Fortunately Go hadn’t heard the knocking on the door because she’d gone to wash up and get ready for bed. Once she was safely in her bedroom, I let Andie in.
“Hi Mr. Dunne!” Andie said. “Like my outfit?” I noticed she’d cut out the part of the lingerie that would normally be covering her boobs.
“You need to leave,” I said. “And you also need to delete that Tweet immediately.”
She looked at her phone. “No use now,” she said. “It’s already been retweeted 7,000 times.”
Hooking up with Andie had been easier to accomplish than I thought it would be. When I first started teaching at the community college, I formulated a strategy: I’d give all the hot girls Ds to see if any of them would bite and ask to “do something for extra credit.” It was a genius plan, because since it was a community college a lot of the girls were on financial aid, which requires them to maintain a B average. So if girls had sex with you to raise their grade, they’d essentially be paid to do so. But you didn’t have to pay anything. It was like state-subsidized free prostitution.
The first time we had sex was when Andie came to my office hours. Guys: if you teach or TA, and a girl comes to your office hours, she wants to hook up. If a girl actually cared about the material and had done the reading, she’d be so far ahead of rest of the students that she’s not gonna bother talking to you. And the girls who don’t care about the material certainly aren’t gonna spend their free time with you discussing the class. So if a girl comes to office hours, she wants to hook up.
Whenever I’d tell one of my friends about Andie, they’d always ask, “How was the sex?” This is the stupidest question ever. It was great, of course. Because it was sex with a college girl. Guys who claim they had sex with a college girl and it wasn’t that great are just making themselves feel better because they couldn’t keep the girl interested and now she won’t fuck them anymore.
I told Andie again that she needed to leave Go’s, but she blackmailed me by taking off her clothes, which forced me to hook up with her. She tasted like butterscotch. But that might’ve been because I had a butterscotch sundae right before she came over.
Finally, I managed to get her out of the house. As soon as she left, Go came out of her bedroom, looking really pissed.
“Nicoflavius Dunne,” she said, using my real first name, which she only used when she was really mad at me. “Tonight, you have crossed a line. Because from this night forward, you’re a man who cheats on his sister. You can’t ever undo that.” And then she stomped back to her room and slammed the door.
Awk-warrrrd.
I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the TV and was greeted by the face of Dr. Banjay Rupta, host of Dr. Rupta’s Office, a show on one of the big cable news networks. Dr. Rupta was an optometrist by trade, and he’d first started out on the network reporting on eye medicine. But because he was a doctor, the network gradually started using him as an “expert” on all kinds of medical matters, and then gave him his own show where he held forth authoritatively on any topic whatsoever. Tonight on Dr. Rupta’s Office, Dr. Rupta was focusing on one topic only: Where’s Amy?
After a few minutes of discussion about the crime scene, the show shifted its focus to me. They began playing a montage of recent remarks I’d made in front of the cameras:
“These past few days have been the best days of my life.”
“Honey, if you’re out there…please don’t come back.”
“Which do you think I should use, Tinder or OkCupid?”
They finished by showing the clip of me drawing an overweight body on Amy’s head on the “Find Amy” poster. I laughed again when I saw the clip. It really never gets old.
The special guest during the segment was one of the women whose number I’d gotten during the search. I’d called her the next night, and she’d come over to the Days Inn and given me an hj behind the ice machine.
DR. RUPTA: Can you describe what Nick Dunne’s demeanor was on the night you hung out with him?
WOMAN: Uh, demeanor?
DR. RUPTA: Yes, describe it for us.
WOMAN: Um…hard?
The rest of the interview was similarly enlightening. So enlightening that it put me to sleep, which was a good thing, because the next day I had to get up early to go visit Desi Collings.
Desi lived in a McMansion in a tony St. Louis suburb. I thought the house might be creepy inside, but when I walked in I was pleasantly surprised to see the walls covered with lovely photos of Desi and his wife, as well as pictures of Desi’s two children, a son and daughter. But then when I looked at the photos more closely, I realized they were all photos of Desi and Amy, from grade school all the way up until now.
Desi was well dressed and good-looking — clearly the kind of guy who thinks being well dressed and good looking will get a girl to hook up with you eventually if you spend enough time in the friend zone.
“Nice to meet you, Nick,” said Desi. “Amy’s told me so much about you.”
Amy had only been able to tell him “so much” about me because they’d hung out “so much.” It saddened me to think of this guy wasting his entire life in the friend zone. I just wanted to shake him into sanity and tell him how things worked with guys and girls. But I had to stay on topic.
“Great to meet you as well,” I said. “So I came here because I had to ask you a couple very important questions. This is completely confidential, by the way. I’ll never tell another soul, I swear on my life. I just need to know: did you kill Amy?”
“What? Of course not!”
“Did you kidnap Amy?”
“No!”
“Did you do anything to Amy that would make it so that I never have to see her again?”
“Nope.”
“Shit,” I said. “Well thanks for your time.” I went to leave, but Desi stopped me.
“Hey Nick, if you do find Amy, could you give her a message for me?”
“Sure.”
“Tell her that if she wants someone to accompany her for some shoe shopping or brunch, I’m totally down.”
