though seeing it again now, Frank realizes that this one is a tad fancier.
They approach a table near the front, where Sally Peake introduces him to a young guy named Claudio Mazza. Frank tries to get an instant fix on him, but is thwarted from the get-go. Despite his Italian name, Claudio Mazza has blond hair and blue eyes. Frank is also finding it hard to categorize him as a typical college kid. Is he a nerd, a jock, a hipster, or a partier? None of these really seems to fit. He does have a book next to his coffee cup, but that hardly counts as a clue around this place. Probably nineteen or twenty years old, he’s dressed with a nod to punk-or maybe it’s punk-meets-goth-in dirty, wide-strapped, spiked boots and a pair of studded jeans that look like something from an art installation. But these are offset sharply by an almost foppish upper half-tweed jacket and a plain white T-shirt.