Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

  “Siobhan. O’Brien.” Faith tsk-tsked, as if she were admonishing a child. “No more games. Tell us who you really are.”

  I cleared my throat. “Believe it or not, that is my name. I was adopted by an American couple when I was a baby.”

  “Investigator for an adoption service? You really want us to believe that?”

  There was no reason for me to keep up the front because it wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  “I am a private investigator who was hired by Josie Sykes, Penny Sykes’s mother, to find her. I lied so I’d get to talk to you, Faith, because it seemed like the fastest way for us to communicate.”

  After a pause, Faith screamed, “Lies!”

  “If you flip the lights back on, I’ll show you my PI license. I’ll also show you the copy of the contract I drew up for Josie.”

  After a long moment, someone else spoke as quietly as possible, which I heard as clear as broadcast news because the room was silent.

  “Maybe we should turn the…”

  “Damn it, Raven!” Faith said.

  “Sorry,” Raven said. “It’s just that I don’t think she’s playing us and I still have to cram for my chemistry exam.”

  “I haven’t even started my bio report,” someone else said, which opened the floodgates.

  “…on page 4 of War and Peace…”

  “…Dr. Polansky is such a hardass…”

  “…if I don’t pull a C, I’m gonna friggin fail macro…”

  I heard a deep and disappointed sigh, shuffling footsteps, then had to shield my eyes from the lights above. Faith stood over me, the night-vision goggles hanging off her neck. There was probably more duct tape on that thing than any original part. A small gray patch was still stuck on her cheek, so I pointed to my own face.

  “Thanks,” Faith said.

  “So can I go?” said the black girl with the oversized earrings. In the darkness, Faith had referred to her as Raven.

  “Yes, yes,” Faith said, “whoever needs to go, go.” Then she pointed to me. “Not you.”

  20

  It was just me, Faith, and the lily-tattooed girl Molly now left in this very large room. Molly was very happy about this. In fact, it wouldn’t have been an understatement to say that she reminded me of my childhood dog Ginny any time she got near a Frisbee.

  “How about if I get us some chairs, Sister Faith?” she chirped.

  “Sure,” Faith said, who was perhaps one percent as happy as Molly. Their relationship was as obvious as the nose on my face. Molly, the underclasswoman, looked up to Faith the upperclasswoman with great reverence. Faith didn’t strike me as someone who didn’t enjoy being worshipped, but then again, everyone had their limits. Molly ran over to the closet and brought over a trio of folding chairs, then wiped the one for Faith free of dust with the sleeve of her shirt.

  “Do you plan to resell my phone on eBay?” I asked Faith once we were all sitting.

  She tossed the phone back to me, which I thankfully caught. It may be in vogue for every kid to have a phone with a broken screen, but I was too old to have to peer past a spiderweb of cracks.

  “What are you doing?” Faith asked Molly, who had silently, magically produced a pen and a notepad.

  “As the recording secretary of the Womyn of Llewellyn, shouldn’t I be taking notes?”

  Faith closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “Does this look like a meeting to you?”

  “I don’t know, Sister. We’ve had Ex-Com sessions with just three sisters, too. You call this a meeting, and I’ll do my job. You say it’s not, and I’ll wait for you to give me your next command.”

  “It’s not a meeting.”

  “Yes, Sister,” Molly said. Shot down pretty hard, but her smile was wider than ever as she put away her notepad and pen and sat with her hands on her lap.

  “You know what you could bring me? My iPad. It’s in my…”

  She was already up and on her way. “I know where it is, Sister Faith.” Molly ran over to the wall and pushed, and there it was, the hidden door I’d missed. There was a bookcase right where the seam would be, smartly concealed.

  “Driving you a little insane?” I asked.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Molly’s quite the whirlwind.”

  “Like the Tasmanian Devil. Sometimes she leaves little whorls of air behind her. But she’s a good girl. There aren’t many of us left.”

  “And what do you exactly mean by that?”

  Faith looked at me and said nothing. I found the copy of Josie’s contract in my purse and handed it and my New York State Private Investigator’s License to her.

  “All I want to know is where Penny is.”

  Faith raked her fingers through her hair and tied it up into a tight ponytail. Her bright green hair no longer framing her face, she looked like any normal girl of her age. She’d have to dye that hair back to a non-nutty color if she wanted to work in the real world. College is so short, too short.

  “What’s in it for me?” Faith asked.

  I laughed. “How about satisfying your innate human desire to do good?”

  “Her mother fucked her up, you know.”

  “Don’t all mothers fuck up their children?”

  “Some more than others. Which is why we have TLC, to take care of girls like Penny.”

  “I’ve only heard Josie’s side. What did Penny tell you?”

  “That’s between me and her,” Faith said. She handed the contract and ID back to me. “You could’ve just made all this up with a laminator and a laser printer.”

  I handed her my business card. “If you change your mind and want to help, get in touch.”

  I got up and headed for the hidden door.

  “That’s it?” Faith said. “I thought real detectives were tenacious.”

  “Real detectives find other, less time-consuming ways to get information,” I said. “If you still think I’m lying, then I’m wasting my time.”

  “Wait.”

