Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes

by Karin Slaughter

  “What’s the order of monks who shave their heads in a circle?” Nancy Griggs had asked when they had heard the advice from a graduating senior.

  “Franciscan?” Julia had guessed, thinking it was something her mother would know, but that if she told her mother, her father would probably show up at her Spenser class with a shotgun.

  “Right,” Nancy had said. “When he makes a pass at you, ask him if he’s a Franciscan monk because of the bald spot on his head.”

  When, not if. All of the girls assumed that Professor Edwards had a thing for Julia.

  The truth was that he’d never made a pass at her, but the rest of the truth was that he didn’t have to say anything about her ass or her breasts because his eyes did all of the commenting. The real tragedy (other than that he got away with it) was that Edwards was actually a great teacher. Julia had coasted through high school on her writing. Edwards challenged her to put more effort into her work. He spotted her bullshit from miles away. He rewrote her sentences, explaining the rhetorical difference. He made her want to be better.

  And at the same time, he made her extremely uncomfortable.

  Edwards finally looked up from her essay. “I like where you’re going with this, but you know it needs work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He held her gaze. Her paper was still on the podium, one of his big hands holding it down in case she tried to take it.

  Julia gripped together her hands. Her face was flushed. She was sweating. She hated any kind of attention, and the worst part was that she sensed that Professor Edwards understood this, and was torturing her for it just because he could.

  “All right.” He clicked his pen and started marking up the pages with quick strokes that cut into the pulp of the paper. “Don’t need this—­” He slashed an X through two paragraphs she had spent hours on. “And this—­” He circled another paragraph, then drew an arrow up to the top of the page. “Move it here, then move this here. And, actually, this paragraph on the back page should move up to the beginning, right around here, and this is redundant. This, too. This I like, but just barely.”

  By the time he was finished, both Julia and her paper were reminiscent of an Escher clock spiraling into despair.

  “Understand?” Edwards asked.

  “Yes, sir.” She understood that she was never to be late for another class ever again.

  Julia took the paper. He held on to it a second longer than necessary, so when she finally wrested it from his grip, the pages fluttered. She pretended to thumb through his notes as she walked back to her desk. She could feel Edwards watching her every move, and he even gave a weird grunt when she sat down at her desk, like he was mimicking the opening of an Al Green song.

  1:20 p.m.—­Tate Student Center, University of Georgia, Athens

  Julia sat across the table from Veronica Voorhees, who was supposed to be sharing her salad but had already eaten over half of it. Julia didn’t care. Her stomach was upset from the run-­in with Professor Edwards—­not the one at the beginning of class, but the one after class was over.

  Julia had been the last to leave the room. Suddenly, Edwards was right behind her, so close that she could feel his hot breath on her neck when he whispered, “Extra credit if I see you at my lecture tonight.”

  “Oh,” she said, momentarily stunned by the closeness. “Okay.”

  “South Campus. We could get coffee afterward, maybe talk about your paper some more.”

  “S-­s-­sure,” she had stuttered like an idiot.

  And then she’d felt his palm smooth the curve of her ass the same admiring way that she’d seen men at livestock auctions run their hand over an animal’s flank.

  Julia was two floors down the stairs before she started to brim with should’ves. She should’ve slapped away his hand. She should’ve asked him what the hell he was doing. She should’ve told him to leave her alone, that he was disgusting, that he was cruel, that he was a really good teacher, so why the hell did he have to make everything gross by being such a creep?

  “What’re you so pensive about?” Veronica asked. Salad fell out of her mouth. She reminded Julia of how Mona No-­Name ate the first day she showed up at the shelter. She had shoveled in so much food that she started to choke.

  Mona. Julia had been so wrapped up in her petty problems with Professor Edwards that she had forgotten all about the missing homeless girl.

