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much he missed out on by having me as his steady girlfriend for his entire college career.) But when the call girl’s fees came to light, Deirdre remarked, “Wow. That’s a whole lot more than the girls at school make.”
    And this is when he started to listen. “How much do college call girls make these days?”
    Deirdre plopped herself down in a chair and waited for a moment before finally asking, “Do you want to hear about it?”
    He did.
    The call girl operation was a longstanding Mercer College business, Deirdre said. Very entrepreneurial: student-founded, student-operated, student-owned. It was an open secret, winked at by the faculty and snickered at by non-participating students, who nevertheless were awed by the wicked glamour. No one knew exactly how big an operation it was; most guessed that there were ten or fifteen women on the roster.
    Engrossed in the story, I was vaguely titillated, as if reading a tabloid headline while waiting to buy groceries. Then I remembered that Tim was not telling me this for my entertainment. “I don’t see how—what good would I be on this story?” It was too much to hope that he’d ask me to write a feature on bordello décor.
    “You’ve got the contacts.”
    I felt myself backtracking, trying to undo my bragging. “Just the dean of admissions. And he’s easy to reach—listed in the college directory. I just did one interview. We’re not close.”
    “And you’ve got this whole education thing working,” he said. “You understand the system.”
    “I don’t, though.” I was speaking fast now, in a desperate bid to convey my incompetence. “I understand blind children taking their dogs to school, I understand replacing soda machines with juice dispensers. And anyway, I don’t see how relevant all this is to education. This thing, it sounds like something you’d read in the National Enquirer. ”
    “These days, all the big news starts at the National Enquirer —the stuff everyone’s too squeamish to print until it shows up in the grocery store checkout line. Besides, it’s not like this story is without precedent. Don’t you remember, back in the eighties, that big scandal about Ivy League prostitution? It was on the front page of the New York Times .”
    Tim has had a subscription to the Times since he was in the sixth grade.
    “The eighties?” I took a swig of my water. “If it wasn’t in Tiger Beat magazine, I’d have missed it.”
    “Well, it was big, mainstream, national news.” He leaned forward. “And it’s happening again.”
    “I don’t think I’m the right person for the job,” I said.
    He put his elbows on the table, leaned forward, closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. I recognized this gesture. It had always made me feel inadequate. He leaned back, opened his eyes. “You’re perfectly positioned,” he said. “You’ve got the title, you’re affiliated with this”—he searched for an adjective that wouldn’t annoy me—“non-threatening publication. People will be relaxed around you. Anyone you talk to will assume you’re only going to say positive things about them because that’s all Salad ever does.”
    He’d gone as far as he could on the Internet, he said, spending hours searching under “call girls,” “prostitution,” and “Mercer College.” He was now on the e-mail lists of at least thirty porn sites, but he’d gotten no closer to breaking the story. “Deirdre says they keep it under wraps—it’s all word of mouth.”
    He outlined his proposal: together, we would “blow this thing open.” The story, under the byline, “Tim McAllister (with Kathy Hopkins, Salad magazine),” would break on-line in New Nation , and follow in print a day later in Salad . Any reprint or syndication fees would be split seventy-five/twenty-five in favor of New Nation . “I’ll run it by my publisher,” I said, wishing I could pitch a story on dorm decorating instead. (“Move over, plastic milk crates!”) “He