The Venus Fix (7 page)

Jordain started to ask his next question when the phone rang. He let it go until the third ring, then grabbed it, said his name, listened, said a brief yes, and then hung up. “Follow-up
on the Bullard case. Nothing that can’t wait. I was about to ask if there are other places as easy to get it as a hospital.”

“Yup.” He checked the sheet. “Army supply units would have it. Any doctor might prescribe it. The prescription eye drops would most likely go by the brand name Homatropine or Isopto Atropine, which of course you could get from an online pharmaceutical site. Know what else? You can buy the stuff from any shop or Web site selling Wiccan supplies. They use it to introduce hallucinations. Butler checked and found three atropine injectors for sale at eBay.”

“Paper trail,” Jordain muttered.

“There’s an even easier way to get it. You can grow it yourself. Or take a field trip with a little pocket knife to one of the dozens of medical gardens attached to so many museums and schools. Quite a few have a poison garden and—”

“Damn it, Perez, I got it. You can get the stuff anywhere and everywhere. I can get the stuff. Butler can get it. It’s a no-brainer. It’s probably even growing in Central Park.”

“Probably.”

“Great, so, we know the
what.
Do we know anything about the how? Do you know the details?”

“That’s the part you aren’t going to believe.”

Jordain’s expression went from serious to impatient, tinged with slight annoyance.

“The poison entered her system through mucous membranes. Specifically through the membranes in her vaginal wall.” He paused.

Jordain made a hurry-up motion with this hand.

“The atropine was mixed into the lubricant she slathered on her dildo.”

I
opened the door to the English lab at five twenty-five to find three members of the group sitting there in the shadows. Hugh was scrolling through a PDA. Barry seemed to be sleeping with his head on his arms, which were folded on the desktop. Amanda also had her eyes closed, but she had headphones on and from the sway of her shoulders she was clearly engrossed in the music she was listening to.

The original group consisted of eight boys who ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen. They’d been meeting with me late every Tuesday afternoon since early November after the Park East School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Six weeks later, the principal had recommended four girls join the group. Each of them, with the exception of Amanda, had been sexually involved either with one of the boys in the group or with one of their friends. The three of them were adapting well. They were even helping the boys to open up a little.

But Amanda sat in each session not participating—fidgeting, anxious, waiting for something, ready to jump up and bolt at any second. Since she was the only teenager who had asked to join the group her actions and silence worried me.

I switched on the light and walked into the classroom.

Hugh looked up, Barry continued sleeping. Amanda started and opened her eyes.

“You might want to wake Barry up,” I said to Hugh as I took off my coat. “Then the three of you can help me put the chairs in a circle.”

Amanda looked down at her finger. There was a small, fresh cut on her left thumb, an angry half moon of dark, dried blood. She was touching it lightly with the forefinger of her right hand. The shape was familiar to me—it was the shape a chisel made when it slipped on the wood or marble you were sculpting.

“You shouldn’t move chairs with that. Does it hurt?” I asked her.

“It did.”

“How did you do it?”

“In art class.”

It was the most she’d said in three weeks.

“Sculpture?”

She seemed slightly surprised.

“Do you like art class?” I asked.

She shrugged, the kind of shrug that meant yes, not no.

“I’d like to see your work. I’m something of an amateur sculptor.”

“I don’t show my stuff to people. Ever.”

Too much emotion in the sentence, but I was thrilled to have heard it. “Sometimes I do. Because if I keep it secret, it gets too important.”

She was staring at me.

While the boys formed the circle, the rest of the group straggled in. Timothy, who was one of the brightest but also most disturbed kids, walked in talking on his cell phone. When he saw me, he ended the call.

Amanda’s eyes followed him across the room. She seemed to settle down a little now that he was here. When he glanced over and saw her, he gave her an almost imperceptible smile. They had a bond, but what kind of bond I didn’t yet understand.

