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"Well, our school is not Harvard University, so there's nothing strange about it." James said. He put the two piles of papers together, separated them evenly, and turned them upside down on the table like playing cards. "Sometimes, I feel that my hard work is simply in vain."
Louisa was a little surprised when she heard this. "It's not your fault that the students didn't work hard. But they're not in a mess either. A few of them got A's." Her eyes suddenly became serious, "Your life is not wasted."
What James meant was that he taught introductory history year after year, and his students didn't even bother to understand the most basic historical chronology. He thought, Louisa is only twenty-three years old. What does she know about life and what waste is? However, he still felt comfortable hearing her say that.
"Don't move," he said. "There's something in your hair." Her hair was cool and a little wet, as if it hadn't been completely dried after the morning shower. Louisa remained motionless, staring at his face with wide eyes. Not a petal, he thought, but a ladybug, and he plucked it off. Ladybug propped up her little yellow legs as thin as silk thread, stood on tiptoes, and hung upside down on his nails.
"There are a lot of worries this year." A voice came from the door. James looked up and saw Stanley Hewitt leaning half in. He didn't like Stan - a ruddy, broad-shouldered man who spoke to him loudly and slowly, as if James had hearing problems. Stan often tells silly jokes, such as "George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walked into a bar..." and the like.
"What's the matter, Stan?" James asked. He suddenly found that his index finger and thumb had inadvertently stretched out over Louisa's shoulder, making the shape of a pistol, and pointed it at Stan. He quickly retracted his hand.
"I just wanted to ask a question about the dean's latest announcement," Stan said, holding up a piece of mimeographed material. "I didn't want to disturb you."
"I have to go," Louisa said. "Have a good morning, Professor Lee. I'll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt." Louisa squeezed past Stanley and entered the corridor. James noticed She blushed, and his own face grew hot. After Louisa left, Stanley sat down on the corner of James' table.
"Beautiful girl," he said, "she's going to be your assistant this summer, right?"
"Yes." James opened his palm, and the ladybug crawled onto his fingertips, walking along the spiral and ring-shaped fingerprints. He wanted to punch Stanley's grinning mouth and feel his twisted front teeth with his knuckles. However, he just crushed the ladybug on his hand with his thumb. The fragments of carapace caught between the fingers, feeling like popcorn husks, the shattered ladybird turned into a small pile of sulfur-colored powder. Stanley's fingers kept scratching on the spine of James' book. Although after a while, James would rather time stay in this ignorant moment, but now, what bothered him the most was Stan's malicious smile. So when the phone rang, he felt so relieved that he didn't even notice the anxiety in Marilyn's voice right away.
"James," she said, "can you go home?"
Police told them that many teenagers would run away from home without warning. Girls often get angry with their parents, they say, without the parents even noticing. Nass watched the police check his sister's room. He hoped that they would use talcum powder, feather brushes, sniffer dogs, magnifying glasses and other tools to find clues, but they only used their eyes to see: the top of the desk was fixed on the wall with thumbtacks. Posters, shoes on the floor, half-open school bags. Then the younger policeman placed his palm on the cap of Lydia's round pink perfume bottle, as if holding a child's head.
The older police officers told them that most cases of missing girls would be dismissed within 24 hours because the missing girls would return home on their own.
"What does that mean?" Nath asked. "Most? What does that mean?"
The policeman glanced at him over his bifocals. "That said, that's what happens in most cases," he said.
"Eighty percent?" Nath said. "Ninety? Ninety-five?"
"Ness," James said, "Okay, let Officer Fisk do his job."
The younger officer jotted down the details of the case in his notebook: Lydia Elizabeth Lee, sixteen. Last seen: Monday, May 2, wearing a printed necktie dress. Parents' names: James and Marilyn Lee. Officer Fisk began to question James in detail, and he suddenly remembered something.
"Your wife also disappeared once?" he asked. "I remember that case happened in 1966, right?"
James felt a warmth on the back of his neck, and there seemed to be sweat dripping from behind his ears. He was grateful that Marilyn was downstairs on the phone. "It was a misunderstanding," he said uncomfortably. "My wife and I were having communication problems because of household matters."
"Got it." The older police officer took out his notebook and started taking notes. James curled his fingers and tapped lightly on Lydia's desk.
"Do you have any other questions?"
In the kitchen, the police flipped through family photo albums, looking for a clear photo of Lydia's face. "This one." Hannah said, pointing to the photo album. This photo was taken last Christmas, and Lydia has a sulky look on her face. At that time, Nath, who was holding the camera, tried to make her laugh, but failed. She was sitting under a tree, her back against the wall, and she was the only one in the photo. The expression on her face was one of naked defiance, her eyes looking straight at you as if through the photo paper, as if saying, "What are you looking at?" Nath couldn't tell the difference between her blue irises and her black irises in this photo. Pupils, the shining photo paper turned her eyes into two black holes. When he took out the developed photo from the grocery store and saw his sister's expression on it, he regretted taking the photo. However, he now had to admit that the photo in Hannah's hand was very accurate - at least it looked very much like the way Lydia looked when he last saw her.
