Girls

On a hot day at the end of April, we lost one girl and gained another. The one we lost, Amy, was tall and lean, straight blond hair to her waist, a nose that was long and thin and noble. Looking at her photograph in the paper, she could have been royalty, a princess who, while not in line for the throne, would always be much revered. Or maybe a model, but not sexy or petulant-mouthed like magazine models, more like the wholesome models that we grew up looking at in the Sears Wish Book. The picture in the paper showed her smiling, backpack on her back, standing amid pine trees and looking as though she'd been surprised, simply looked up to see someone standing on the trail with a camera. She looks amused to find the photographer there and amused that he'd want to take her picture.

I say he deliberately. I'm of the generation that assumes that most photographers are men or at least that he is a generic term that represents all of us, and I'm of the age when old patterns such as this are not easily escaped. I also say he because this is a smile that women reserve for men, not the kind of smile that I've ever given to or received from someone of my gender. But then again, maybe I should qualify this by saying that it's not the kind of smile that heterosexual women waste on one another, lest I seem guilty of assuming that we are all content with the dominant male/female paradigm.

And why do I use we? Because we, the community — the people of our small town and the university: faculty (me and my kind) and students (Amy and her kind) — sometimes find in ourselves a rare but keen unity.

I suppose that while I'm dealing with these issues of language I should also defend my use of the word girl. I refer again to my age and habits, but also to the age and habits of those I'm referring to. I and my peers are women, and quite honestly, we have so little in common with our 20-year-old students that they seem to merit different titles, labels more akin to their habits and lifestyles.

As I was saying, in her picture, Amy looks amused and wholesome, slightly flirtatious but not overtly sexual. She looks like the glamorous older cousin that we all had, the one so pretty and pleasant that we had to like and admire her. This was why it seemed to be a mistake. She seemed more misplaced or momentarily forgotten than truly missing. After all, who would deliberately harm a girl like Amy? On that first day, when we saw her picture in the campus paper with the banner reading, "Senior Reported Missing," we felt sorry for her, not sorry that she was missing, but sorry that she would be so embarrassed when she returned from whatever spur-of-the-moment trip she'd taken, and sorry for the roommate who was obviously an alarmist and who would undeniably be ridiculed in many a letter on the Opinions Page and undoubtedly become known as the Girl Who Cried Wolf. So what if Amy's car was in the apartment's parking lot, but her bedroom was empty? So what if a shattered bottle of strawberry-kiwi juice, the girl's favorite, had been found nearby? The editors and reporters of the town's paper seemed to feel similarly, since she received only a small and inconspicuous place in the local section with a caption asking, somewhat understatedly, if we'd please call if we saw Amy or knew her whereabouts. No one was alarmed; actually, we were a bit blasé. We rolled our eyes and sighed as we thought of these kids who came here for school and managed to get themselves into all kinds of silly and senseless trouble.

But by the evening news we were nervous. Nervous because the other girl had been found lying among the trees just beyond the park. Near enough that some children, after having spun themselves into a state of sweaty nausea on the merry-go-round, had wandered into the shade and wandered upon the sight of a young woman's naked and abused body, wrists and ankles still bound with wire.

At first we were certain it was Amy; the equation was balanced. One girl missing, one girl found. But shortly after the announcement that a body was found came the announcement that it couldn't be Amy because this girl had black hair, was much shorter than Amy and had been dead for several days — already the term decomposed could be applied to her.

At first, we were relieved by this news. But after a moment's thought we realized that Amy was not simply missing but had been taken. Still, we tried to remain optimistic. Candlelight vigils were hastily announced. We listened to the chief of campus police and to the county sheriff when they said that while they didn't know the identity of the girl found in our park, there was good forensic evidence and sophisticated and extensive databases for identifying her and for building a case against the perpetrator. There were tire tracks, footprints, fiber samples, DNA evidence and a host of other techniques for finding this man. But no, sorry, they were not ready to make any assumptions or announcements about the possible connection between this body and the disappearance of our girl. And, of course, it was too soon to give up hope for Amy's safe return.