I asked Timothy to help with the last few chairs, and he grudgingly threw his coat and knapsack on the floor and went to work. Jeremy came in with Charlie. Both clean-cut and well groomed, they always arrived and left together. More than anyone else, they participated in these sessions, and I kept hoping they’d influence the rest of the kids, who were there in body only.

A few seconds later Jodi arrived, a Goth with a long black coat that swept up the dirt on the floor. Every week she came in elaborate clothes and makeup. Ellen and Merry came in right behind her. Jodi’s opposites, these two smiled, were poised and were always dressed in clothes that would have seemed ridiculously expensive on grown women.

Altogether they were a cross-section: a Goth, a brain, two preppies, a retro hippie, an art student, a musician, two fashionistas. But they did share an interest that was seriously affecting their lives: the boys were severely addicted to Internet porn, and fearless when it came to ignoring the rules against going to X-rated sites while in school. None of them had been caught in the act, but there had been enough evidence of their travels to put them in jeopardy. Therapy with me was the only thing keeping them from expulsion.

The girls had been affected by the boys’ addiction. Their self-esteem had been brutalized, and they had been flagrantly acting out, hoping to get the boys to pay more attention to them. Their parents and teachers were worried.

And then there was Amanda.

We started that Tuesday night only five minutes late, which was better than usual. Right away it was clear that everyone was jittery, especially Timothy, who literally couldn’t sit still.
Hugh kept casting glances at him as if making sure he was all right. Amanda kept looking over at him, too, but as if she knew he wasn’t okay. Jeremy was tapping his foot on the floor in a precise rhythm and Charlie was biting his nails.

When Timothy clicked his pen for the fifth time in a row, I asked him to tell me what was going on.

He shrugged.

Charlie cleared his throat.

Jeremy turned and looked out of the window so that I couldn’t see his face.

Amanda opened her bag and fished around in it for a few seconds, brought out a Band-Aid and proceeded to put it over the cut.

“Timothy?” I asked again.

He didn’t respond.

The Goth girl, Jodi, leaned over and whispered to him. It sounded to me as if she’d said
tell her,
but I wasn’t sure, so I asked her to repeat what she’d said so we all could hear it.

“It was nothing.”

“Timothy, do you want to tell us what Jodi said?”

He shrugged.

“I think she said ‘tell her.’ Is that right?” I pushed.

Timothy still didn’t answer.

“Jodi, is that what you said?”

She looked at me but didn’t respond. Living with a teenager myself, I knew that more often than not, no answer was code for the affirmative. But why wouldn’t she answer? What was she scared of?

“Tell me what, Timothy? You’re not going to get in trouble, but let’s get it out in the open.”

“I was online, okay?”

I ignored the sarcasm. “Good, thanks for telling me. Did you try to call anyone before you went online?”

We’d set up a buddy system, and each kid was supposed to call and at least discuss his urge to go into a chat room or porn site before giving in to it. To date, we hadn’t had much success. In other addiction-therapy programs the act of stopping to make the call worked well and I was still hoping it would have some effect here if I could get the kids to make the calls. The problem was these boys couldn’t understand what was wrong with what they were doing other than that adults were telling them they shouldn’t be doing it.

“No, I didn’t try to call anyone.” Timothy sounded irritated.

“Did you even think about calling?”

“What happened…wasn’t about me getting off. It was about what I saw.”

“What did you see?”

He was, once again, silent.

Amanda was playing with the edge of the Band-Aid she’d just affixed.

“Timothy, what did Jodi think you should tell me?”

“I saw something freaky online, okay? It was bad. Now, can we drop it?”

“Bad?”

“Oh, Jesus. No matter what anyone says, you have another question,” Hugh said impatiently.

“None of you have to answer any of my questions. Most of the time, you don’t. I know some of you guys don’t want to be here. In fact, I know you’d rather be anywhere else. But it’s nonnegotiable. Hugh, why do you think you’re here?”

“Because we go online.”

“Just go online?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“We go online too much. You think, everyone thinks, that we have no control.”

“When you are sitting there and you haven’t clicked the mouse yet, but you’ve typed in the URL of the porn site, what are you thinking about?”

