“My mom used to say I was an accident waiting to happen. I’d get her to buy me good jeans, and then I’d rip the knees and she’d get upset and promise never to buy me anything anymore.”

She touched her left temple. Caught some hair between her fingers and twisted. Pouted. That reminded me of someone. I watched her fidget and it finally came to me: young Brigitte Bardot.

Would she know who that was?

She said, “My head’s been spinning. Since the mess. It’s like someone else’s screenplay and I’m drifting through the scenes.”

“The legal system can be overwhelming.”

“I never thought I’d be in the system! I mean, I don’t even watch crime stuff on TV. My mom reads mysteries but I hate them.”

“What do you read?”

She’d turned aside, didn’t answer. I repeated the question.

“Oh, sorry, I spaced out. What do I read...Us magazine. People, Elle, you know.”

“How about we talk about what happened?”

“Sure, sure...it was just supposed to be...maybe Dylan and I took it too far but my acting teacher, her big thing is that the whole point of the training is to lose yourself and enter the scene, you really need to abandon the self, you know, the ego. Just give yourself up to the scene and flow.”

“That’s what you and Dylan were doing,” I said.

“I guess I started out thinking we were doing that and I guess...I really don’t know what happened. It’s so crazy, how did I get into this craziness?”

She slammed a fist into an open hand, shuddered, threw up her arms. Began crying softly. A vein throbbed in her neck, pumping through cover-up, accentuating a bruise.

I handed her a tissue. Her fingers lingered on my knuckles. She sniffled. “Thanks.”

I sat back down. “So you thought you were doing what Nora Dowd taught you.”

“You know Nora?”

“I’ve read the court documents.”

“Nora’s in the documents?”

“She’s mentioned. So you’re saying the false abduction was related to your training.”

“You keep calling it false,” she said.

“What would you like me to call it?”

“I don’t know...something else. The exercise. How about that? That’s really what it started out as.”

“An acting exercise.”

“Uh-huh.” She crossed her legs. “Nora never came out and told us to do an exercise but we thought— she was always pushing us to get into the core of our feelings. Dylan and I figured we’d...” She bit her lip. “It was never supposed to go that far.”

She touched her temple again. “I must’ve been whack. Dylan and I were just trying to be artistically authentic. Like when I tied him up and wrapped the rope around myself, I held it around my neck for a while to make sure it would leave marks.” She frowned, touched a bruise.