Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death by Jane Haddam Page B

talk to him about. It had been bad enough last week, when she had just found out and didn’t really believe it yet. It had been bad enough before she started to hide from the doctor.
    The doctor is only lying to me anyway, Christie told herself The doctor made a mistake. The doctor only wants to make a lot of money out of cutting me up. This thing is not really happening to me, and I won’t let them panic me into believing it is.
    Christie got off the bed and walked over to the phone. She tried to touch it and couldn’t. She walked over to the window and looked out at the quad. This was Jonathan Edwards College at Yale University, the place she had dreamed of being since she was old enough to know what a university was. She was a sophomore who was majoring in sociology. When she graduated, she was going to go to work for a congresswoman and learn how to get into politics.
    Christie went back across the room to the door that led to the common room and opened it up. Tara and Michelle were sprawled on the floor out there, two happy, slightly chubby nineteen-year-olds with a bucket of buttered popcorn sitting between them. Christie used to be slightly chubby, too, but over the last few months she had gotten bone thin.
    “Hi,” Tara said, not looking up from what she had spread across the floor to read.
    Michelle did look up. “You look sick,” she said. “You’ve been looking sick all week. Maybe you ought to check into the infirmary.”
    “We’re thinking of checking into a health club,” Tara said. “Look at what we found in the mail today. ‘A New Body for the New Year.’ Don’t you just love it?”
    “I’d love to have a new body,” Michelle said. “Six inches taller and twenty pounds thinner.”
    “The rumor’s all over campus that Dr. Bandolucci got hold of one of these and now she’s going to give a big lecture on the tyranny of slenderness. Can you imagine?”
    “Well,” Michelle said, “nobody could convict Martha Bandolucci of being oppressed by the tyranny of slenderness.”
    “Martha’s always being oppressed by something,” Tara said. “I keep waiting for her to start talking about how the shape of the banister rails in Woolsey Hall reflect the patriarchal obsession with reifying the female—”
    “Oh, my God,” Michelle said.
    “All those dykes over at the Women’s Revolutionary Caucus are going to be up in arms about it, too,” Tara said. “They’re probably going to picket. I’ve been telling Michelle we ought to sign up for this thing just to show the flag for real women.”
    “Don’t call yourself a real woman,” Michelle said. “You’ll end up getting us both in trouble for saying unnice things about homosexuals.”
    “I want to say unnice things about everybody,” Tara said. “That’s what I’m going to do as soon as I get out of here. I’m going to become the first female Howard Stern. I’m going to trash the world and get paid for it.”
    “Howard Stern makes a lot of money,” Michelle said.
    Christie sat down in the red beanbag chair and leaned over to pick up the brochure Tara had been reading. It was a full-color, first-rate professional production with the picture of a long-lined woman on the front flap that looked vaguely familiar. Christie tried to think of where she might have seen a picture of this woman before, but couldn’t. Magda Hale’s Fountain of Youth Work-Out , the smaller type said. That didn’t ring a bell, either.
    Christie dumped the brochure back on the floor. “Is that something that’s going on in New Haven?” she asked them.
    “The studio’s up on Prospect Street,” Michelle said. “I go by there every once in a while when I do tutoring at the Hispañola Center.”
    “She’s got one of those half-hour shows on cable, too,” Tara said. “I think she’s kind of famous. She’s supposed to be I don’t know how ancient, except it never shows on her, if you know what I mean.”
    “It sounds more like California than New