He shrugged.

“It’s not a test, it’s just a question. Think about sitting there. The screen is on your homework, but the Web address of a porn site is typed in…. You don’t have to click over…you don’t have to give in… What are you thinking?”

“It’s not about giving in,” Hugh said. “It’s just there. It’s so easy. Why shouldn’t I go? Who the hell am I hurting? That’s what I just don’t get about this. Who cares so much?”

I looked around the room, waiting to see if anyone was going to respond.

Ellen was watching him. They’d gone out. She was frowning. Pressing her lips together. Wanting to say something, holding back. “Ellen? Is there something you want to say?”

“If you can control it, how come you don’t?”

He didn’t answer.

Amanda lifted the corner of the Band-Aid and then pressed it back down. It was Barry who blurted out a response, his voice strident. “I’m not hurting anyone. None of us are. I like watching who’s online and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

He’d said
hurting anyone.

Amanda continued her picking at the outer edges of the adhesive strip, lifting, pressing down, lifting.

“I know you’re not hurting anyone, Barry. I know none of you is intentionally hurting anyone.” I looked around the room, trying to make eye contact with each of them. Merry inched forward in her chair.

“I can’t…it’s hard to…I mean, I don’t want to have to do that stuff all the time to get someone to like me.”

“Do you mean sexual stuff?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Does it hurt, Merry?”

“Well, not like someone cut me. But even with what I did, it was still better to look at those girls than me. I don’t know. That sorta sucks.”

No one responded.

“You’re not hurting anyone, are you, Timothy?”

He didn’t respond.

“Do you think you’ve ever hurt anyone by going online?”

“Maybe,” he blurted out.

“How?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

His answer made no sense to me, but I didn’t want to stop and make him explain himself and risk damming him up.

“What should you have done?”

“I couldn’t. If I told anyone what I saw they’d know I’d gone online. Three strikes and I’m out. That’s my father’s fucking stupid rule. Shit. If you tell them now, I’ll be thrown out of here.”

“But I won’t. We have a deal in here, right? You can talk about whatever you want and I keep it confidential. I promised you all that in our first session and I haven’t broken that promise.”

Someone to Timothy’s left murmured something, but I ignored it.

“Timothy, what did you see?”

“No.” He said it too quickly.

The rest of them knew what he’d seen. They’d talked about it before the group, I sensed.

“Leave him alone,” Hugh said loudly.

“Why?”

Hugh, Timothy and Barry invariably looked out for one another in our sessions, defending one another if they felt I was being too tough on one of them. This time, both of the others were quiet.

“Why do you feel the need to protect Timothy from me?” I asked, pushing Hugh harder than I normally would.

Now Barry leaned forward; he clenched his hands together. “Leave him alone. He’s been going crazy.”

“I don’t want to leave him alone, I want to help.”

“It’s too late to help.” It was Amanda. “Again.”

“Why? What do you mean ‘again’?”

She turned to Timothy and they exchanged a pained glance.

“Amanda?”

Her fingers hadn’t stopped fussing with the Band-Aid.

“Do you think it would help Timothy if he told us what he saw?” I asked her.

“It doesn’t matter.” Her finger stopped playing with the Band-Aid. “Not anymore. No one can help.”

“You know, this is stupid,” Ellen said. “These guys don’t want us to help them. They don’t want anything from us. Except blowjobs. And even then, they keep watching the girls online. Right while we’re doing it to them. You might as well be dead….” She was hissing now.

Amanda’s eyes widened, frightened, pained. Her fingers worked the edge of the strip of plastic.

“Amanda, what is it?”

She shook her head back and forth. “Nothing.” And then with one fast jerk, she pulled off the adhesive, baring the line of dried blood.

F
ive hours later, my daughter was sitting at the island in the middle of the kitchen while I went through the refrigerator looking for something ready-made that I couldn’t ruin.

Having a late-night snack after Dulcie got home from the theater had replaced having dinner together. Now we talked over the day while she tried to come down after the performance.