aybe you are, he thought, and the voice in his head sounded too damn much like his wife’s.

“All right, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He knocked on the door, summoning the correctional officer who would take Peter back to his cell, when suddenly the boy spoke.

“How many did I get?”

Jordan hesitated, his hand on the knob. He did not turn to face his client. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he repeated.

Dr. Ervin Peabody lived across the river in Norwich, Vermont, and worked part-time at Sterling College’s psychology program. Six years ago he had been one of seven coauthors of a published paper about school violence-an academic exercise he barely remembered. And yet, he’d been called by the NBC affiliate out of Burlington-a morning news show he sometimes watched over a bowl of cereal for the sheer glee of seeing how often the inept newscasters screwed up. We’re looking for someone who can talk about the shooting from a psychological standpoint, the producer had said, and Ervin had replied, I’m your man.

“Warning signals,” he said in response to the anchor’s question. “Well, these young men pull away from others. They tend to be loners. They talk about hurting themselves, or others. They can’t function in school, or are subjected to discipline there. They lack a connection with someone-anyone-who might make them feel important.”

Ervin knew the network hadn’t come to him for his expertise-only for solace. The rest of Sterling-the rest of the world-wanted to know that kids like Peter Houghton were recognizable, as if the potential to turn into a murderer overnight were a visible birthmark. “So there’s a general profile of a school shooter,” the anchor prodded.

Ervin Peabody looked into the camera. He knew the truth-that if you said these kids wore black or listened to odd music or were angry, you were discussing most of the male teenage population at some point during their adolescent years. He knew that if a deeply disturbed individual was intent on doing damage, he’d probably succeed. But he also knew that every eye in the Connecticut Valley was on him-maybe even in the whole Northeast-and that he was up for tenure at Sterling. A little prestige-a label of expert-couldn’t hurt. “You could make that argument,” he said.

Lewis was the one who settled the Houghton household for the night. He’d start in the kitchen and load the dishwasher. He’d lock the front door and turn off the lights. Then he’d head upstairs, where Lacy was usually already in bed, reading-if not out assisting at a birth-and he’d stop in his son’s room. Tell him to shut off the computer and go to bed.

Tonight he found himself standing in front of Peter’s room, looking at the mess wrought by the police during their search. He thought about righting the remaining books on the shelves, putting away the contents of the desk drawers that had been dumped onto the carpet. On second thought, he gently closed the door.

Lacy was not in the bedroom, or brushing her teeth. He hesitated, an ear cocked. There was chatter-it sounded like a furtive conversation-coming from the room directly below him.

He retraced his steps, drawing closer to the voices. Who would Lacy be talking to at nearly midnight?

The screen of the television glowed green and unearthly in the dark study. Lewis had forgotten there even was a television in that room, it was so infrequently used. He saw the CNN logo and familiar ticker tape of breaking news along the bottom. A thought occurred to him: that ticker tape hadn’t existed until 9/11-until people were so scared that they needed to know, without any delay, the facts of the world they inhabited.

Lacy was kneeling on the carpet, her face turned up to the anchor’s. “There is little word yet about how the man who was the shooter secured his weapons, or exactly what those weapons are…”

“Lacy,” he said, swallowing. “Lacy, come to bed.”

Lacy did not move, did not give any indication she’d heard him. Lewis passed her, trailing his hand over her shoulder as he went to shut off the television. “Preliminary reports are focusing on two pistols,” the anchor confided, just before his image disappeared.

Lacy turned to him. Her eyes reminded him of the sky you see from airplanes: a boundless gray that could be anywhere, and nowhere, all at once. “They keep calling him a man,” she said, “but he’s only a boy.”

“Lacy,” he repeated, and she stood and moved into his arms, as if this were her invitation to the dance.

If you listen carefully in a hospital, you can hear the truth. Nurses whisper to one another over your still body when you are pretending to sleep; policemen trade secrets in the hallway; doctors enter your room with another patient’s condition on their lips.

Josie had been making a mental list of the wounded. It seemed she could play six degrees of separation with any of the injured-when she had seen them last; when they had crossed her path; where they had been in proximity to her when they had been shot. There was Drew Girard, who’d grabbed Matt and Josie to tell them that Peter Houghton was shooting up the school. Emma, who’d been sitting three chairs away from Josie in the cafeteria. And Trey MacKenzie, a football player known for his house parties. John Eberhard, who had been eating Josie’s French fries that morning. Min Horuka, an exchange student from Tokyo who’d gotten drunk last year out on the ropes course behind the track and then peed into the open window of the principal’s car. Natalie Zlenko, who’d been in front of Josie in the cafeteria line. Coach Spears and Miss Ritolli, two formers teachers of Josie’s. Brady Pryce and Haley Weaver, the golden senior couple.

There were others that Josie knew only by name-Michael Beach, Steve Babourias, Natalie Phlug, Austin Prokiov, Alyssa Carr, Jared Weiner, Richard Hicks, Jada Knight, Zoe Patterson-strangers with whom, now, she’d be linked forever.

It was harder to find out the names of the dead. They were whispered about even more quietly, as if their condition were contagious to the rest of the unfortunate souls just taking up space in the hospital beds. Josie had heard rumors: that Mr. McCabe had been killed, and Topher McPhee-the school pot dealer. To hoard crumbs of information, Josie tried to watch television, which was running twenty-four-hour Sterling High Shooting coverage, but inevitably her mother would come into the room and turn it off. All she had gleaned from her forbidden media forays was that there had been ten fatalities.

Matt was one.

Every time Josie thought about it, something happened to her body. She stopped breathing. All the words she knew congealed at the bottom of her throat, a boulder blocking the exit from a cave.

Thanks to the sedatives, so much of this seemed unreal-as if she were walking on the spongy floor of a dream-but the moment she thought of Matt, it became authentic and raw.

She would never kiss Matt again.

She would never hear him laugh.

She would never feel the print of his hand on her waist, or read a note he’d slipped through the furrows of her locker, or feel her heart beat into his hand when he unbuttoned her shirt.

She was only remembering the half of it, that she knew-as if the shooting had not only split her life into before and after, but also robbed her of certain skills: the ability to last an hour without puddling into tears; the ability to see the color red without feeling queasy; the ability to form a skeleton of the truth from the bare bones of memory. To remember the rest of it, given what had happened, would be nearly obscene.

