“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t get out of the library much. It’s nice to talk to an actual person.”

She nodded.

“My dad’s a businessman,” she said. “He works all the time. I barely saw him growing up. Now he’s rich and powerful, but he’s not happy. He’s angry all the time. What’s the point of that?”

“I don’t know. My dad’s a teacher, and he spends all his time wishing he was big and important like your dad.”

“Wow, you’re really good at cheering people up.”

She smiled for the first time. I laughed.

“Yeah, I guess that wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

We were quiet for a while. I noticed we were totally alone. The path was deserted, and it was getting colder by the minute. The silence was almost absolute, except for the occasional rush of the wind through the leaves.

“Listen, I know it’s none of my business, but if you want to talk about anything…” I was aiming for heroic rather than nosy, and I probably came down somewhere in between. “Like you said, I’m a total stranger. Anything you say is pretty much anonymous.”

She looked at me for a minute. It was a curious expression, like she was sizing me up and weighing her options. Was I trustworthy? Could I ease her mind? I guess she decided it was worth a shot, since after a little pause she shrugged, more to herself than to me. She closed her eyes and seemed to focus her thoughts.

“When I said I shouldn’t be here… I really shouldn’t be here. I don’t deserve to be here.”

She took a deep breath and looked me straight in the eye.

“I’m only here because of my dad.”

She sighed and leaned back against the wall. “I’ve never said that out loud before.” She laughed. “I think about it a lot, though.”

She smiled at me with those full lips, and her cheeks looked rosy and warm, even out here in the cold.

“I always wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I’m not even sure why. I’ve been saying it since I was a little kid. I think when I was in elementary school, I said it once and saw how people reacted. I guess they thought it was amazing that I even knew the word. School was easy for me. I got straight A’s. College was easy too. Chemistry, biology, I could learn them in no time. Neurosurgery was the best, the hardest, so I knew that’s what I was going to do. I never imagined anything else.

“But medical school… all of a sudden, everything was different. Nothing came easy anymore. It was like trying to memorize the phone book. I was drowning. I kept my grades up, kept telling everyone I was going to be a neurosurgeon. On the outside, I was fine, but…” She paused. “I felt like I was in a fog. One night I called my dad from a pay phone so no one would hear me. I was crying. I said, ‘Do you want me to make straight A’s?’ He was just sarcastic. He said, ‘No, I want you to make C’s.’ I failed every class that semester.” She looked down. “A breakdown like that… Do you know how many spots there are for neurosurgeons? There’s two of us in my intern class. Thirty total in the country. I was finished.”

She trailed off, shrugged.

“But…”

“My dad worked it out with the school. They wrote it off as a research semester on my transcript. I slept late, worked out, did some easy lab work a couple of hours a day. I took the tests again and got straight A’s. They backdated the grades. My F’s just kind of… disappeared.” She looked right at me. “I’m sure there’s some nice new building on campus with our name on it.”

I let it all sink in.

“You asked him to do this?” My question came out more judgmental than I meant it to.

She shook her head. “No. But I went with it. I didn’t say no.” She sighed. “So you see, you feel like a mistake. But I know I am.”

We walked toward her apartment without talking. It was well past midnight, and even in this academic hamlet, it wasn’t safe for women to walk alone along the river at night.

I thought about her story. I guess I knew things like that happened, but to hear it for sure… it’s the kind of stuff that makes schools like this an impossible dream for people like me. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling I got from her. Her eyes were kind and playful at the same time; they looked right at you, as if you were the most important person in the world. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have leaning over my hospital bed, telling me everything was going to be all right. Or was I just going easy on her because she was pretty?

Finally, I said, “I think you’re too hard on yourself. In the end, you took those tests. You made those A’s.”

“My transcript is a lie.”

“I’m not denying that. And I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying you can’t torture yourself like this. It’s not good for you. It won’t help your patients.”

She smiled, but she didn’t look convinced.

“Do you have any hobbies?” I asked.

“What?”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

“Hobbies,” I repeated. “Things you do for fun. When you’re not beating yourself up.”

She thought about it for a second.

“I like opera.”

“Really? I’ve never even heard an opera.”

“Well, I haven’t been in years, since I stopped letting my dad pay for things. Now it’s too expensive. But I have my CDs.”

She smiled genuinely for the first time that night, then she caught herself.

“So,” she said, stopping and looking right at me. “What should I do?”

“I really don’t know.”

“I could use some friendly advice.”

“What would happen if you came clean?”

“They’d fire me. I’d never get another job in medicine.”

“And if you didn’t? Like I said, you made those A’s in the end. Can you make peace with yourself?”

“I don’t know. Could you?”

“The truth is, it would be pretty easy for me to tell you to do the right thing. It’s not my career. It’s not my dream at stake. I don’t know what I’d really do if I were you.”

We reached her stoop.

“This is it,” she said.

We were standing below a brownstone with a short staircase up to her door.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah. It felt good just to say it out loud. That’s a start, right? I just need some sleep. A shower, go for a run maybe.”

I looked at her pretty face, her warm smile. I didn’t like what she had done (or had let happen), but she was so kind, so gentle. I wanted her to stop hurting all the same.

“Some first date,” she said.

I hesitated, then took a shot.

“Can I see you again?”

She studied my face. For a second, I thought she was going to say yes.

“What would we do?” she asked, smiling. “See a movie? Grab some pizza? I think tonight kind of exists in its own universe. Total strangers. Moonlight confessions. Isn’t that what you said?”

“I guess so.”

“We have a secret,” she said, holding out her hand.

“We do,” I said.

She squeezed my hand, and I felt it through my entire body.

7

Friday the seventeenth. I couldn’t stop shaking. My tie was crooked. My jacket looked worn. I cursed my pants, my shoes. It was all wrong, bush league, low-class. Nothing I could do about it now. I wished I’d had the courage to ask Nigel to come with me. I knew he would be there, but just as certainly, I knew that I couldn’t say anything to him, that I was supposed to arrive alone.

2312 Morland Street. I didn’t even know what that was. Was it the secret clubhouse? Even Miles, my source of all things creepy and Ivy League, didn’t know where the physical heart of the V &D was located. There was no famous landmark, no cryptic house for tourists to photograph. At least, not as far as he knew. And Miles ate this stuff up with the delight of a stamp collector. If he didn’t know, who else could I ask?

Yesterday, I told Miles about the invitation. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to tell someone. He was a huge help. He stroked his wild beard, patted me on the shoulder, and said: “My advice? If they ask you to have sex with a goat, that’s where you draw the line.”