Shahla walked into a room with a sign that said “Listening Room” over the door, and set the food on one of the three tables. Tony followed her.

She turned back to him and said, “I understand that you let the class use your condo for one of the Saturday sessions and that you have a really neat pool. That was a nice thing to do.” She gave him a thumbs-up sign.

“How did you hear about that?” Tony asked, caught off guard.

“Joy is my friend. She was one of the facilitators for the class. She swam in your pool.”

“I remember Joy.” That was an understatement. He was not likely to forget the blonde Joy, especially how she looked in a bikini.

“I’m supposed to show you around,” Shahla said, after a sip of coke. “This is the listening room. We write the names of repeat callers on the board each day so that if they call a second time, we can tell them they’ve already called.”

“Repeat callers get only fifteen minutes a day,” Tony said, quoting from the class, where facilitators had done comical imitations of some of the chronic Hotline haunters. There were several names on the white board from earlier shifts, including Prince Pervert, Lovelorn Lucy, and Masturbating Fool. “Don’t you hang up on the bad calls?”

“Yeah, if they start talking about sex in an explicit way or if we think they’re masturbating, we tell them it’s an inappropriate call and hang up.”

She spoke in a casual voice, but Tony felt uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to talking about masturbation with a teenage girl. He said, “And the books are for referrals?”

“Right. We have a couple of different telephone directories, including a local one, and these other books contain numbers we can give to callers, depending on their problem. They have names of counselors, drug and alcohol programs, shelters, that sort of thing.” She pointed out the books on one of the tables. “And this is the Green Book which tells about the repeat callers.”