Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page A

special guest, who regales me with details about a controversial planned development on the outside of town that should interest me more than it does. From that conversation I ricochet across the room to the corner inhabited by a tall, dark-haired woman who turns out to be the director of the rape crisis center. I find her entertainingly caustic. “Nice life, right?” she says at one point, surveying the room, with its soft lighting, delicately upholstered chairs, and self-conscious air of civilization.
    I am flattered by her assumption that I share her attitude toward this studied atmosphere of privilege. But I’m not sure she’s right about the students; you never know what darkness lurks behind clear, bright undergraduate faces. We all know the statistics about rape on college campuses. Throwing me a quick, sharp glance, the rape crisis center director reads my mind. “Of course you never know,” she adds quickly. “Violence against women is hardly limited to certain social spheres. It’s just my own prejudices speaking. I can’t stand this kind of thing.” She sips her tea with manifest irony. “I bet tomorrow night they’ll be at some fraternity mixer wearing lingerie and togas, drumming up clients for the center. They had to beg to get me to this little shindig.” She’s wearing a chunky black sweater over a flowing, flowery skirt and far more practical boots than mine. Delia, her name is. Impulsively, I suggest having a drink sometime, thinking she seems refreshingly different from my female colleagues. The murky aura of a darker world hovers around her, glowers in her critical, sideways glances. She has seen what people can do to each other. I want to claim her as an ally; I feel the need for one.
    “I don’t drink,” Delia says. “Coffee, maybe?” I accept her politely proffered card, say I’ll call. She places her china teacup carefully on a spindly end table and announces that it’s time for her to mingle. She sounds like someone facing a firing squad. Guiltily, I acknowledge that I, too, should leave the safety of my corner.
    I scan the room for students I recognize, or even the senator. Glossy-haired young women in demure dresses—all in muted colors, as if by agreement—stand in loose clusters, chatting with glassy animation. Such clusters are more structurally impenetrable than they look, I have learned; standing on their peripheries does not guarantee acceptance. A shred of chemistry comes back to me: something about noble gases, unable to react with other elements.
    I wonder what is noble about such gases. Noble: nasturtium, nadir, nescience.
    No one comes to my rescue.
    Carly would know what to do. She always did. She was the opposite of noble, in the atomic sense.
    *   *   *
    My editor is excited about the sequel; this is why I got a two-book deal. “I’d love to see you confront the aftermath,” she’d said at lunch in Manhattan. “Not the immediate aftermath, I mean, but the lives of these girls—after they’ve been returned to their families, their small towns, tried to reassimilate, et cetera. What becomes of them? What kind of connection do they have? Wouldn’t they always have a kind of bond? What could bring them back together?” She had pressed on with questions like these, as apparently a whole novel unfolded itself in her excitable (but also practical) imagination.
    Back at home I exchange my red dress for warm layers, including the knitted fingerless gloves I have taken to wearing in the evening. I pour myself a glass of wine and settle at my computer. My fingers arrange themselves on the keyboard. I will need to enter a more purely fictional realm than I have inhabited as yet. The kidnapper’s son will serve as the mechanism that brings them back together, and he’ll provide a fresh menace. He will want to destroy them, of course. But first he will need to lure them to him. Outside my window, thick snowflakes have begun to drift down; every now and then a