of criticizing any of her absurd theories about life after death.
For Valerie it was all a big joke. Offline she laughed unkindly at the other Queens, and Rosa felt flattered because this strange girl trusted her. Of course she would never mention it to anyone; she’d had to promise that just once and never again. She had entered Valerie’s close circle—a circle that consisted of Valerie and Rosa. For the first time since Zoe had left for Sicily, she felt there was someone who took her seriously and accepted her. In spite of the differences between them, her sister had left a vacuum behind, and Valerie filled it with her bizarre charm and charisma.
After that, they danced together through the clubs, from Bushwick to Brighton Beach, they smoked pot under the Brooklyn Bridge, and they tried to think up ways of outdoing Valerie’s triumph over the Suicide Queens. Twice a week Valerie waited tables at a club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, but she wouldn’t take Rosa with her. It was work for her, not play. Rosa respected that.
Valerie had an eye for cute boys, but all she ever did with them was drink and smoke. For Valerie, her attitude was nothing but a show, an illusion—an act she put on for the Suicide Queens as well as men. Even Rosa wasn’t quite sure whether she had ever met the real Valerie, or only the mask she wore for show.
The Halloween party in the Village had been one of thousands of parties thrown in New York that weekend, and what happened to Rosa could have happened to any girl. The drugs in Rosa’s cocktail, the strangers who raped her—it was pure chance that it was her. There were probably several dozen such cases on the same night. She was nothing out of the ordinary; the police had no doubt of that. She’d been drinking; she was wearing a miniskirt. That was enough to make the rape an everyday event with an eleven-digit reference number in the files.
The party had been Valerie’s suggestion. Someone had given her the address while she was waitressing. She and Rosa took a taxi because the subway on Halloween would be hellish, and they began drinking in the back of the cab. All Rosa knew was that they were going to the Village, but she didn’t know the house, and she had no memory of the building where they got out. A typical brownstone: an old building with several floors. The police spoke to Valerie later, but she too said she couldn’t remember the address. Maybe that was the truth, maybe just another lie so she didn’t get a reputation for hanging out with the cops.
Not that it ultimately made any difference. After that evening Rosa didn’t want to see Valerie again, and for reasons that Rosa first put down to a guilty conscience, and later to indifference, Val herself never tried to get in touch. What had looked like a close friendship for a couple of months had really just been a kind of useful link between them based on Valerie’s idea of a good time, and the rape had put an end to any fun for one of them. In Valerie’s world of trendy clubs in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, there was no place for regret or for Rosa.
Sixteen months later Rosa didn’t know Valerie’s number by heart anymore, and the cell phone where it had been stored no longer existed. They had never met at home. There was no Valerie Paige listed, and the last name was far too common to be used as a starting point for inquiries.
In retrospect, it seemed odd that Valerie had disappeared from her life without a trace. Even the Suicide Queens weren’t to be found on the internet anymore, after one of the girls had taken the game too far. For her, there’d been no going back. Rosa did find hints in one forum that the community still existed on another server, under a new name, but there were no direct links, and no other clues to the new online identities of its members. Anyway, she doubted she would have found Valerie there; she had probably gotten tired of playing around with placebos and apple juice long ago, and was looking for her fun elsewhere.
When Trevini still hadn’t called by late that evening, Rosa took a cab to the Meatpacking District. She had never seen the club where Valerie waited tables, but she remembered its name: the Dream