said. “It’s only a form, but we have to follow it.” She patted Pip’s hand and then stroked it. “We’ll go fast.”
Pip wondered why Annagret kept touching her.
“Your friends are disappearing. They don’t respond to texts or Facebook or phone. You talk to their employers, who say they haven’t been to work. You talk to their parents, who say they’re very worried. You go to the police, who tell you they’ve investigated and say your friends are OK but living in different cities now. After a while, every single friend of yours is gone. What do you do then? Do you wait until you disappear yourself, so you can find out what happened to your friends? Do you try to investigate? Do you run away?”
“It’s just my friends who are disappearing?” Pip said. “The streets are still full of people my age who aren’t my friends?”
“Yes.”
“Honestly, I think I’d go see a psychiatrist if this happened to me.”
“But the psychiatrist talks to the police herself and finds out that everything you said is true.”
“Well, then, at least I’d have one friend—the psychiatrist.”
“But then the psychiatrist herself disappears.”
“This is a totally paranoid scenario. That is like something out of Dreyfuss’s head.”
“You wait, investigate, or run away?”
“Or kill myself. How about kill myself?”
“There are no wrong answers.”
“I’d probably go live with my mom. I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. And if she somehow disappeared anyway, I’d probably kill myself, since by then it would be obvious that having any connection to me wasn’t good for a person’s health.”
Annagret smiled again. “Excellent.”
“What?”
“You’re doing very, very well, Pip.” She reached across the table and put her hands, her hot hands, on Pip’s cheeks.
“Saying I’d kill myself is the right answer?”
Annagret took her hands away. “There are no wrong answers.”
“That sort of makes it harder to feel good about doing well.”
“Which of the following have you ever done without permission: break into someone’s email account, read things on someone’s smartphone, search someone’s computer, read someone’s diary, go through someone’s private papers, listen to a private conversation when someone’s phone accidentally dials you, obtain information about someone on false pretenses, put your ear to a wall or door to listen to a conversation, and the like.”
Pip frowned. “Am I allowed to skip a question?”
“You can trust me.” Annagret touched her hand yet again. “It’s better that you answer.”
Pip hesitated and then confessed: “I’ve been through every scrap of paper my mother owns. If she had a diary, I would have read it, but she doesn’t. If she had an email account, I would have broken into it. I’ve gone online and searched every database I can think of. I don’t feel good about it, but she won’t tell me who my father is, she won’t tell me where I was born, she won’t even tell me what her real name is. She says she’s doing it for my protection, but I think the danger is only in her head.”
“These are things you need to know,” Annagret said gravely.
“Yes.”
“You have a right to know them.”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand that these are things the Sunlight Project can help you find out?”
Pip’s heart began to race, in part because this had not, in fact, occurred to her before, and the prospect was frightening, but mainly because she sensed that a real seduction was kicking into gear now, a seduction to which all of Annagret’s touchings had merely been a prelude. She took her hand away and hugged herself nervously.
“I thought the Project was about corporate and national security secrets.”
“Yes, of course. But the Project has many resources.”
“So I could just, like, write to them and ask for the information?”
Annagret shook her head. “It isn’t a private detection agency.”
“But if I actually went and did an internship.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, that’s interesting.”
“Something to think about, ja?”
“Ja-ah,” Pip said.
“You’re traveling in a foreign country,” Annagret read, “and one night the police come to your hotel room and arrest you as a spy, even though you haven’t been spying. They take you to the police station. They say that you may make one call that they will listen to both sides of. They warn you that anyone you call will also be under suspicion of spying. Whom do you call?”
“Stephen,” Pip said.
There was a flicker of disappointment in Annagret’s face. “This Stephen? The Stephen here?”
“Yes, what’s wrong with that?”
“Forgive me, but I thought you would say your mother. You’ve mentioned her in every other answer so far. She’s the only person you trust.”
“But that’s only trust in a deep way,” Pip said. “She’d go insane with worry, and she doesn’t know anything about how the world works, and so she wouldn’t know who to call to help me. Stephen would know exactly who to call.”
“To me he seems a bit weak.”
“What?”
“He seems weak. He’s married to that angry, controlly person.”
“Yes, I know, his marriage is unfortunate—believe me, I know.”
“You have feelings for him!” Annagret said with dismay.
“Yes, I do, so what?”
“Well, you didn’t tell me. We’re telling each other everything, on the sofa, and you didn’t tell me this.”
“You didn’t tell me you used to sleep with Andreas Wolf!”
“Andreas is a public person. I have to be careful. And that’s many years ago now.”
“You talk about him like you’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
“Pip, please,” Annagret said, seizing her hands. “Let’s not fight. I didn’t know you had feelings for Stephen. I’m sorry.”
But the wound the word weak had inflicted was hurting Pip more now, not less, and she was aghast to realize how much personal data she’d already surrendered to a woman so confident of her beauty that she could fill her face with metal and chop her hair (so it looked) with lawn clippers. Pip, who had no grounds for such confidence, snatched her hands away and stood up and noisily dropped her cereal bowl in the sink. “I’m going upstairs now—”
“No, we still have six questions—”
“Because I’m obviously not going to South America, and I don’t trust you one bit, not the tiniest bit, and so why don’t you and your masturbating boyfriend go down to L.A. and squat in somebody else’s house and give your questionnaire to somebody who’s into somebody stronger than Stephen. I don’t want you in our house anymore, and neither does anybody else. If you had any respect for me, you would have seen