In the days that followed we lived in a state of thinly disguised panic. Girls disappeared from campus, this time at the insistence of parents or because of their own growing and consuming fear. The ones who remained gathered in clumps between classes, spoke softly and held their bodies with stiff self-consciousness. Both the town and campus papers printed newly anxious pleas for information. They also printed warnings that young women should exercise vigilance in locking doors and windows, avoid walking or driving alone at night and avoid the company of men whom they did not know. Unusual phone calls, deliveries, or unexpected utility or household repairs should be met with caution. "We do not have any solid leads in the cases of Amy Sanders or the recently discovered body," the sheriff said, "but I think we're safe in assuming that we have a predator in our midst."

While the sheriff's statements disappointed us with their lack of information and annoyed us with their inclusion of the obvious, he did provide us with a name for our fear. The man that we'd simply called he for the last few days became The Predator. In the hallways between classes, girls and sometimes boys whispered this word with a kind of horrified reverence. It seemed impossible to them, so young and heartbreakingly naive, that this could happen at their college and to their classmate. To the faculty, it seemed impossible that we hadn't expected it or that it hadn't happened sooner. After all, so much youthful beauty crammed into such a small space had to be a recipe for disaster.

As more parents called more daughters home, the president made a statement on the local news that everything possible was being done to keep our students safe. There were town meetings with the president, various deans, campus, county, state and federal law enforcement agencies. Professors and graduate students from the psychology department led encounter groups in dorms and sorority houses. Campus ministries and student religious groups organized prayer vigils in which they prayed for the safety and/or peace of the victims and that The Predator be brought to justice of both the divine and secular varieties. The under-funded and rarely utilized campus escort service experienced a boom in both volunteers and customers until a freshman engineering student accused an escort of groping her during their walk from the library to her dorm. Now our female students turned their attention to their male classmates and their fear was fortified with resentment. When a fraternity hosted its annual pre-finals party, the campus paper was filled with angry letters from angry girls who saw this party as one among many indicators of a lack of concern and empathy for their vulnerability. They were also angry that articles in this paper occasionally referred to them as co-eds. The Women's Studies Department was inundated with requests for information about their program and with change of major and minor forms. These professors organized letter-writing campaigns, personal safety workshops, and women-only martial arts classes at the fitness center.

And still our girls left. I received dozens of tearful visits and phone calls asking for incompletes and extensions. One student told me how angry she was that she suddenly felt as though she needed a man to keep her safe from other men. There were even calls from parents. One father shouted, "In loco parentis, in loco parentis" at me.

"What can I do?" I said. "I'm just a history teacher."

"Somebody has to do something," he yelled, "and the president won't return my calls."

Six days after the body was found, we learned a name. Camille Kurtz. She'd been taken from a college up north, reported missing weeks ago after she failed to return from a run. There had been frantic pleas from her parents and friends. Our newspaper described an interview in which her fiance cried and clutched Camille's small and trembling dog. These were aired in New England. Yet here we were, a thousand miles and two weeks away, in possession of her body and, according to some, her spirit as well. With the announcement of the identity, came a description of the crimes committed upon her. Raped. Bruises, cuts and finally stab wounds to the neck, chest, shoulders, arms.

My classes became smaller and smaller as we approached finals. I gave incompletes by the handfuls, and summer school enrollments plunged. At graduation, a bouquet of tiger lilies and white roses along with Amy's diploma were placed in an empty chair on the front row. Throughout the next few days, CNN showed footage of the ceremony, shots of the chair and portions of the president's speech about how much we missed Amy and how much we valued our female students, whom he did not refer to as co-eds although the word girl was used quite often. My summer class was canceled due to low enrollment. The campus and bars were barren. The town was peaceful, left to those of us too old, too wilted, too corrupt of flesh to worry over the intentions of strangers. We had reached the age when our possessions were more desirable than our bodies, and in this knowledge was an unexpected but decided relief. We took walks alone, drank beer in the empty bars and wondered aloud how Amy's parents, whom we'd seen at graduation and on the nightly news, were coping. And like them, we waited to hear that some other college town had found the body of a young woman with long blond hair and regal face, found her at the edge of a park where she lay waiting in the leaf-dappled light, awash in the trilling calls of play-weary children.