Dulce

“Well, that’s just rude.”

I shake my head, shove my cell phone back in my pocket, and continue jogging up to the house, taking the steps two at a time.

I pull the door open and make my way across the quiet hallway and up to the first floor.

I’ve never been to Cassandra’s room before, but I remember where it is after visiting Sarah the day we went for coffee.

They had yelled at each other in the hallway before slamming their collective doors on each other. It was all very juvenile and hilarious at the time, but as I quietly make my way past Sarah’s room, things feel anything but funny.

I reach my hand up to knock, but stop and try the handle first. I push it down and it pops open. Damn girl has no sense of self-preservation. Don’t people know how rife with sexual assault college life can be? Even somewhere away from here. This place, of course, is ten times worse. She should know better, especially if she comes from an influential family. That shit is usually instilled in them from birth. Everyone is a potential threat.

Maybe I really am fucked-up. God help my kids when I get around to having them.

It’s dark inside, but I don’t put the light on. I close the door behind me and wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark before taking in what I can see in the moonlight. Thankfully, the blinds are open, making that an easy endeavor.

The dorm room itself is clear, but I can hear the shower running. Rather than barging in there and demanding answers, I do a quick sweep of the room.

Her bed is unmade, her sheets twisted and rumpled from when she climbed out of it earlier.

A condom wrapper litters the floor, but no discarded condom. Either the wrapper is old, and this girl is a slob—given the state of the room, it’s possible—or the boy who used it took it with him.

I pull out her bedside drawer and find a green dildo and an industrial-sized bottle of lube.

Some might find that shocking, but she’s a healthy woman, so why the hell not? Besides, I’ve seen much worse in my line of work, even dildos the size of a human arm.

I use a pen to move it around and look beneath it, knowing it would put off a lot of first-time snoopers, but I’m not most people.

Underneath is a stack of photos. I don’t have time to go through them now, so I take them with me, shoving them into the kangaroo pouch on the front of my jacket.

I head to her closet and have a quick look but turn up nothing.

I hear the shower turn off as I snoop through the other drawers of her dresser and find a bunch of pins with the school emblem. They are the kind of thing handed out to prefects or student representatives, but we don’t have that kind of setup here. This isn’t a normal school as such.

I take a handful and shove them into the same zip pocket that holds my cell phone.

Ooh, cell phone. I search the room and find it on the bed with her wallet.

I grab both items and leave. It’s not what I originally had planned, but I have a feeling this girl won’t tell me the truth. I’d rather look through her stuff first and see what I can find.

I run to the fire escape, which seems to be my theme tonight, climb down to the small footpath that runs parallel with the woods, and head back to my place.

I know she’ll notice them gone. I’m banking on it. I want to see what she does when she’s spooked. Most teenage girls would freak out if they realized someone had been in their room and stolen something while they had been a few feet away, naked and vulnerable.

I move toward the nearest streetlight, far enough from Cassandra’s building that she won’t see me, but close enough to see if campus security turns up. While I’m there, I tackle her wallet first. The usual is inside—her ID, what I’m assuming by the name is Daddy’s credit card, plus a bunch of loyalty cards for stores and restaurants.

There is a mascara wand and a lipstick in the zip-up compartment, both expensive brands, both almost used up, so she must really like them. There is nothing unusual until I find another zipper at the back of the wallet that I almost skip over as decorative.

I pull it open and pull out a wad of cash. It’s so thick I’m not sure how she managed to get it all in there. I flick through the notes quickly and realize they are all one-hundred-dollar bills. There have to be about twenty of them.

It might not seem like a huge amount of money to the people that go here, but it’s not an insignificant find either.

There isn’t much use for paper money on campus. Everything is purchased using your ID card. It’s supposed to be a safe method, and I can understand the logic behind it, even if it is a pain trying to remember the damn thing all the time.

There are no huge shopping areas around here, no fancy boutiques or malls, not for at least fifty miles. In this day and age, most people shop electronically, either online or in-store with their cards. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone paying with cash unless they were trying to show off when buying an expensive dinner or if they were leaving a tip. And definitely not with a huge amount.

What Cassandra wears is designer and new this season. So, if she’s not physically shopping for it, she’s doing it online and getting it delivered. Then why the cash and where did it come from?

A puzzle I’d have to see if I could figure out.

Perhaps Bitchy Barbie has a drug problem. The last time I checked, small-time dealers still deal in cash. It’s one of the few possibilities that makes sense.

I shove everything back inside the wallet and slip it back into my pocket before taking out her cell phone.

The phone is more basic than I’d expect a girl like Cassandra to have. I turn it over and swipe my finger across the screen, and frown, surprised that it opens for me.

You can’t be serious. First the door, then this? What kind of idiot doesn’t keep their phone password protected?

I go to her contacts, but don’t see any of her friends’ names. In fact, there are no contacts at all, apart from one that’s listed as “Mary’s.” Given the way it’s been entered, it must be a place rather than a person.

I check the call log and see the last call made was at 10 p.m. and lasted ten minutes. I check through the text messages and come up empty.

There is no way this is Cassandra’s personal cellphone, so the question remains, why does she need a separate one? I check the camera roll. I find it full of shots of hundreds of different girls. Some are posed, overly dramatic with pouty lips and cocked hips, but some are natural, and others you can see are completely oblivious of the camera.

The question is, why? Cassandra isn’t in any of them. Not a single obligatory drunk friendship pose with glassy eyes and big toothy grins, and Cassandra looks like the type to do that shit.

I was hoping for answers, what I have is a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and a thousand more questions.

I turn it off and shove it into my pocket. I doubt anyone is going to try tracking it, but old habits die hard.

I sit on the grassy knoll near the streetlamp and wait for almost an hour, but no security team turns up to investigate. No police arrive to calm an upset girl whose place got broken into tonight.

Standing up, I brush myself off again and slowly start jogging back to my place, trying to fit all the pieces together.

The older cell, the cash, and the lack of calling the police lean me toward my drug theory, but I can’t discount the photos of all those girls. That doesn’t fit the drug theory puzzle at all. That fits a different puzzle altogether.

Could these girls be some of the women who have been trafficked from here? Not all of them. There are just too many. It would be impossible for this to remain a secret with that many women being snatched. I’m still surprised how they’ve managed to escape attention all this time already.