So instead, Josie found herself veering drunkenly from the soft-focus moments with Matt to the macabre. She kept thinking of a line from Romeo and Juliet that had freaked her out when they’d studied the play in ninth grade: With worms that are thy chambermaids. Romeo had said it to Juliet’s looks-like-dead body in the Capulet crypt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But there were a whole bunch of steps in between that no one ever talked about, and when the nurses were gone in the middle of the night, Josie found herself wondering how long it took for flesh to peel from a skull; what happened to the jelly of eyes; whether Matt had already stopped looking like Matt. And then she’d wake up and find herself screaming, with a dozen doctors and nurses holding her down.

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?

The door to her room opened and her mother stepped inside. “So,” she said, with a fake smile so wide it divided her entire head like an equator. “You ready?”

It was only 7:00 a.m., but Josie had already been discharged. She nodded at her mother. Josie sort of hated her right now. She was acting all concerned and worried, but it was too much too late, as if it had taken this shooting for her to wake up to the fact that she had absolutely no relationship with Josie. She kept telling Josie she was here if Josie needed to talk, which was ridiculous. Even if Josie wanted to-which she didn’t-her mother was the last person on earth she’d want to confide in. She wouldn’t understand-no one would, except for the other kids lying in different rooms in this hospital. This hadn’t been just some murder on the street somewhere, which would have been bad enough. This was the worst that could happen, in a place where Josie would have to return, whether she wanted to or not.

Josie was wearing different clothes than the ones she’d been brought here with, which had mysteriously disappeared. No one was admitting to anything, but Josie assumed they were covered with Matt’s blood. In this, they had been right to throw them away: no matter how much bleach was used and how many washings were done, Josie knew she’d be able to see the stains.

Her head still ached from where she’d struck the floor when she fainted. She’d cut her forehead and narrowly avoided needing stitches, although the doctors had wanted to watch her overnight. (For what? Josie had wondered. A stroke? A blood clot? Suicide?) When Josie stood up, her mother was at her side immediately, an arm anchored around her for support. It reminded Josie of the way that she and Matt sometimes walked down the street in the summer, their hands filed into the back pockets of each other’s jeans.

“Oh, Josie,” her mother said, and that was how she realized she’d started to cry again. It happened so often, now, that Josie had lost the capacity to tell when it stopped and started. Her mother offered her a tissue. “You know what? You’ll start feeling better when you get home. I promise.”

Well, duh. Josie couldn’t start feeling any worse.

But she managed a grimace, which might have been a smile if you weren’t looking too closely, because she knew that’s what her mother needed right now. She walked the fifteen steps to the door of her hospital room.

“You take care, sweetheart,” one of the nurses said as Josie passed their pod of desks.

Another one-the one Josie had liked the best, who fed her ice chips-smiled. “Don’t come back and see us, you hear?”

Josie moved slowly toward the elevator, which seemed to get farther and farther away each time she glanced up. As she passed by one of the patient rooms she noticed a familiar name on the clipboard outside: HALEY WEAVER.

Haley was a senior, homecoming queen for the past two years. She and her boyfriend, Brady, were the Brangelina of Sterling High-roles Josie actually had believed she and Matt stood a good chance to inherit after Haley and Brady graduated. Even the wishful thinkers who pined after Brady for his smoky smile and sculpted body had to admit that there was a poetic justice to his dating Haley, the most beautiful girl in the school. With her waterfall of white-blond hair and her clear blue eyes, she had always reminded Josie of a magical fairy-the serene, heavenly creature that floats down to grant someone’s wishes.

There were all sorts of stories that circulated about them: how Brady had given up football scholarships at colleges that didn’t have art programs for Haley; how Haley had gotten a tattoo of Brady’s initials in a place no one could see; how on their first date, he’d had rose petals spread on the passenger seat of his Honda. Josie, circulating in the same crowd as Haley, knew that most of this was bullshit. Haley herself had admitted, first, that it was a temporary tattoo, and second, that it wasn’t rose petals, but a bouquet of lilacs he’d stolen from a neighbor’s garden.

“Josie?” Haley whispered now, from inside the room. “Is that you?”

Josie felt her mother’s hand on her arm, restraining her. But then Haley’s parents, who were blocking a clear view of the bed, moved away.

The right half of Haley’s face was swathed in bandages; her hair was shaved to the scalp above it. Her nose had been broken, and her one visible eye was completely bloodshot. Josie’s mother drew in her breath silently.

She stepped inside and forced herself to smile.

“Josie,” Haley said. “He killed them. Courtney and Maddie. And then he pointed the gun at me, but Brady stepped in front of it.” A tear streaked down the cheek that wasn’t bandaged. “You know how people are always saying they’d do that for you?”

Josie started shaking. She wanted to ask Haley a hundred questions, but her teeth were chattering so hard that she couldn’t manage a single word. Haley grabbed on to her hand, and Josie startled. She wanted to pull away. She wanted to pretend she’d never seen Haley Weaver like this.

“If I ask you something,” Haley said, “you’ll be honest, won’t you?”

Josie nodded.

“My face,” she whispered. “It’s ruined, isn’t it?”

Josie looked Haley in the eye. “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

They both knew she wasn’t telling the truth.

Josie said good-bye to Haley and her parents, grabbed on to her mother, and hurried even faster toward the elevators, even though every step felt like a thunderstorm behind her eyes. She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class-how a steel rod had pierced a man’s skull, and he opened up his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he’d never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

By the time Patrick returned to Sterling High the next morning, the crime-scene detectives had turned the halls of the school into an enormous spiderweb. Based on where the victims had been found, string was taped up-a burst of lines radiating from one spot where Peter Houghton had paused long enough to fire shots before moving on. The lines of string crossed each other at points: a grid of panic, a graph of chaos.

He stood for a moment in the center of the commotion, watching the techs weave the string across the hallways and between banks of lockers and into doorways. He imagined what it would have been like to start running at the sound of the gunshots, to feel people pushing behind you like a tide, to know that you couldn’t move faster than a speeding bullet. To realize too late you were trapped, a spider’s prey.

Patrick picked his way through the web, careful not to disturb the work of the techs. He would use what they did to corroborate the stories of the witnesses. All 1,026 of them.

The breakfast broadcast of the three local network news stations was devoted to that morning’s arraignment of Peter Houghton. Alex stood in front of the television in her bedroom, nursing her cup of coffee and staring at the backdrop behind the eager reporters: her former workplace, the district courthouse.

She’d settled Josie in her bedroom to sleep the dark, dreamless sleep of the sedated. To be perfectly honest, Alex needed this time alone, too. Who would have guessed that a woman who’d become a master at putting on a public face would find it so emotionally exhausting to hold herself together in front of her daughter?