  Was Mona really missing? Had a man really snatched her off the street and dragged her into his van? Had that same van pulled to a stop behind Beatrice Oliver five weeks ago? Whoever took either or both women knew what he was doing. He wasn’t a bogeyman or a cartoon wolf. He was a shark with razor-­sharp teeth who snatched helpless women from the surface and dragged them down to a dark place where he could devour them.

  “Julia?” Veronica knocked on the table for attention. “What’s going on with you, kid?”

  “Just tired.” Julia took a bite of grilled cheese sandwich to give her mouth something to do. She tried to banish the shark images from her mind by letting her thoughts return to Professor Edwards.

  She could report him, but whoever took her complaint would give Edwards a chance to respond. Julia had no doubt he would have a good response. She ticked all of the boxes quickly: She’s mad because I gave her a bad grade on her paper. This is payback because she threw herself at me and I said no. She’s crazy. She’s a bitch. She’s a liar. She’s been in trouble before.

  That last bit was actually true. Julia had been detained by the campus police last year. Some of the graduating seniors at the Red & Black had dared Julia to do something more than write a damning op-­ed about the agricultural college’s foray into genetically modified organisms. She hadn’t realized that she was the only person not on speed until after they’d all broken into the lab and destroyed some equipment.

  “Their pupils are bigger than my dick,” the campus cop had told his partner.

  Julia had never seen a real penis before, but she’d had no doubt that he was correct. In the cold light of the cop’s flashlight, her fellow criminals were obviously stoned out of their minds.

  “Hey, beautiful!” Ezekiel Mann stood behind Julia’s chair. His clammy hands rubbed her shoulders. “Where did you go?”

  Julia hadn’t gone anywhere, but she said, “Sorry.”

  “No problem.” His fingers dug into her skin. “You got time for that game of pool?”

  Julia was standing up before he finished the sentence. She had been manhandled enough for the day.

  “Ladies first.” He placed a cue stick in her hand.

  Julia took the stick because ­people were watching and she didn’t want to seem rude. She was really good at pool (her grandmother had taught her) but she purposefully missed even the easiest shots so that Ezekiel wouldn’t be embarrassed. The only saving grace was David Conford, sitting on one of the tweedy, overstuffed couches, who called the game like he was Howard Cosell.

  “Julia Carroll, a young kid with a glint in her eye, leans across the table. Will she go for the six or the ten?” David stopped to drink from his bottle of Coke. He dropped out of character. “You know, Julia, you’re really bad at this.”

  Ezekiel said, “She’s pretty. She doesn’t need to be good at anything.”

  Julia changed her angle and banked the six and ten ball into the corner pocket.

  “Down goes Frazier!” David clapped his hands together. “The comeback kid stuns the crowd.”

  To David’s further delight, Julia sank the last four balls, then put the eight in the side pocket while Ezekiel stood slack-­jawed, his cue stick in front of him like a scaled-­down petard.

  Julia sat by David on the arm of the couch. “That was fun.”

  Ezekiel jammed his stick into the rack and stomped away.

  David laughed good-­naturedly as his departing friend. He told Julia, �
�Hey, Fast Eddie, gimme a heads-­up next time so I can place a smacker on the game.”

  She laughed, because David was one of those boys who was effortlessly funny.

  He said, “I hear Michael Stipe is going to be at the Manhattan tonight.”

  “Right.” There were daily rumors that the lead singer of R.E.M. was going to be in this bar or the next one tonight or this weekend or maybe he was already there. “I thought he was on tour?”

  “Just calls ’em likes I sees ’em, sweetheart.” David got up from the couch. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  “Maybe,” Julia said, but just to be nice.

  The student center was clearing out. Julia grabbed her purse and her book bag. Instead of getting on her bike, she headed toward the Red & Black offices a few buildings away. She felt buoyed by the pool game (she had let herself win at something!) and she wanted to take advantage of the slight boost to her ego and present her pitch for the Beatrice Oliver story.