  I turned around and saw her sitting there. I don’t know what it was—maybe the two empty chairs that flanked her, or just the vastness of the room itself, but from where I was standing, she seemed quite alone.

  “Please, sit,” she said. I walked back and sat. Faith rose and paced as she spoke, her sneakers squeaking lightly against the floor.

  “I assume you went to college,” she said. I nodded. “So you know what it’s like. This is my fourth and final year, and even though I don’t expect my alma mater to never change, you have to admit, this is a special case. The Llewellyn I fell in love with is not the Llewellyn I’m leaving.”

  “The boys,” I said.

  Her shoes squealed sharply as she came to a sudden halt. “See, she’s fooled you, too. And you are someone who is professionally difficult to fool. The boys are just a distraction. A good distraction, I’ll give her that, the sneaky bitch. Oh no, there’s a long con going on, and nobody else is seeing it. God, how can everyone be so fucking blind?”

  “The sneaky bitch being your president, Vera Wheeler?”

  Faith spoke with a passion that rivaled any evangelical Sunday sermon. Outsized hand gestures, flailing arms, her whole body expressing every word: Faith was either going to become a Broadway actress or a dictator of a small nation. If she had a lectern, she would’ve slammed it as she told me about all the evil Wheeler had done. Some of it went over my head because it was too Llewellyn-centric, acronyms like FOS and SDM whizzed by me in her impassioned speech, but in the end, I wanted to apologize to my brain for working to piece together this ridiculous ramble.

  “So what you’re claiming,” I said, “is that Wheeler is in the process of turning Llewellyn into a breeding ground for…fashion models?”

  Faith stuck out her arms akimbo and stared me down. “You think I’m batshit crazy.”

  “Batshit might be a little harsh. Maybe duck poop?”

  “And now you turn me int
o a joke.”

  “You have to admit…” I said, but I was interrupted by Molly’s flourished reentry. She sprinted to Faith with her iPad in hand, and once she caught her breath, asked, “I hope I didn’t miss too much.”

  “You did good,” Faith said. “Perfect timing, Sister Molly.”

  “I’m here for you, Sister Faith,” she said. “Always and forever.”

  If Faith’s eyeballs could roll back any further, they’d be on the back of her head.

  “So,” Faith said to me. “Here’s some duck poop for you.”

  21

  Faith swiped at her iPad until she got to what she wanted to show me.

  “Look through these photos. There’s two on each page. On the left is a freshwoman from the class four years ago. On the right is the incoming freshwoman class. There are a total of eighty-four comparisons, and I’ll be more than happy to wait as you go through each and every one.”

  The photos on the left from four years ago looked like yearbook portraits, while the ones on the right were selfies. So if anything, the older ones had the advantage of being taken by a professional under proper lighting, coiffed hair, etc.—and yet as I swiped from one picture to another, there was no comparison here. Much of the incoming freshman class was a collection of striking young women. Not necessarily beautiful in a traditional way, but almost every time, my eyeballs were drawn to the right for some specific feature: brilliant blue eyes flecked with gold, lips as thick as pincushions, a nose as sharp as a blade. Runways models, I thought. Magazine covers. There were three or four that I had to stop and stare for a good ten seconds, because they were every bit as gorgeous as any Hollywood starlet. And these were just cell phone pics.

  “How did Wheeler get all the incoming freshwomen to send photos of themselves?” I asked.

  Molly chimed in. “We were strongly recommended to interview with Llewellyn alumni, and at the end of each interview, the interviewer suggested we take a selfie together.”

  “You see? This is how noxious Wheeler is. She used our alums to do her bidding.”

  As much as I found it to be an insane notion, the evidence before me made her assertions harder to ignore. But still, this was outlandish. As if she felt my lingering doubts, Molly jumped in.

  “Can I see the iPad again?” she asked.

  Molly swiped and moved things on the iPad with such speed and confidence that only comes from being born in a world that had always had the internet. A few more deft strokes of her fingers later, she held up the screen and showed me the same two-photo output like before, except this one had the faces aligned and split into four quadrants by way of two perpendicular green lines.

  “Symmetry is one of the keys to facial attractiveness,” Molly said. “There’s an app that’ll calculate your beauty quotient.”

  “As if girls don’t have enough reasons to feel bad about themselves,” I said.

  Molly touched a button and all the faces blazed by me while two numbers floated on the top left and top right part of the screen. A pleasant ding later, the slideshow stopped and the numbers held fast. 6.835 on the left, 9.129 on the right.

  “This is just the beginning, I’m certain of it. There’s a building…” Faith said, then trailed off as another thought took her over. “Okay. You want to find Penny, right?”

  I knew where this was going. “What do you want?”

  “Have you seen Travers Hall?”

  I had not. Faith signaled to Molly, and the wizard was back at it, and in a moment she had a photograph of a white shoebox of a building with scaffolding around it and a big yellow sign, UNDER CONSTRUCTION – NO ADMITTANCE. When Molly expanded a corner of the screen, I recognized the sundial near the side of Broadhurst Hall.

  “So this Travers Hall is behind and to the right of Broadhurst,” I said, seeing the campus layout in my mind. “But I don’t remember this, and it’s hard to miss because it’s so white.”

