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pay phones. Her number rang three times without an answer, and he thought that he would get her voice mail, and he could just hang up. At the beginning of the fourth ring he began to relax, and then the ring stopped and there was a live voice saying hello on the other end.
    â€˜Susie-Paul?’ he said quietly.
    â€˜Alex,’ she said. ‘I was starting to think I’d called the wrong number.’
    â€˜No. No, that was me, I’ve been busy. Sorry.’
    â€˜Adrian said he’d run into you. It made me think I should … ’ her voice trailed off.
    â€˜Yes. Well.’ He tried to think of something to say aside from
it’s been a long time
, which was self-evident, or
it’s good to hear from you
, which wasn’t entirely true.
    â€˜Are you … you know, I’d like to see you. Could we meet for coffee sometime, or … ’
    He thought,
let’s get it over with
. ‘I’m free for a little while tonight.’
    â€˜Oh. Okay, let me … okay. Tonight’s fine.’
    â€˜We could have dinner. But there’s things I need to do later.’
    â€˜Sure. Is, is seven good for you?’
    â€˜Yeah, I’m, I live around Little Italy, so … ’
    â€˜We could go to Sneaky Dee’s,’ said Susie.
    â€˜Aw, no,’ he said, smiling despite himself. ‘I’m too old to go in there. The young people would laugh at me. Really, I’m, like, I’m really old these days.’
    â€˜Well, don’t say this to
me
, Alex. What about that place, the Thai place at Bloor and Bathurst?’
    â€˜That’s not a useful description.’
    â€˜You know the one. The place that used to be the place that had the Caesar salad?’
    â€˜Oh yeah. The Royal Whatever.’
    They had been to the place with the Caesar salad, he remembered now. Remembered riding his bicycle home in the middle of the night, his eyes stinging, shaky and confused. One night like all the others.
    â€˜They have this Buddha that lights up.’
    â€˜Well, you know. The Buddha’s like that. Can you win little plastic prizes from him?’
    â€˜I’m afraid not. Sorry to disappoint you.’
    â€˜Well, I guess you can’t have everything.’
    â€˜I’ll see you there?’
    â€˜Yeah. I’ll see you. Cool.’
    He hung up the phone and turned around to face the lobby, shaking his head. ‘Alex, man,’ he said to the air, ‘do you have a clue what you’re doing here?’

Falling

I
    After one girl has fallen, the rest are explicable; they have a template, a precedent. But before that, it is harder to understand. At the beginning of this problem, then, is a single girl, the first girl to fall.
    She shouldn’t have been a mystery, not even a question, this shining privileged girl with glossy hair, bright enough, well-meaning; this girl surrounded all her life with the expectation of clarity and goodness, who had collected tins of soup for the food bank, had given a talk in the school assembly about looking for the best in everyone, who had signed up to tutor an underprivileged child in math.
    She had fears, of course she did, the normal kinds of fears. They read newspapers for their current affairs class, and she knew something about what went on in the world. She had dreamed for a while of the towers in New York. She hadn’t seen, on the television coverage, the people who fell or leapt from the windows, but it was all they had talked about at school, a literal incarnation of that childhood game, sitting around a flashlight at a sleepover trying to imagine whether you would rather die from burning or jumping. She knew that one war was already happening, and there might be another coming, wars in distant countries but somehow close. She drew peace signs on her notebooks, picked up flyers from leafletters by the Eaton Centre, and worried vaguely, the details unclear.
    But she would not say that she fell