Every Secret Thing

Alice had looked shocked, too scared and numb to cry. But Ro

Still, she was literally a little girl, no more than eighty pounds. They couldn’t strike back or use the usual methods to control her. Ro

Watching the whole episode, her hand on Alice’s shoulder, Sharon had known a horrible moment of gratitude that she had not drawn the assignment to defend Ro

She whispered encouragement as the policewomen rushed the girl through the corridors, Ro

Ro

“I mean, you know, grown-ups,” he said.

“They’re less scary,” he added, and they had laughed, pretending he hadn’t spoken the truth.

Sharon looked at the client of the moment, Gordon Beamer, twelve years old and, unless a miracle happened at Victor Cullen, pretty permanently fucked. Not even ten years into her job, she was begi

Fu

“Let’s roll this rock up the hill,” she said on a sigh.

“What rock?” Wanda Beamer demanded. “They got rocks at Cullen?”

She didn’t wait for the answer to her own question, for she noticed her daughter had wandered off to stare at the children’s paintings that were supposed to add some joy to this grim corridor. She shrieked the little girl’s name-Amber-grabbed her, and paddled her hard. The girl cried without making a sound. Gordon Beamer stared at the ceiling. So did Sharon, thinking about how it was only a few hours until she finally got to see Alice again.

4.

11:35 A.M.

Helen Ma

A floater rotating among several city elementary schools, Helen usually made a point of eating and mingling with the other teachers. So much was projected onto a pretty woman if she was the least bit self-contained. Helen had accepted long ago that she had to work hard to convince others that she wasn’t remote or snobbish.

Today, however, Helen was too depressed to summon the energy for the polite, super-interested persona she had cultivated. Instead, she sat in her car and chewed on her sandwich, staring blindly through the windshield. It was a good neighborhood, a yuppie enclave with long rows of white-flowering fruit trees that made the streets look like a lane from a fairy tale. And yet Helen had detected a dark, Grimm-like aspect, although it had taken her a while to diagnose exactly what was wrong, what was missing. Children. The yuppies all moved as soon as they had kids. The students in the public school came from the tougher, less desirable neighborhoods that fringed the area.

Helen, who had grown up in Co

Helen had no scientific evidence, but she was sure that girls had not developed so early in her day. She wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was linked to fast food or that bovine growth hormone in milk. She had heard stories about seven-year-olds with breasts and periods. The doctors at Hopkins were trying to figure out how to arrest their puberty without turning them into midgets.

Now Helen always had very good eating habits. She wasn’t a zealot, but she had always chosen whole grains and vegetables and fresh fruits, hopeful that Alice would follow her example. Of course Alice had ended up yearning for the junkiest of junk foods, and Helen had capitulated, taking her to McDonald’s or Arby’s at least once a week, in the belief that small indulgences would keep Alice from becoming obsessive. Hunger had been the one uncontrollable urge in her otherwise obedient daughter.

Where would Alice ask to go to lunch today, after Sharon picked her up down at Middlebrook? Alice would probably want something fast and greasy, while Sharon would feel compelled to make an event out of it, a celebration-more like high school graduation than what it was.