She wanted to sit down and get drunk. She wanted to weep, her head buried in her hands, at her good fortune: her daughter was two doors away from her. Later, they would have breakfast together. How many parents in this town were waking up to realize this would never be true again?

Alex shut off the television. She didn’t want to compromise her objectivity as the future judge on this case by listening to what the media had to say.

She knew there would be critics-people who said that because her daughter went to Sterling High School, Alex should be removed from the case. If Josie had been shot, she would have quickly agreed. If Josie had even still been friendly with Peter Houghton, Alex would have recused herself. But as it stood, Alex’s judgment was compromised no more than that of any other justice who lived in the area, or who knew a child who attended the school, or who was the parent of a teenager. It happened all the time to North Country justices: someone you knew would inevitably wind up in your courtroom. When Alex was rotating as a district court judge, she’d faced defendants she’d known on a personal level: her mailman caught with pot in his car; a domestic disturbance between her mechanic and his wife. As long as the dispute didn’t involve Alex personally, it was perfectly legal-in fact, mandatory-for her to try the case. In those scenarios, you simply took yourself out of the equation. You became the judge and nothing more. The shooting, as Alex saw it, was the same set of circumstances, ratcheted up a notch. In fact, she’d argue that in a case with the massive media coverage this one had, it would take someone with a defense background-like Alex’s-to truly be impartial to the shooter. And the more she thought about it, the more firmly convinced Alex became that justice couldn’t be done without her involvement, the more ludicrous it seemed to suggest she was not the best judge for the job.

She took another sip of her coffee and tiptoed from her bedroom to Josie’s. But the door stood wide open, and her daughter was not inside.

“Josie?” Alex called, panicking. “Josie, are you all right?”

“Down here,” Josie said, and Alex felt the knot inside her unravel again. She walked downstairs to find Josie sitting at the kitchen table.

She was dressed in a skirt and tights and a black sweater. Her hair was still damp from a shower, and she had tried to cover the bandage on her forehead with a swath of bangs. She looked up at Alex. “Do I look all right?”

“For what?” Alex asked, dumbfounded. She couldn’t be expecting to go to school, could she? The doctors had told Alex that Josie might never remember the shooting, but could she erase the fact that it had ever happened from her mind, too?

“The arraignment,” Josie said.

“Sweetheart, there is no way you’re going near that courthouse today.”

“I have to.”

“You’re not going,” Alex said flatly.

Josie looked as if she were unraveling at the seams. “Why not?”

Alex opened her mouth to answer, but couldn’t. This wasn’t logic; it was gut instinct: she didn’t want her daughter to relive this experience. “Because I said so,” she finally replied.

“That’s not an answer,” Josie accused.

“I know what the media will do if they see you at the courthouse today,” Alex said. “I know that nothing’s going to happen at that arraignment that’s going to be a surprise to anyone. And I know that I don’t want to let you out of my sight right now.”

“Then come with me.”

Alex shook her head. “I can’t, Josie,” she said softly. “This is going to be my case.” She watched Josie pale, and realized that until that moment, Josie hadn’t considered this. The trial, by default, would put an even thicker wall between them. As a judge, there would be information she couldn’t share with her daughter, confidences she couldn’t keep. While Josie was struggling to move past this tragedy, Alex would be knee-deep in it. Why had she put so much thought into judging this case, and so little into how it would affect her own daughter? Josie didn’t give a damn if her mother was a fair judge right now. She only wanted-needed-a mother, and motherhood, unlike the law, was something that had never come easily to Alex.

Out of the blue, she thought of Lacy Houghton-a mother who was in a whole different level of hell right now-who would have simply taken Josie’s hand and sat with her and somehow made it seem sympathetic, instead of contrived. But Alex, who had never been the June Cleaver type, had to reach back years to find some moment of connection, something she and Josie had done once before that might work again now to hold them together. “Why don’t you go upstairs and change, and we’ll make pancakes. You used to like that.”

“Yeah, when I was five…”

“Chocolate chip cookies, then.”

Josie blinked at Alex. “Are you on crack?”

Alex sounded ridiculous even to herself, but she was desperate to show Josie that she could and would take care of her, and that her job came second. She stood up, opening cabinets until she found a Scrabble game. “Well, then, how about this?” Alex said, holding out the box. “I bet you can’t beat me.”

Josie pushed past her. “You win,” she said woodenly, and then she walked away.

The student who was being interviewed by the CBS affiliate out of Nashua remembered Peter Houghton from a ninth-grade English class. “We had to write a story with a first-person narrator, and we could pick anyone,” the boy said. “Peter did the voice of John Hinckley. From the things he said, you think he’s looking out from hell, but then at the end you find out it’s heaven. It freaked out our teacher. She had the principal look at the paper and everything.” The boy hesitated, scratching his thumb along the seam of his jeans. “Peter told them it was poetic license, and an unreliable narrator-which we’d been studying, also.” He glanced up at the camera. “I think he got an A.”

At the traffic light, Patrick fell asleep. He dreamed that he was running through the halls of the school, hearing gunshots, but every time he turned a corner he found himself hovering in midair-the floor having vanished beneath his feet.

At a honk, he snapped alert.

He waved in apology to the car that pulled up alongside him to pass and drove to the state crime lab, where the ballistics tests had been given priority. Like Patrick, these techs had been working around the clock.

His favorite-and most trusted-technician was a woman named Selma Abernathy, a grandmother of four who knew more about cutting-edge technology than any technogeek. She looked up when Patrick came into the lab and raised a brow. “You’ve been napping,” she accused.

Patrick shook his head. “Scout’s honor.”

“You look too good for someone who’s exhausted.”

He grinned. “Selma, you’ve really got to get over your crush on me.”

She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Honey, I’m smart enough to fall for someone who doesn’t make my life a pain in the ass. You want your results?”

Patrick followed her over to a table, on which were four guns: two pistols and two sawed-off shotguns. They were tagged: Gun A, Gun B-the two pistols; Gun C and Gun D-the shotguns. He recognized the pistols-they were the ones found in the locker room-one held by Peter Houghton, the other one a short distance away on the tile floor. “First I tested for latent prints,” Selma said, and she showed the results to Patrick. “Gun A had a print that matches your suspect. Guns C and D were clean. Gun B had a partial print on it that was inconclusive.”

Selma nodded to the rear of the laboratory, where enormous barrels of water were used for test-firing the guns. She would have test-fired each weapon into the water, Patrick knew. When a bullet was fired, it spun through the barrel of a gun, which caused striations on the metal. As a result, you could tell, by looking at a bullet, exactly which gun it had been fired from. This would help Patrick piece together Peter Houghton’s rampage: where he’d stopped to shoot, which weapon he’d used.