  The twenty-­eight printouts her mother left on the kitchen table had brought the focus of Julia’s pitch to a fine point. ­People always said they wanted hard news, but what they really wanted was to be scared. These girls were all so normal. So innocent. So familiar. They could’ve been your mother or your cousin or your girlfriend. A daughter vanishes from a movie theater. A sister disappears at the fairgrounds. A beloved aunt drives off in her car and is never seen again. Julia knew what mattered in Beatrice’s story—­the same details that had haunted her all these weeks.

  A beautiful girl disappeared while getting ice cream for her ailing father. . .

  Julia smiled. She repeated the line to herself as she walked down the long hallway to the Red & Black offices. And then she coughed in the perpetual hazy film of smoke that drifted out of the open doorway. They were all supposed to be reporters, but no one was about to do a story on the dangers of secondhand smoke because their advisor would rather take early retirement than give up his Marlboro Reds.

  Mr. Hannah called the journalism room his bullpen, which seemed to Julia a glorified way of saying he wasn’t going to clean the mounds of papers from his desk, from the corners, and especially from the loaded bookshelves that ran around the periphery of the room.

  Julia loved the mess. She loved the horrible smells—­the nicotine and ink and that weird blue stuff that came out of the mimeograph machine. She loved the clacking of the telex and the whir of the printer and the shush of Spray Mount and zwip of the paper cutter and the hum of the two Macintosh computers on the long table at the back of the room. She especially loved Mr. Hannah because he had worked at the New York Times, the Atlanta Constitution and the L.A. Times all before pissing off so many ­people that the only place left to spout off his big mouth was inside the halls of academia.

  “Tenure,” he often told them, “is the last bastion of free speech.”

  Despite his scraggly, unkempt appearance, Mr. Hannah had done pretty well by moving to Athens. UGA’s Grady College of Journalism was nationally renowned, which was fantastic if you were a parent who didn’t want to pay out-­of-­state tuition and horrible if you were an aspiring journalism student who wanted to live somewhere other than the town in which you grew up.

  Mr. Hannah smiled when Julia walked into the room. “There’s my pretty girl.” Somehow, he made the words seem like a gesture of affection rather than a creepy come-­on. “Where is my riveting piece on the coming privatization of the cafeteria’s meal ser­vices?”

  Julia handed him her article. He scanned it while she stood there, the overhead light reflecting her typed words back onto the lenses of his eyeglasses.

  “It works,” he said, which was the best any of them could ever hope for. “What else you got for me? I need some news.”

  “I was thinking,” Julia began, even as she felt the opening line she had so deftly crafted just moments ago slip out of her brain and float into the ether. “A girl—­a beautiful girl—­was . . . and . . .”

  Mr. Hannah clapped together his hands. “And?”

  “And . . .” Julia’s skull was an empty, brainless Tupperware bowl. She was vibrating with anxiety. She felt like she was going to burst into tears.

  “Julia?”

  “Yes.” She cleared her throat. Her tongue had turned into a bag of wet salt. She went to the facts, because the facts mattered. “There’s a girl who disappeared. She lives—­lived—­about fifteen minutes from here.”

  “And?”

  “Well, she’s gone. Abducted. The detective on the case said—­”

  “Probably ran off with a boyfriend,” someone interrupted.

  Julia looked over Mr. Hannah’s shoulder. Greg Gianakos. Lionel Vance. Budgy Green. Their heads stuck up above the production partition like prairie dogs. They all had cigarettes dangling from their mouths, and all were on their way to becoming as flabby and bleary-­eyed as their mentor. The only difference was that they looked at her with a marked absence of Mr. Hannah’s kindness.

  “Ignore them, kid,” Mr. Hannah coaxed. “Pitch me a story I can put on the front page.”

  “Okay,” Julia said, like it was that easy to recapture her earlier certainty. What was the heart of the Beatrice Oliver story? What was the hook? Julia thought about the terror that had gripped her when she first read about the girl’s abduction on the telex. The menace she had felt this morning when she walked down streets that were as familiar as her childhood home. The fear summoned by the articles she’d read in her mother’s kitchen. She had to distill for Mr. Hannah what really bothered her about the Beatrice Oliver abduction. It wasn’t just that the girl was snatched off the street. It wasn’t just that she was being kept. It was why she had been taken in the first place.