  “It’s behind three rows of huge evergreens to separate it from the rest of campus. And the building is strictly off limits,” Molly said.

  “It is being built, so there are probably hazards,” I said.

  “True,” Faith said. “But look here, and here. Why are the windows covered? And why is there a security guy posted at the entrance? Not to mention that there’s an active alarm system at night.”

  “And how would you know that?” I asked.

  “That’s not the point. Why would you install an alarm system when the building isn’t even completed yet?”

  I didn’t know, but I was getting kind of curious myself.

  “So here’s the deal. I’ll tell you everything I know about Penny,” Faith said.

  “But you don’t know where she is.”

  “No. But I probably know more than anybody else outside of Grace Park, and good luck talking with her.”

  “What, is she involved with too many clubs to make time for me?”

  “She’s got bodyguards,” Molly said.

  “Bodyguards?”

  Faith corrected her. “’Special security’ is what the meatheads call themselves. It’s like when the President’s daughter goes to school, spooks keep eyes on her. Look, I’ll grant you full access to Penny’s room, too. You can spend the night there, even, since it’s pretty late and this way, you can look all you want. I just want you to find out all you can about Travers Hall.”

  “Breaking and entering.”

  “We have the alarm code. None of us Womyn can go near that building because campus security is keeping tabs on us, but you, you’re a WILL. They won’t suspect you.”

  “Because I’m old and feeble.”

  “Exactly,” Molly said, oblivious to my sarcasm.

  “I have a contact in the media, and if the story is juicy enough, I can nail Wheeler for the fake that she is,” Faith said. “There is something going on here. Right? You think so, too. I can see it in your face, Siobhan.”

  “I agree there is something, but I doubt it’s what you think.”

  “This will take like an hour of your time, tops,” Faith said. “A few photos, just a quick peek, that’s all.”

  I didn’t glance at my watch but it felt like it was well past midnight. I took a good look at Faith, and then at Molly. They seemed like silly girls with their weird hair and tattoos, but their passion for their school was as real and as deep as any devotion. And who knew, maybe digging around Travers would get me closer to finding Penny. Getting to the end of a case was never a straight line.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s help each other.”

  Faith and Molly slid from their chairs and onto the floor. They held hands and knelt.

  “You too,” Faith said. “By our bylaws, two Womyn of Llewellyn can consecrate another.”

  Consecrate? Lordy. But when in Rome…I knelt, and we formed a circle. Faith and Molly spoke together.

  “By the power vested in us, we Womyn of Llewellyn bring you, Siobhan O’Brien, and your everlasting feminine spirit inside our inner circle and declare you our dear Sister.”

  I wanted to ask if this honor was temporary or forever and ever and ever, but kept my mouth shut.

  22

  As we climbed the stairs to the second floor of Fordham, Faith told me about Penny.

  “Some quiet girls, when they leave home, they get even quieter. And some blast off in the opposite direction. I don’t know what her mom told you, but Penny was pretty out of control. She was already here for a couple of months for the pre-frosh summer program, which is where she made friends with Grace Park, so I’m not sure exactly what was going on between the two of them, but the first night I met Penny, she got drunk and passed out.

  “At that point she was living with Grace—you know the school bent over backwards to get that girl here, right? They converted a part of an admin building into a dorm just for her. Only a few girls have been invited inside, and from what I hear, it’s like a fancy hotel suite. Nobody has any pictures bec
ause there’s always a goon posted at her door who collects the phones before you can enter. It’s nuts.”

  We were now at the double doors that led to Tender Llewellyn Care. Sitting behind a small desk was one of the twin girls with spiky hair I’d seen at Faith’s table in the dining hall.

  “Glad you finally showed up, Faith,” she said. “You and Molly are the last ones, so everyone’s in now.”

  “Excellent,” Faith said. She turned to me. “Since you’re WILLing, you can just show Katie here your Lewie ID.” Katie used her phone and scanned the barcode on the back. Then she pressed a button under the desk and released the electronic lock. Faith held the door open, and we all went inside.

  “I’m here,” Molly said, stopping at the first room on the right. “It’s great to bring you into the fold, Sister Siobhan.” She opened up her arms for a hug, so I hugged her, and then she was gone.

  The hallways were bathed in red light.

  “Some of the girls have trouble sleeping,” Faith said. “Red light doesn’t interfere with melatonin production. And you might have noticed a bit of white noise in the background.”

  I hadn’t, but now that I was listening, I did hear it, like a running fan. “Soothing,” I said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  The hallway ran down the middle of the floor, then branched off at the center to the left and right. From a bird’s eye view, the layout would resemble a giant cross.

  Penny’s room was at the far end. It was a basic college dorm room, a twin bed, a desk and chair, a dresser. Outside of some books on the desk, there was nothing else that suggested someone lived here.

  “Where’s her stuff?” I asked.

  “That’s it. She had a fridge but gave it away. Gave away just about everything before she left. And threw away the rest, like she had a few photos in frames of her and her mom, her and her high school friends, that sort of thing.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “About a week ago. Right after the fight in her writing class.”

  “A fight?”