“Gun A was the one primarily used during the shooting, Guns C and D were left in the backpack retrieved at the crime scene. Which is actually a good thing, because they most likely would have done more damage. All of the bullets retrieved from the bodies of victims were fired from Gun A, the first pistol.”

Patrick wondered where Peter Houghton had gotten his armory. And at the same time, he realized that it wasn’t hard in Sterling to find someone who hunted or went target shooting at the site of an old dump in the woods.

“I know, from the gunpowder residue, that Gun B was fired. However, there hasn’t been a bullet recovered yet that confirms this.”

“They’re still processing-”

“Let me finish,” Selma said. “The other interesting thing about Gun B is that it jammed after that one discharge. When we examined it we found a double-feed of a bullet.”

Patrick crossed his arms. “There’s no print on the weapon?” he clarified.

“There’s an inconclusive print on the trigger…probably smudged when your suspect dropped it, but I can’t say that for certain.”

Patrick nodded and pointed to Gun A. “This is the one he dropped, when I drew down on him in the locker room. So, presumably, it’s the last one he fired.”

Selma lifted a bullet with a pair of tweezers. “You’re probably right. This was retrieved from Matthew Royston’s brain,” she said. “And the striations are consistent with a discharge from Gun A.”

The boy in the locker room, the one who’d been found with Josie Cormier.

The only victim who’d been shot twice.

“What about the bullet in the kid’s stomach?” Patrick asked.

Selma shook her head. “Went through clean. It could have been fired from either Gun A or Gun B, but we won’t know until you bring me a slug.”

Patrick stared at the weapons. “He’d used Gun A all over the rest of the school. I can’t imagine what made him switch to the other pistol.”

Selma glanced up at him; he noticed for the first time the dark circles under her eyes, the toll this overnight emergency had taken. “I can’t imagine what made him use either of them in the first place.”

Meredith Vieira stared gravely into the camera, having perfected the demeanor for a national tragedy. “Details continue to accumulate in the case of the Sterling shootings,” she said. “For more, we go to Ann Curry at the news desk. Ann?”

The news anchor nodded. “Overnight, investigators have learned that four weapons were brought into Sterling High School, although only two were actually used by the shooter. In addition, there is evidence that Peter Houghton, the suspect in the shootings, was an ardent fan of a hard-core punk band called Death Wish, often posting on fan websites and downloading lyrics onto his personal computer. Lyrics that, in retrospect, have some people wondering what kids should and should not be listening to.”

The green screen behind her shoulder filled with text:

Black snow falling

Stone corpse walking

Bastards laughing

Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

Bastards don’t see

The bloody beast in me

The reaper rides for free

Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

“The Death Wish song ‘Judgment Day’ includes a frightening foreshadowing of an event that became all too real in Sterling, New Hampshire, yesterday morning,” Curry said. “Raven Napalm, lead singer for Death Wish, held a press conference late last night.”

The footage cut to a man with a black Mohawk, gold eye shadow, and five pierced hoops through his lower lip, standing in front of a group of microphones. “We live in a country where American kids are dying because we’re sending them overseas to kill people for oil. But when one sad, distraught child who doesn’t see the beauty in life goes and wrongly acts on his rage by shooting up a school, people start pointing a finger at heavy metal music. The problem isn’t with rock lyrics, it’s with the fabric of this society itself.”

Ann Curry’s face filled the screen again. “We’ll have more on the continuing coverage of the tragedy in Sterling as it unfolds. In national news, the Senate defeated the gun control bill last Wednesday, but Senator Roman Nelson suggests that it’s not the last we’ve seen of that fight. He joins us today from South Dakota. Senator?”

Peter didn’t think he’d slept at all last night, but all the same, he didn’t hear the correctional officer coming toward his cell. He startled at the sound of the metal door scraping open.

“Here,” the man said, and he tossed something at Peter. “Put it on.”

He knew that he was going to court today; Jordan McAfee had told him so. He assumed that this was a suit or something. Didn’t people always get to wear a suit in court, even if they were coming straight from jail? It was supposed to make them sympathetic. He thought he’d seen that on TV.

But it wasn’t a suit. It was Kevlar, a bulletproof vest.

In the holding cell beneath the courthouse, Jordan found his client lying on his back on the floor, an arm shielding his eyes. Peter was wearing a bulletproof vest, an unspoken nod to the fact that everyone packing the courtroom that morning wanted to kill him. “Good morning,” Jordan said, and Peter sat up.

“Or not,” he murmured.

Jordan didn’t respond. He leaned a little closer to the bars. “Here’s the plan. You’ve been charged with ten counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of attempted first-degree murder. I’m going to waive the readings of the complaints-we’ll go over them individually some other time. Right now we just have to go in there and enter not-guilty pleas. I don’t want you to say a word. If you have any questions, you whisper them to me. You are, for all intents and purposes, mute for the next hour. Understand?”

Peter stared at him. “Perfectly,” he said, sullen. But Jordan was looking at his client’s hands.

They were shaking.

From the log of items removed from the bedroom of Peter Houghton:

Dell laptop computer.

Gaming CDs: Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Three posters from gun manufacturers.

Assorted lengths of pipe.

Books: The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger; On War, Clausewitz; graphic novels by Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman.

DVD-Bowling for Columbine.

Yearbook from Sterling Middle School, various faces circled in black marker. One circled face x’d out with words LET LIVE beneath picture. Girl identified in caption as Josie Cormier.

The girl spoke so softly that the microphone, hanging on a boom over her head like a piñata, had trouble picking up the unraveled threads of her voice. “Mrs. Edgar’s classroom is right next to Mr. McCabe’s, and sometimes we could hear them moving their chairs around or shouting out answers,” she said. “But this time we heard screaming. Mrs. Edgar, she took her desk and shoved it up against the door and told us all to go to the far end of the classroom, near the windows, and sit on the floor. The gunshots, they sounded like popcorn. And then…” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And then there wasn’t any more screaming.”

Diana Leven hadn’t expected the gunman to look so young. Peter Houghton was shackled and chained, wearing his orange jumpsuit and bulletproof vest, but he still had the apple cheeks of a boy who hadn’t come through the far side of puberty yet, and she would have bet money he didn’t have to shave. The glasses, too, upset her. The defense would play that to the hilt, she was certain, claiming some myopia that would have made sharpshooting an impossibility.