"Don't choose that one," James said. "Lydia is making a face. People would think she always looks like this. Choose a good one." He flipped through the album and picked out the last one. , "This one is better."
This was taken a week ago on Lydia's sixteenth birthday. She was sitting at the table, wearing lipstick and smiling. Although her face is facing the camera, her eyes are looking outside the frame. What is she laughing at? Did you see something interesting? Nath thought. Maybe it was something he or his father said that made Lydia amused, or maybe it was for some reason they didn't know. In the photo, Lydia looks like a model in a magazine advertisement. Her lips are dark and rich. She is holding a plate of cake evenly covered with frosting in her slender palms. She looks so happy that it hardly seems real.
James pushed the birthday photo on the table in front of the two policemen. The younger one stuffed the photo into a Manila thick paper document bag and stood up.
"This one will do," he said. "If we don't find her tomorrow, we will make a flyer. Don't worry, I'm sure she will come back." As he spoke, a drop of spit flew onto the album. Hannah wiped it away with her fingers.
"She's not going to run away from home without saying a word," Marilyn said. "What if a madman or a lunatic kidnaps her?" She reached for the morning newspaper, which had been lying in the center of the table.
"Try not to worry, ma'am," Officer Fisk said. "It's unlikely that something like this would happen. In most cases..." He glanced at Nath, then cleared his throat, "Missing girls almost always come home." .”
After the police left, Marilyn and James sat with a piece of paper. The police suggested that they call all of Lydia's friends and contact anyone who might know where she was. So, the two made a list together: Pam Sanders, Jane Pittman, Shelly Brierley... Although Nath didn't say anything, he knew that these girls were never Lydia's. friend. Lydia had been classmates with them since kindergarten. The girls would occasionally call and have a laugh with Lydia. Sometimes Lydia would shout into the receiver, "I got it!" Sometimes, at night, she would sit for hours at the window on the landing, the phone on her lap, the receiver between her shoulder and her ear. Whenever her parents passed by, she would mumble something under her breath, twirling the phone cord with her little fingers until they were gone. Nath felt that based on Lydia's behavior, her parents wrote down the names of girls who might know her whereabouts.
But Nath knew what Lydia was like at school. He had seen how she sat silently in the cafeteria while the other girls chatted. He had seen how she said nothing as they copied Lydia's homework. He stuffed the notebook back into his bag. After school, she would board the school bus alone and sit quietly next to Nas. Once, he passed by Lydia when she was on the phone and found that she was not gossiping with her classmates, but telling her about the day's homework—read the first act of "Othello" and complete the odd-numbered exercises in Part Five—and then hung up. Drop the phone. The next day, while Lydia was once again curled up on the windowsill with her ear pressed against the receiver, Nath picked up the extension receiver in the kitchen and heard only a low dial tone. Lydia never really had friends, a fact her parents never knew. If her father asked, "Lydia, how's Pam doing?" Lydia would say, "Oh, she's fine, she just joined the cheerleading team." Nath wouldn't argue with her. Instead, he was surprised by her calmness and her superb skill in lying without even raising her eyebrows.
But Nass couldn't tell his parents the truth now. He saw his mother scrawling names one after another on the back of an old invoice, and then asked him and Hannah: "Who else can you think of?" He immediately thought of Jack. , but replied "No more".
Lydia stayed with Jack—or rather, Jack clung to her—throughout the spring. Every evening, they would go for a drive in Jack's Beetle, and Lydia wouldn't go home until dinner time, pretending that she had been at school. The friendship was "out of the blue" - Ness refuses to use another word to describe it. When Jack was in first grade, his mother moved him into the house around the corner, and Nath thought they could be friends, but that wasn't the case. Jack had humiliated him in front of other children and laughed at him when Nath's mother ran away from home, thinking she would never come back. It was as if, now that Nath thought about it, Jack, without a father, was qualified to have an opinion on his parents leaving home. When the Woolfs moved in, all the neighbors talked behind their backs about how Janet Woolf was getting divorced and how Jack was running around while Janet was working the night shift at the hospital. That summer, neighbors also gossiped about Nath's parents—but Nath's mother eventually returned home, while Jack's mother was still divorced, and Jack was still a wild child running around.
What now? Just last week, Nath was driving home from running errands and saw Jack walking his dog. Nath was walking along the shore of the lake, about to turn onto the small street where they lived, when he spotted Jack coming from the path along the shore. Jack was a tall, slim man, and his dog ran ahead, bounding briskly toward a tree. Jack was wearing an old faded T-shirt, and his uncombed light brown curly hair was sticking up. As Nath drove past him, Jack looked up at him and nodded almost imperceptibly, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Nath felt that Jack's behavior was more a sign that he recognized him than a greeting, nothing more. Moreover, his dog stared unscrupulously into Nath's eyes, casually raised one leg and began to urinate. It was with this guy that Lydia spent the entire spring.