  She told Mr. Hannah, “Rape.”

  “Rape?” He was obviously surprised. “What about it?”

  “She was raped,” Julia said, because why else would a man abduct a woman less than two blocks from her family home? Why else would he keep her?

  “Are you talking about Jenny Loudermilk?” Greg Gianakos stood up from his desk. He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “No way you can squeeze more than a paragraph out of that.”

  Julia shrugged, but only because she had no idea who Jenny Loudermilk was.

  Apparently, neither did Mr. Hannah. “Fill me in.”

  “Sophomore,” Greg said, though Mr. Hannah had directed his request to Julia. “Good-­looking blonde. Wrong place, wrong time.”

  Lionel Vance took over. “I heard she was pretty sloppy. Spent most of the night looking for the bottom of a PBR.”

  “Yeah, everybody knows sophomores are cheap drunks.” Greg was clearly annoyed at having his story stepped on. “Anyway, the gal was pouring her way down Broad Street and some guy grabbed her, took her into an alley, and raped her.”

  Mr. Hannah patted his pockets for his cigarettes. “Nobody wants to read about rape. Say assaulted, or attacked, or threatened if she wasn’t hit.” He asked Julia, “That’s the story you want to tell?”

  “Well, I—­”

  “She won’t talk to you,” Lionel said. “The victim. They never talk. So, what’s your story? Some girl gets drunk and goes off with the wrong guy? Like Greg said, that’s barely a paragraph. I wouldn’t even put it on the back page.”

  Mr. Hannah lit his cigarette. He asked Julia, “You agree? Disagree?”

  “I think—­”

  “It’s an anomaly,” Greg interrupted. “If your story is that suddenly the world is filled with rapists, you’re wrong. And a university campus is statistically one of the safest places to be.”

  Mr. Hannah blew out a stream of smoke. “Statistics, huh?”

  Greg said, “Look, Jules. Don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment. Yes, what happened to Jenny shouldn’t have happened, but a reporter only reports the facts, and you won’t get any facts here because the victim already scurried of
f home, the guy who did it certainly won’t talk, and the cops won’t discuss a case that’s never going to be prosecuted.”

  Julia’s fingernails dug into her palms. She thought about the stack of printouts in her purse. She wanted to throw them in Greg’s smug face, but they would only prove his point. Twenty-­eight women in a state with a population of almost 6.5 million was hardly a significant number.

  He seemed to read her mind. “Jenny Loudermilk was one girl out of approximately fifteen thousand female students. That’s an outlier.”

  Julia tried, “It doesn’t always get reported.”

  “Because half of them got drunk and changed their minds.”

  “I meant reported in the newspaper.” She remembered that the articles were about missing women, not women who had been raped. Assaulted. Attacked. “Or reported to the police. Or reported to anybody.”

  “For good reason.” Greg lit a cigarette. “This is the story: that the campus is safer for women than it’s ever been. That the world is safer for women than it’s ever been.”

  “Is that right?” Mr. Hannah crossed his arms over his chest. He was grinning like a maniac. “Back that up, hotshot. Gimme your statistical proof that the world is safer for women, other than because it looks great through your Wonder Bread View-­Master.”

  “I will.” Greg went to one of the Macintoshes at the back of the room. He turned on the machine and sat down. “We’ve got all the crime statistics from the last ten years on a set of discs.”

  “I’m gonna die of old age by the time that thing boots up.” Mr. Hannah stood at the metal shelves behind his desk. He traced his finger along the spines of several books until he found what he was looking for. “The FBI is mandated by the United States Congress to collect all relevant crime data from a set number of police forces around the country at least once every year.” He plucked out several books. “The most current report I’ve got is 1989.”