The four cameras that the district court judge had agreed on to represent the networks-ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN-hummed to life like a barbershop quartet as soon as the defendant was led into the room. Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts, Peter turned immediately toward them. Diana realized that his eyes were not all that different from those of the cameras: dark, blind, empty behind the lenses.

Jordan McAfee-a lawyer Diana didn’t like very much on a personal level but grudgingly admitted was damn good at his job-leaned toward his client the moment Peter reached the defense table. The bailiff stood. “All rise,” he bellowed, “the Honorable Charles Albert presiding.”

Judge Albert hustled into the courtroom, his robes whispering. “Be seated,” he said. “Peter Houghton,” he began, turning to the defendant.

Jordan McAfee stood. “Your Honor, we waive the reading of the charges. We’d like to enter not-guilty pleas for all of them, and we request that a probable cause hearing be scheduled in ten days.”

This wasn’t a surprise to Diana-why would Jordan want the whole world to hear his client being indicted on ten separate counts of first-degree murder? The judge turned to her. “Ms. Leven, the statute requires that a defendant charged with first-degree murder-multiple counts, at that-be held without bail. I assume you have no problem with this.”

Diana hid a smile. Judge Albert, God bless him, had managed to slip in the charges anyway. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

The judge nodded. “Well then, Mr. Houghton. You’re remanded back into custody.”

The whole procedure had taken less than five minutes, and the public wouldn’t be happy. They wanted blood; they wanted revenge. Diana watched Peter Houghton stumble between the hold of two sheriff’s deputies and turn back to his lawyer one last time with a question on his lips that he didn’t utter. Then the door closed behind him, and Diana gathered her briefcase and walked out of the courtroom to the cameras.

She stood in front of a thrust of microphones. “Peter Houghton was just arraigned on ten counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of attempted first-degree murder, and various accompanying charges involving illegal possession of explosives and firearms in this recent tragedy. The rules of professional responsibility prevent us from commenting on the evidence at this point, but the community can rest assured that we are prosecuting this case vigorously, that we have been working around the clock with our investigators to make sure that the evidence is collected, preserved, and appropriately handled so that this unspeakable tragedy will not go unanswered.” She opened her mouth to continue but realized that there was another voice speaking, just across the hallway, and that reporters were defecting from her impromptu press conference to hear Jordan McAfee instead.

He stood sober and penitent, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as he stared right at Diana. “I grieve with the community for its losses, and will represent my client to the fullest. Peter Houghton is a seventeen-year-old boy; he’s very scared. And I ask you to please have respect for his family and to remember that this is a matter to be determined in court.” Jordan hesitated, ever the showman, and then made eye contact with the crowd. “I ask you to remember that what you see is not always all it seems to be.”

Diana smirked. The reporters-and the people all over the world who would be listening to Jordan’s careful speech-would hear his little salvo at the end and believe that he had some fabulous truth up his sleeve-something that would prove his client was not a monster. Diana, however, knew better. She could translate legalese, because she spoke it fluently. When an attorney spun mysterious rhetoric like that, it was because he had nothing else he could use to defend his client.

At noon, the governor of New Hampshire held a press conference on the steps of the Capitol building in Concord. On his lapel he was wearing a loop of maroon and white ribbon, the school colors of Sterling High, which had sprouted up at gas station cash registers and Wal-Mart counters and were being sold for $1 each, the proceeds going to support the Sterling Victims Fund. One of his minions had driven twenty-seven miles to get one, because the governor planned to throw his hat into the Democratic primary in 2008 and knew this was a perfect media moment during which he could portray compassion at its strongest. Yes, he felt for the citizens of Sterling, and especially those poor parents of the dead, but there was also a calculated part of him that knew a man who could shepherd a state through one of the most tragic school shooting incidents in America would be seen as a strong leader. “Today, all of this country grieves with New Hampshire,” he said. “Today, all of us feel the pain that Sterling feels. They are all our children.”

He glanced up. “I’ve been up to Sterling, and I’ve spoken to the investigators who are working hard, round the clock, to understand what happened yesterday. I’ve spent time with some of the families of the victims, and at the hospital with the brave survivors. Part of our past and part of our future disappeared in this tragedy,” the governor said as he looked solemnly into the cameras. “What we all need, now, is to focus on the future.”

It took Josie less than a morning to learn the magic words: when she wanted her mother to leave her alone, when she was sick of her mother watching her like a hawk, all she had to do was say that she needed a nap. Then, her mother would back off, completely unaware of the fact that her whole face relaxed the minute Josie let her off the hook, and that only then could Josie recognize her.

Upstairs, in her room, Josie sat in the dark with her shades drawn and her hands folded in her lap. It was broad daylight, but you’d never know it. People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were. A room could be turned into an artificial night. Botox transformed people’s faces into something they weren’t. TiVo let you think you could freeze time, or at least reorder it to your own liking. An arraignment at a courthouse fit like a Band-Aid over a wound that really needed a tourniquet.

Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she’d stashed-her supply of sleeping pills. She was no better than any of the other stupid people in this world who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She’d thought that death could be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.

Yesterday, she hadn’t known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashed wall. She hadn’t understood that life left a person’s lungs first, and their eyes last. She had pictured suicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn’t understood how hard it was for her to be the Josie they wanted her to be. She’d somehow thought that if she killed herself, she’d be able to watch everyone else’s reaction; that she’d get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn’t really understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance.

Death wasn’t something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.

She ripped the plastic bag open into her palm and stuffed five of the pills into her mouth. She walked into the bathroom and ran the tap, stuck her head close to the faucet until the pills were swimming in the fishbowl of her bulging cheeks.

Swallow, she told herself.

But instead, Josie fell in front of the toilet and spit the pills out. She emptied the rest of the pills, still clutched in her fist. She flushed before she could think twice.

Her mother came upstairs because she heard the sobbing. It had seeped through the grout of the tile and the soffits and the plaster that made up the ceiling downstairs. It would, in fact, become as much of this household as the bricks and the mortar, although neither of the women realized it yet. Josie’s mother burst into the bedroom and sank down beside her daughter in the attached bathroom. “What can I do, baby?” she whispered, running her hands up and down Josie’s shoulders and back, as if the answer were a visible tattoo instead of a scar on the heart.

Yvette Harvey sat on a couch holding her daughter’s eighth-grade graduation photo, taken two years, six months, and four days before she died. Kaitlyn’s hair had grown out, but you could still see the easy lopsided smile, the moon face that was part and parcel of Down syndrome.

