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nervous.
    “So,” I say, “do you live in the area?”
    She smiles. “No.” The smile disappears and her lower lip trembles. She wipes her eyes. “Have you heard about the college girl who was found dead on-campus a few days
ago?”
    Louis is back in the room with us. “The cab will be here in twenty minutes,” he says.
    Silence. I try to thaw the ice that has formed in my chest. “You were talking about the Solomon girl,” I prompt Ivy. Louis glances at me and looks away in a blink of an eye.
“Meryl?”
    Ivy doesn’t know who we are. She doesn’t know that Meryl was probably one of our former students.
    Doesn’t know that Meryl’s real body is here with us.
    “She’s a friend of mine,” Ivy says. “We’re roommates. The day before she failed to come home to the boarding house, I dropped her on this street.”
    “Oh my God,” Louis says, which is probably the more appropriate thing to do, instead of steeling myself on my chair, bracing for impact.
    “When was that?” Louis asks.
    “January 16,” Ivy says, wiping away an errant teardrop. “It was a Wednesday. I was in Meycauayan for my brother’s birthday Tuesday night, and he lent me his car so I
could just drive to campus instead of taking the bus. I didn’t have class, so I picked up Meryl after hers and we had lunch. Then she asked me to drop her here, just at the intersection. She
said she just needs to take photos for a project. I offered to come with her, but she said she wanted to do it alone. She seemed a bit pissed off at me for insisting so much. That reaction got me
riled up as well—I was just being nice—so I left and I never saw her again.”
    “And you don’t know where she went?”
    Ivy shakes her head. “I’ve been biking around here ever since they found the body.” Her voice trembles at the last word. “I was wondering if there were any shops here,
anything colorful that she could photograph, but there was only a playground, residential homes. I did bring a picture of hers so I can show it to people here and ask if any of them saw her, but no
one did.” She shrugs, lowers her voice, as though she’s talking to herself. “And anyway, I don’t remember her bringing her DSLR.”
    “They didn’t find a camera in her bag,” I say.
    “Yes, so maybe she lied to me.” She looks at her hands.
    “Have you told the police about this?” Louis asks.
    She nods. “I was among the first to be interviewed. But there were conflicting reports. I remember letting her off here at around 2 pm. But some classmates of hers claimed to have seen her
at around the same time at Trudy’s, which is a small café nearby. I don’t know. Maybe I got the time wrong. Maybe her classmates saw someone else. Maybe after I left her here she
took a cab and went to have coffee on her own. No one is sure, so I guess the police just noted it down and went on their way.”
    “I’m sorry about your friend,” Louis says.
    Ivy nods and claws open her sling bag. “The week she was identified, I went through her things. It’s probably a bad thing, but her parents are coming over and Meryl might be keeping
something she didn’t want her folks to see.” She smiles and sniffs. “Friends, you know? You need to have a good friend around after you go so she can clear your search
history.”
    She puts five glossy prints on the coffee table. My heart drops.
    “I didn’t know.” Ivy wipes her eyes. “I didn’t know she felt this way. She is beautiful. She has no idea. She is beautiful and I should have told her.”
    They are blown up high resolution prints of pages from Meryl’s planner. At least two are larger recreations of her collages. Her planner is the sketchbook of ideas and these are the
artwork you can frame and display. Alice in Meryl’s sad wonderland, her kingdom of lace.
Alice ate the Eat Me Cake, the foolish slut.
     
    IVY ASKS IF she can have a smoke while waiting for her cab so I accompany her on the porch while Louis