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silently wondering, What the hell was wrong with Virginia Tech? Blacksburg’s a nice town.
    But Stephanie likes it here.
    “I mean, what are the odds?” she asks, taking a bite of her beans and rice. “What are the odds that some perv is going to kill you? I figure, Izzy used up all the bad luck for the whole campus, right?”
    She can maybe see that I’m a little shocked by how casual she is about it all.
    “I’m sorry. But it’s just so weird, you know? My dad always said if we couldn’t laugh, we’d all go insane. I think he got it from a song.”
    I nod. She’s funny, talking a mile a minute. I resist the urge to wipe the food particles off the side of her face, just make a little motion with my hand.
    “Sorry,” she says, swiping at her cheek with a napkin. “I get carried away.”
    She says she didn’t really know Isabel that well, just a few chats about classes and guys and home.
    “I think she was kind of rich,” Stephanie says. She looks and sounds like somebody who’s going to be paying off some five-figure loans when she graduates, somebody whose parents said, “Honey, we’ll pay your tuition and fees, but you’re going to have to get some loans and a part-time job.”
    “She actually picked up the check when we went to dinner the first night here. There were five of us!”
    She shakes her head at such wanton spending.
    “But she was nice. She always smiled, and she had the cutest accent. She was from Boston.”
    I ask her if she knew that they’d arrested a suspect.
    “Everybody on campus knows that,” she says, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “Maddy, she’s in the suite, too, she tweeted me about it like three hours ago.”
    I ask her what she knows about Isabel and Martin Fell. She’s told the cops most of this already, I’m sure. I’m not sure this is germane to whatever I’m going to write, but I have a curious nature.
    “She met him at that bar over on Grace. She had, like a fake ID or something. She looked very mature. Sometimes, she’d stay over at his place. She brought him up one time, and you could see that he was a little older, but thirty-two? Oh, my god!”
    I can tell she thinks thirty-two is somewhere near retirement age.
    The night Isabel disappeared, she’d gone with some other girls to dinner, and then, Stephanie had heard, she was supposed to meet Martin Fell at a bar on West Main.
    “I think she walked there,” Stephanie said. “At least, that’s what we heard the girl who drove said.”
    One of the other girls from the suite saw her later at the place on West Main with Martin Fell, but she said it didn’t look like they were getting along too well. And Isabel appeared to be a little drunk.
    “Not like falling-down drunk,” Stephanie says, “just, you know, toasted a little around the edges. But then Kathy said it looked like Izzy and the guy were arguing about something.
    “She said that next time she looked, Izzy was gone. She never even saw her leave.”
    Stephanie seems to at least temporarily understand the permanence of “gone,” and she tears up. I’m about to do some black-and-white movie thing like hand her my handkerchief, when she shakes her head like a dog after a swim, smiles and tells me she’s fine, fine.
    She tells me that Stephanie already knew what she wanted to be. She had told her, on the first day, that she was going to be a vet.
    “She was signed up for all kinds of hard science shit. She was serious as hell, about school at least.”
    We talk a little more, and then I pay for our lunch and she leaves. She barely looks before crossing the street, as unafraid of the city bus coming toward her as she seems to be of everything else. I think of Andi, and I’m more scared than my pitiful parenting record gives me a right to be. Men and women are equally entitled to walk on the wild side, but how come it’s never a girl doing something like this to some guy? Whoever Martin Fell is, I want him dead in a slow and painful