What would have happened if she hadn’t chosen to mainstream Kaitlyn in middle school? If she’d sent her to a school for kids who had disabilities? Were those kids any less angry, less likely to have bred a killer?

The producer from The Oprah Winfrey Show handed back the stack of photographs that Yvette had given her. She hadn’t known, before today, that there were levels of tragedy, that even if the Oprah show called you to ask you to tell your sad story, they would want to make sure it was sad enough before they let you speak on camera. Yvette hadn’t planned to show her pain on television-in fact, her husband was so dead set against it he refused to be here when the producer came to call-but she was determined. She had been listening to the news. And now, she had something to say.

“Kaitlyn had a beautiful smile,” the producer said gently.

“She does,” Yvette replied, then shook her head. “Did.”

“Did she know Peter Houghton?”

“No. They weren’t in the same grade; they wouldn’t have had classes together. Kaitlyn’s were in the learning center.” She pushed her thumb into the edge of the silver portrait frame until it hurt. “All of these people who are going around saying that Peter Houghton had no friends-that Peter Houghton was teased…that’s not true,” she said. “My daughter had no friends. My daughter was teased every single day. My daughter was the one who felt like she was on the fringe, because she was. Peter Houghton wasn’t a misfit, like everyone wants to make him out to be. Peter Houghton was just evil.”

Yvette looked down at the glass covering Kaitlyn’s portrait. “The grief counselor from the police department told me Kaitlyn died first,” she said. “She wanted me to know that Kaitie didn’t know what was going on-that she didn’t suffer.”

“That must have been some consolation,” the producer offered.

“It was. Until we all started talking to each other and realized that the grief counselor had told the same thing to every one of us with a dead child.” Yvette glanced up, tears in her eyes. “The thing is, they couldn’t all have been first.”

In the days after the shooting, the families of the victims were showered with donations: money, casseroles, babysitting services, sympathy. Kaitlyn Harvey’s father woke up one morning after a light, last springtime snow to find that his driveway had already been shoveled by a Samaritan. Courtney Ignatio’s family became the beneficiaries of their local church, whose members signed up to provide food or cleaning services on a different day of the week, a rotating schedule that would take them through June. John Eberhard’s mother was presented with a handicapped-accessible van, courtesy of Sterling Ford, to help her son adapt to life as a paraplegic. Everyone wounded at Sterling High received a letter from the president of the United States, crisp White House stationery commending them on their bravery.

The media-at first a wave as unwelcome as a tsunami-became something ordinary on the streets of Sterling. After days of watching their high-heeled black boots sink into the soft mud of a New England March, they visited the local Farm-Way and bought Merrell clogs and muck boots. They stopped asking the front desk at the Sterling Inn why their cell phones didn’t work and instead congregated in the parking lot of the Mobil station, the point of highest elevation in town, where they could get a minimal signal. They hovered in front of the police station and the courthouse and the local coffee shop, waiting for any crumb of information they could call their own.

Every day in Sterling, there was a different funeral.

Matthew Royston’s memorial service was held in a church that wasn’t large enough to hold the grief of its mourners. Classmates and parents and family friends packed into the pews, stood along the walls, spilled out the doors. A contingent of kids from Sterling High had come dressed in green T-shirts with the number 19 on the front-the same one that had graced Matt’s hockey jersey.

Josie and her mother were sitting somewhere in the back, but that didn’t keep Josie from feeling that everyone was staring at her. She wasn’t sure if that was because they all knew she was Matt’s girlfriend or because they could see right through her.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” the pastor read, “for they will be comforted.”

Josie shivered. Was she mourning? Did mourning feel like a hole in the middle of you that got wider and wider every time you tried to plug it up? Or was she incapable of mourning, because that meant remembering, which she couldn’t do?

Her mother leaned closer. “We can leave. You just say the word.”

It was hard enough not having a clue who she was, but here in the Afterward, she couldn’t seem to recognize anyone else, either. People who had ignored her for her whole life suddenly knew her by name. Everyone’s eyes got soft at the edges when they looked at her. And her mother was the most foreign of all-like one of those corporate addicts who has a near-death experience and becomes a tree-hugger. Josie had expected to have to fight her mother in order to attend Matt’s funeral, but to Josie’s surprise, her mother had suggested it. The stupid shrink Josie had to see now-probably for the rest of her life-kept talking about closure. Closure, apparently, meant that she was supposed to realize that losing normal was something you got over, like losing a soccer game or a favorite T-shirt. Closure also meant that her mother had morphed into a crazy, overcompensating emotive machine, one who kept asking her if she needed anything (how many cups of herbal tea could a person drink without liquefying?) and trying to act like an ordinary mother, or at least what she imagined an ordinary mother to be. If you really want me to feel better, Josie felt like saying, go back to work. Then they could pretend it was business as usual, and after all, her mother was the one who’d taught Josie how to pretend in the first place.

In the front of the church was a coffin. Josie knew it wasn’t open; rumors had flown about that. It was hard to imagine that Matt was inside that lacquered black box. That he wasn’t breathing; that his blood had been drained out and his veins were pumped full of chemicals instead.

“Friends, as we gather here to remember Matthew Carlton Royston, we are beneath the protective shelter of God’s healing love,” the pastor said. “We are free to pour out our grief, release our anger, face our emptiness, and know that God cares.”

Last year, in ancient world history, they had learned about how the Egyptians prepared their dead. Matt-who studied only when Josie forced him to do it-had been truly fascinated. The way the brain was sucked out through the nose. The possessions that went into a tomb with a pharaoh. The pets that were buried beside him. Josie had been reading the chapter in the textbook out loud, her head cradled on Matt’s lap. He’d stopped her by putting his hand on her forehead. “When I go,” he said, “I’m going to take you with me.”

The pastor looked out over the congregation. “The death of a loved one can shake us to our very foundations. When the person is so young and so full of potential and skill, the feelings of grief and loss can be even more overwhelming. At times such as this we turn to our friends and family for support, for a shoulder to cry on and for someone to walk that road of pain and anguish with us. We cannot have Matt back, but we can rest easy knowing that he’s found the peace in death he was denied here on earth.”

Matt didn’t go to church. His parents did, and they tried to make him go, but Josie knew he hated it. He thought it was a waste of a Sunday, and that if God was at all worthy of hanging around with, he’d probably be out riding around with the top down on his Jeep or playing pickup pond hockey instead of sitting in a stuffy building doing responsive reading.

