The Venus Fix

Forty-Five

Amanda was alone at home. Her father was away on a business trip to somewhere or other-he was always gone-and her mother was at her book club meeting. She’d stayed late at the office and gone straight there, calling Amanda at seven o’clock to make sure she was home and had found the dinner the housekeeper had left for her.

She’d told her mother she wasn’t hungry. That she had a sore throat. That maybe she was coming down with something. She wasn’t sure why she’d lied, except that she really didn’t feel that good. But not because of a sore throat-it was worse than that. It was everything she had read on news sites about Penny Whistle, ZaZa and Tania and what the guys had been talking about at school before Dr. Snow showed up.

And it was Dr. Snow, talking to her as if she knew everything. As if she really could look right inside her and see how it was all twisted up and scary.

Her fingers on the keyboard, she stared at her desktop, hesitating before clicking the Internet icon. She thought she’d be over this by now, but every fucking time she signed on, she got a cramp in her stomach. Sometimes it lasted a few seconds. Sometimes it was so bad she had to lie down. She never knew why it was worse some days than others. She wanted to tell Dr. Snow about it tonight. She almost had. Almost asked her how long it would hurt. How long it would take before she stopped missing Simone? How long it would take before she’d stop thinking of her when she did the things they used to do?

Simone had lived online.

Amanda used to sign on and instantly an IM would appear.

Wht r u dng?

They’d instant-message back and forth while they did their homework, talked on the phone to other kids and watched TV. They were never not in touch with each other.

So when she went online now and the IM box didn’t pop up right away, she noticed it. And when someone else contacted her, she felt sort of disappointed when she saw the user name and it wasn’t Simonesez.

Amanda’s hands perspired and shook a little as she typed in the URL. She didn’t have to even think-it was right there. Literally at her fingertips.

She was holding her breath, not knowing what to expect. She hadn’t gone there since Simone had died. It had been months and she still missed her best friend as much as she had the very first week she had died. But she had to make sure. If she was going to tell Dr. Snow, she had to make sure first that she was right.

Silently, the Web site appeared. Amanda stared at the checkerboard of women’s photos. How was she going to find the other two girls? The ones that they had found before. She didn’t remember their names. She and Simone had just clicked on anyone who had New York in her profile, and then watched, sometimes laughing and sometimes getting disgusted and sometimes admitting to each other that it was a little sexy to watch this stuff. And then they’d sit and talk about Timothy and Hugh and the other guys they knew who watched this stuff all the time and why the guys liked these girls so much more than them. They finally went shopping at Victoria’s Secret so they could get dressed up to look like the Webcam girls. They posed each other in front of the Web cam Amanda had bought for just this purpose with money she’d saved up and watched themselves on the screen to see if they looked as good as the other girls.

They never did.

It hadn’t seemed like a big deal when they’d started. It seemed pretty normal for them to want to know what the guys were watching. They were curious. There was nothing wrong with that, was there?

In her mind, Amanda was defending what they had done to someone who wasn’t there. She was explaining it as if she were on trial.

No, she wasn’t.

She was trying to imagine what it would be like to explain to Dr. Snow. But first, she had to be sure.

Amanda started clicking on all the New York names. They all looked familiar. She and Simone must have gone to dozens of these sites after that first night they’d stumbled on the guys surfing the Net at a party at Hugh’s house. She and Simone weren’t even invited. But Les, her brother, who was friends with Timothy and Hugh, had dragged them along. He was supposed to be babysitting them, not taking them out. Timothy had been nice to her. He’d been the only one who even noticed her and Simone in a normal way. He’d stayed nice to them. He’d even gone to Simone’s funeral with her. Sat next to her. Not like it meant anything. But it was nice, anyway.

That long-ago night, when she and Simone had walked into the darkened bedroom, they’d seen three boys glued to the computer, the screen’s light reflecting on their faces, and instantly sensed they shouldn’t be there, but they were too curious to leave. The boys never heard them-they were way too involved watching two women making out in a bubble-filled bathtub.

“What ho’s,” Hugh had said in a voice that gave Amanda goose bumps. “I’d like to be that bar of soap.”

“Wrap those legs around me like that. Fucking A,” Barry said.

Only Timothy hadn’t spoken. It was a small thing but it had meant something to her.

So what? Then, at sixteen, Amanda had already seen stuff. She wasn’t too freaked out about it. When you’re a teenager and you have a brother eighteen months older than you, there’s not that much you don’t know about. Her parents had lectured her about going online and giving out her real name, and she’d heard them fighting with Les over what he was looking at on the Net. She’d even wound up on smutty sites by accident, but she’d never watched any porn before. She’d never seen anything that was as down and dirty as what the boys were watching that night.

She and Simone sneaked out before the guys caught them, but a few months later, when Simone was at Amanda’s for a sleepover, they’d asked Les if he’d show them what sites he went to. He said no about a hundred times and then Simone had offered to give him a blowjob in exchange for some of the URLs. He said yes.

Amanda was dumbfounded and sat there without moving the whole time that Simone and Les were out of the room.

“Why did you do it?” she asked her friend later.

“I like him. I thought maybe it would make him like me,” Simone said. Her voice was flat. “The worst part was he kept watching the Web the whole time I was doing it.”

After that, she and Simone became obsessed with figuring out what was so special about the online girls, and what was wrong with themselves.

No. She wouldn’t start thinking about it. It would just make her cry. And that wasn’t the point. She needed to figure it out. She needed to understand what was happening. It was too creepy. There was no way that what she and Simone had done had anything to do with the girls who were getting killed.

But what if it had?