“Of course you do. ‘Why quit so close to the finish line and take up the still disreputable—and possibly dangerous—trade of sex worker?’ ”

“About age…”

“I know I seem excessively grown up for my chronological age,” Allison said, cutting me off. “Or look very young for my whatever…my precocity. Did you ever look up that word? I did once, and the first definition up there—this was a web search…so take it for what it’s worth…but still, the first example of the use of the word was: ‘You’ll be proud of your puppy’s precocity if he is perfectly trained by the age of four months.’ That’s frequently what I felt like, a paper-trained puppy for others to be proud of. Being precocious is weirder than people understand, sometimes I think it should be classified as a disorder. Maybe that’s why I stopped, and what’s a nice girl like me doing something like this?”

“I wasn’t going to ask that.”

“Really?”

“Really. I just couldn’t make it compute. There don’t seem to be enough years in there.” Not that I needed to make the age and educational claims work, but I did want to get a sense of how much truth she was telling me.

She said, “Leon Botstein and Ronan Farrow.”

“Which means?”

“Botstein is the president of Bard College. He gets that high school is humdrum, stupid, horseshit. At least for bright children. They can handle what’s called college-level material. He set up several high schools to do that. I skipped eighth grade, then got into the one in Cleveland. I’m actually from Ohio. I was done there at sixteen with two years of college credits. Then I came here, to Bard, and if I hadn’t changed my major three times I probably could have graduated last spring, when I turned eighteen.”

“And Ronan Farrow?”

“A cherished Bard legend. He graduated from Bard at fourteen. Bard’s youngest ever. Son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. There’s a rumor that Frank Sinatra is his biological father. Actually, it was Mia Farrow who pushed that story. He did not go into the sex trade. He got more degrees, then became a journalist. He’s credited with exposing Harvey Weinstein. If you think about it, maybe making a living from exposing someone else’s sexual activities is part of the sex trade.”

We were in the middle of the campus. She pointed and said, “Park there.” I pulled over. She jumped out. “I won’t be more than fifteen minutes. Promise.” She reached in back and grabbed her suitcase. “I’ll change, too. I know just what to wear for this. It’ll be perfect, you’ll see.” She scrambled away with that quickness and liveliness of youth.

—

I sat back to wait and watch the rain come down.