The pastor moved aside, and Matt’s father stood up. Josie knew him, of course-he cracked the worst jokes, silly puns that were never funny. He’d played hockey at UVM until he blew out his knee, and he’d had high hopes for Matt. But overnight, he’d turned hunch-shouldered and sullen, like a husk that used to contain the whole of him. He stood up and talked about the first time he’d taken Matt out to skate, how he’d started out pulling him along on the end of a hockey stick and realized, not much later, that Matt wasn’t holding on. In the front row, Matt’s mother began crying. Loud, noisy sobs-the kind that splattered against the walls of the church like paint.

Before Josie realized what she was doing, she’d gotten to her feet. “Josie!” her mother whispered, fierce, beside her-in that instant a flicker of the mother she was accustomed to, the one who would never make a spectacle of herself. Josie was shaking so hard that her feet did not seem to touch the ground, not as she stepped into the aisle in the black dress she had borrowed from her mother, not as she moved toward Matt’s coffin, magnetically drawn to a pole.

She could feel Matt’s father’s eyes on her, could hear the whispers of the congregation. She reached the casket, polished to such a gleam that she could see her own face reflected back at her, an imposter.

“Josie,” Mr. Royston said, coming down from the podium to embrace her. “You all right?”

Josie’s throat closed like a rosebud. How could this man, whose son was dead, be asking her that? She felt herself dissolving, and wondered if you could turn into a ghost without dying; if that part of it was only a technicality.

“Did you want to say something?” Mr. Royston offered. “About Matt?”

Before she knew what was happening, Matt’s father had led her up to the podium. She was vaguely aware of her mother, who’d gotten out of her seat in the pew and was edging her way down toward the front of the church-to do what? Spirit her away? Stop her from making another mistake?

Josie stared out at a landscape of faces she recognized and did not really know at all. She loved him, they were all thinking. She was with him when he died. Her breath caught like a moth in the cage of her lungs.

But what would she say? The truth?

Josie felt her lips twist, her face crumple. She started to sob, so hard that the wooden floorboards of the church bowed and creaked; so hard that even in that sealed casket, Josie was sure Matt could hear her. “I’m sorry,” she choked out-to him, to Mr. Royston, to anyone who would listen. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

She did not notice her mother climbing the steps to the podium, wrapping an arm around Josie, leading her behind the altar to a little vestibule used by the organist. She didn’t protest when her mother handed her Kleenex and rubbed her back. She didn’t even mind when her mother tucked her hair back behind her ears, the way she used to when Josie was so small, she could barely remember the gesture. “Everyone must think I’m an idiot,” Josie said.

“No, they think you miss Matt.” Her mother hesitated. “I know you believe this was your fault.”

Josie’s heart was pounding so hard, it moved the thin chiffon fabric of the dress.

“Sweetheart,” her mother said, “you couldn’t have saved him.”

Josie reached for another tissue, and pretended that her mother understood.

Maximum security meant Peter did not have a roommate. He did not get recreation time. His food was brought to him three times a day in his cell. His reading material was restricted by the correctional officers. And because the staff still believed he might be suicidal, his room consisted of a toilet and a bench-no sheets, no mattress, nothing that might be fashioned into a means of checking out of this world.

There were four hundred and fifteen cinder blocks on the back wall of his cell; he’d counted. Twice. Since then, he’d taken the time to stare right at the camera that was watching him. Peter wondered who was at the other end of that camera. He pictured a bunch of COs clustered around a crummy TV monitor, poking each other and cracking up when Peter had to go to the bathroom. Or, in other words, yet another group of people who’d find a way to make fun of him.

The camera had a red light on it, a power indicator, and a single lens that shimmered like a rainbow. There was a rubber bumper around the lens that looked like an eyelid. It struck Peter that even if he wasn’t suicidal, a few weeks of this and he would be.

It did not get dark in jail, just dim. That hardly mattered, since there was nothing to do but sleep anyway. Peter lay on the bench, wondering if you lost your hearing if you never had to use it; if the power of speech worked the same way. He remembered learning in one of his social studies classes that in the Old West, when Native Americans were thrown into jail, they sometimes dropped dead. The theory was that someone so used to the freedom of space couldn’t handle the confinement, but Peter had another interpretation. When the only company you had was yourself, and when you didn’t want to socialize, there was only one way to leave the room.

One of the COs had just come through, doing his security sweep-a heavy-booted run past the cells-when Peter heard it:

I know what you did.

Holy shit, Peter thought. I’ve already started to go crazy.

Everyone knows.

Peter swung his feet to the cement floor and stared at the camera, but it wasn’t giving up any secrets.

The voice sounded like wind passing over snow-bleak, a whisper. “To your right,” it said, and Peter slowly got to his feet and walked to a corner of the cell.

“Who…who’s there?” he said.

“It’s about fucking time. I thought you were never going to stop wailing.”

Peter tried to see through the bars, but couldn’t. “You heard me crying?”

“Fucking baby,” the voice said. “Grow the fuck up.”

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Carnivore, like everyone else.”

Peter swallowed. “What did you do?”

“Nothing they said I did,” Carnivore answered. “How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long till your trial?”

Peter didn’t know. It was the one question he had forgotten to ask Jordan McAfee, probably because he was afraid to hear the answer.

“Mine’s next week,” Carnivore said before Peter could reply.

The metal door of the cell felt like ice against his temple. “How long have you been here?” Peter asked.

“Ten months,” Carnivore answered.

Peter imagined sitting in this cell for ten straight months. He thought about all the times he’d count those stupid cinder blocks, all the pisses that the guards would get to watch on their little television set.

“You killed kids, right? You know what happens in this jail to guys who kill kids?”

Peter didn’t respond. He was roughly the same age as everyone at Sterling High; it wasn’t like he’d gone into a nursery school. And it wasn’t like he hadn’t had a good reason.

He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “How come you didn’t get bail?”

Carnivore scoffed. “Because they say I raped some waitress, and then stabbed her.”

Did everyone in this jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on that bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail-and as it turned out, that was a lie.

Did he sound like this to Jordan?

“You still there?” Carnivore asked.

Peter lay back down on his bench without saying another word. He turned his face to the wall, and he pretended not to hear as the man next to him tried over and over to make a connection.

The first thing that struck Patrick, again, was how much younger Judge Cormier looked when she wasn’t on the bench. She answered the door in jeans and a ponytail, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Josie stood just behind her, her face washed by the same vacant stare he’d seen a dozen times over, now, in other victims he’d interviewed. Josie was a vital piece in the puzzle, the only one who had seen Peter kill Matthew Royston. But unlike those victims, Josie had a mother who knew the intricacies of the legal system.

“Judge Cormier,” he said. “Josie. Thanks for letting me come over.”

