Read it

“Let’s see here,” Lopez says, settling on the bed with the book in her lap. You sit on her left and Julieta is on her right. It’s very cozy. “This girl was a freshman. I think this is her. Peggy Hall. She disappeared in 1971. And… look at that.” She puts her finger on a date at the top of a page: September 15, 1971.

“This is from right before she disappeared,” you say.

“So she started out in the dorms, but…” Lopez trails off. You’re reading along with her.

Peggy writes about how living in the dorms with a roommate was her sexual awakening. She describes her pretty brunette roommate in detail, and writes at length about how she would touch herself while thinking about her, and on a couple occasions, while listening to her roommate have sex with her boyfriend.

Apparently Peggy liked this girl so much that she had to get away. It was frustrating to be so close to her when she was straight, and barely noticed Peggy herself.

“She found out about CCL from her aunt,” Lopez says, pointing at a paragraph with smudged ink. “She wanted to join because all the rumors said that everyone was gay.”

“The rumors were true,” you say.

Peggy writes about her first visits to CCL house, and you can sense her breathless excitement through the prose. On her third visit, two of the sisters took her into a bedroom and gave her the night of her life, which Peggy recounts without leaving out any details.

Lopez shifts slightly as she reads that part. Peggy pledges just a few pages later, and the description of her initiation is absolutely brutal. Apparently in 1971, CCL **** the pledges to perform oral sex on the sisters outside in the cold, naked, while hanging upside down from tree branches. Just… trying to picture that is crazy.

But apparently Peggy managed to make her sponsor cum that way, and she was accepted in. She quickly got into a relationship with one of the other girls, but she was most interested in the Second Officer, the leader’s right-hand girl.

You read as Peggy becomes increasingly obsessed with this girl, writing endlessly about her beauty, and then about her own guilt as she spends her nights making love to her girlfriend but thinking about this officer the whole time. Peggy is… very dramatic. But you can imagine what that must have been like. It must have been intense.

Then something happens that you don’t expect: Peggy writes about seeing something that she shouldn’t have. She doesn’t say that she was stalking that officer that she was in love with, but that’s obviously what she was doing.

It looks like she saw her go into the dean’s office and… do things with him.

That must have been really hard for her. Poor girl.

Lopez turns the page. There’s nothing else. Wait a minute. That was the last entry?

“Oh no,” you say, disappointed. It was really good… you wanted to see how she would deal with her obsession and her girlfriend.

It looks like Julieta was enchanted too, but not Lopez. Lopez looks serious.

“What’s wrong?” you ask her.

“They shut her up,” she says.

“Huh?”

“CCL has always been out of control. They traded sexual favors with the university to keep them looking the other way.” Lopez snaps the book shut and taps it with her finger. “That’s what Peggy saw.”

Oh, wow. That’s dark.

“Does that solve her disappearance?” you ask.

“No.” Lopez stands up. “But it’s a clue. I need to keep looking. My last helper bailed on me. Do you want to help?”

Agree to help Lopez?

Or just stay here with Julieta?