Pretty Is Read Free Page B

desk, red and raw, nails gnawed and not as clean as they could be. I wish he would stuff them back in his pockets; they make me queasy. Sean is no Sherlock, but it seems he’s about to prove Amelia’s point.
    I prevaricate. “If I wanted to know, I suppose I would have Googled myself.” Which I have done, of course. Doesn’t everyone? What I know is that you used to have to scroll through nine pages of obscure singers bearing my name, census data and death records, someone who still has a Myspace account, and a doggy day-care owner in Ohio, not to mention my own faculty profile and syllabi, before you came across a brief, dry item cataloging child abductions by decade. My kidnapping is listed as one of many from the midnineties. Now you need only click through four pages to discover that Lois Lonsdale is also Lucy Ledger, and from there it’s a short virtual leap to the rest of the story.
    I smile at Sean in a way that I hope is both teacherly and winning, hoping to divert him from whatever unpleasant course he is set on. There’s still time to turn back, time to rethink whatever he’s about to do. His plot is still flexible, unlike Pamela’s.
    But he is not to be won. He wrote a terrible first essay, I remember. Did I give him an F or a D? Probably an F. I am trying to make sure no one thinks I am a lightweight, a pushover. I flip open my grade book. Yes, an F. Too bad.
    “It was when you were talking about Pamela and how she could marry Mr. B after what he did. I just thought there was something funny about how you talked about it.” His voice is curiously uninflected. Creepy, I begin to think. Unnerving. “Sometimes that happens to me. I get these feelings about people. So I checked you out. Do you want to guess what I found?”
    “I can just imagine,” I say drily. “I don’t suppose it was my third-place finish in the national spelling bee.”
    For the most part, I have managed to keep Lucy Ledger out of Lois Lonsdale’s everyday life. In her author photo, Lucy Ledger is smoky-eyed and edgily glamorous. She sports a leather jacket and assertive earrings. Lois Lonsdale, on the faculty Web site, peers sternly through forward-falling hair, face framed by a crisp collar emerging from her prim suit. You wouldn’t see a resemblance unless you were looking for it. We didn’t broadcast my real name when the book was published, though a handful of intrepid reviewers figured it out. My parents received a few calls from people interested in reviving the old story, and Miranda and Stephen’s disapproval of my literary venture deepened the faint chill between us. I told my department chair about the book when he hired me, but did not mention its roots in my history; he seemed to find the fact that I had written a popular novel scandalous enough and all too gladly agreed to keep it under wraps to the extent that it was possible. That part was easier than I had expected: there was minimal intersection between my worlds. I never saw a familiar face at a reading. I tried to handle most publicity long-distance; I became adept at the e-mail interview, the phone chat.
    Sean McDougal is the first real threat I have had to confront.
    After scrabbling for a moment in his backpack, he withdraws a battered paperback. It’s swollen and darkened, as if it’s been rescued from drowning—or dropped in a bathtub, more likely. “Got it used on Amazon,” Sean says. “Basically free, except for shipping.”
    It’s Deep in the Woods.
    The thought of this grubby, ill-mannered student poking around in my life—and even in my sentences—chills me. Surely it’s hardly disastrous, though. I think quickly, trying to anticipate how this terribly unappealing young man could use his discovery to hurt me.
    I really cannot imagine.
    For a fiction writer, that’s a failure, I suppose.
    Chloe
    I belong on the stage. Zed told me so (that was what we called him—like the British letter Z; we never knew his name until afterward), and I