The judge stared at him. “This is a waste of time. Josie doesn’t remember anything.”

“With all due respect, Judge, it’s my job to hear that from Josie herself.”

He steeled himself for an argument, but she stepped back to let him inside. Patrick let his eyes roam the foyer-the antique table with a spider plant spilling over its surface, the tasteful landscapes that hung on the walls. So this was how a judge lived. His own place was a pit stop, a haven of laundry and old newspapers and food long past its expiration date, where he’d go for a few hours between his stints at the office.

He turned to Josie. “How’s the head?”

“It still hurts,” she said, so softly that Patrick had to strain to hear her.

He turned to the judge again. “Is there a room where we could go talk for a few minutes?”

She led them into the kitchen, which looked like just the kind of kitchen Patrick sometimes thought about when he imagined where he should have been by now. There were cherry cabinets and lots of sun streaming through the bay window and a bowl of bananas on the counter. He sat down across from Josie, expecting the judge to pull up a chair beside her daughter, but to his surprise she remained standing. “If you need me,” she said, “I’ll be upstairs.”

Josie looked up, pained. “Can’t you just stay?”

For a moment, Patrick saw something light in the judge’s eyes-want? regret?-but it vanished before he could put a name to it. “You know I can’t,” she said gently.

Patrick didn’t have any kids of his own, but he was pretty damn sure that if one of his had come this close to dying, he’d have a hard time letting her out of his sight. He did not know exactly what was going on between the mother and daughter, but he knew better than to get in the middle of it.

“I’m sure Detective Ducharme will make this utterly painless,” the judge said.

It was part wish, part warning. Patrick nodded at her. A good cop did whatever he could to protect and serve, but when it was someone you knew who was robbed or threatened or hurt, the stakes changed. You’d make a few more phone calls; you’d shuffle your responsibilities so that one took priority. Patrick had experienced that, to a greater degree, years ago with his friend Nina and her son. He didn’t know Josie Cormier personally, but her mother was in the field of law enforcement-Christ, she was at its top level-and for this, her daughter deserved to be treated with kid gloves.

He watched Alex walk up the stairs, and then he took a pad and pencil out of his coat pocket. “So,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“Look, you don’t have to pretend you care.”

“I’m not pretending,” Patrick said.

“I don’t even get why you’re here. It’s not like anything anyone says to you is going to make those kids less dead.”

“That’s true,” Patrick agreed, “but before we can try Peter Houghton we need to know exactly what happened. And unfortunately, I wasn’t there.”

“Unfortunately?”

He looked down at the table. “I sometimes think it’s easier to be the one who’s been hurt than the one who couldn’t stop it from happening.”

“I was there,” Josie said, shaken. “I couldn’t stop it.”

“Hey,” Patrick said, “it’s not your fault.”

She looked up at him then, as if she so badly wished she could believe that, but knew he was wrong. And who was Patrick to tell her otherwise? Every time he envisioned his mad dash to Sterling High, he imagined what would have happened if he’d been at the school when the shooter first arrived. If he’d disarmed the kid before anyone was hurt.

“I don’t remember anything about the shooting,” Josie said.

“Do you remember being in the gym?”

Josie shook her head.

“How about running there with Matt?”

“No. I don’t even remember getting up and going to school in the first place. It’s like a blank spot in my head that I just skip over.”

Patrick knew, from talking to the shrinks who’d been assigned to work with the victims, that this was perfectly normal. Amnesia was one way for the mind to protect itself from reliving something that would otherwise break you apart. In a way, he wished he could be as lucky as Josie, that he could make what he’d seen vanish.

“What about Peter Houghton? Did you know him?”

“Everyone knew who he was.”

“What do you mean?”

Josie shrugged. “He got noticed.”

“Because he was different from everyone else?”

Josie thought about this for a moment. “Because he didn’t try to fit in.”

“You were dating Matthew Royston?”

Immediately, tears welled in Josie’s eyes. “He liked to be called Matt.”

Patrick reached for a paper napkin and passed it to Josie. “I’m sorry about what happened to him, Josie.”

She ducked her head. “Me too.”

He waited for her to wipe her eyes, blow her nose. “Do you know why Peter might have disliked Matt?”

“People used to make fun of him,” Josie said. “It wasn’t just Matt.”

Did you? Patrick thought. He’d looked at the yearbook confiscated from Peter’s room-the circles around certain kids who became victims, and others who did not. There were many reasons for this-from the fact that Peter ran out of time to the truth that hunting down thirty people in a school of a thousand was more difficult than he’d imagined. But of all the targets Peter had marked in the yearbook, only Josie’s photo had been crossed out, as if he’d changed his mind. Only her face had words printed beneath it, in block letters: LET LIVE.

“Did you know him personally? Have any classes or anything with him?”

She looked up. “I used to work with him.”

“Where?”

“The copy store downtown.”

“Did you two get along?”

“Sometimes,” Josie said. “Not always.”

“Why not?”

“He lit a fire there once and I ratted him out. He lost his job after that.”

Patrick marked a note down on his pad. Why had Peter made the decision to spare her when he had every reason to hold a grudge?

“Before that,” Patrick asked, “would you say you were friends?”

Josie pleated the napkin she’d used to dry her tears into a triangle, a smaller one, a smaller one still. “No,” she said. “We weren’t.”

The woman next to Lacy was wearing a checkered flannel shirt, reeked of cigarettes, and was missing most of her teeth. She took one look at Lacy’s skirt and blouse. “Your first time here?” she asked.

Lacy nodded. They were waiting in a long room, side by side in a row of chairs. In front of their feet ran a red dividing line, and then a second set of chairs. Inmates and visitors sat like mirror images, speaking in shorthand. The woman beside Lacy smiled at her. “You get used to it,” she said.

One parent was allowed to visit Peter every two weeks, for one hour. Lacy had come with a basket full of home-baked muffins and cakes, magazines, books-anything she could think of to help Peter. But the correctional officer who’d signed her in for visitation had confiscated the items. No baked goods. And no reading material, not until it was vetted by the jail staff.

A man with a shaved head and sleeves of tattoos up and down his arms headed toward Lacy. She shivered-was that a swastika inked onto his forehead? “Hi, Mom,” he murmured, and Lacy watched the woman’s eyes strip away the tattoos and the bare scalp and the orange jumpsuit to see a little boy catching tadpoles in a mudhole behind their house. Everyone, Lacy thought, is somebody’s son.

She glanced away from their reunion and saw Peter being led into the visitation room. For a moment her heart caught-he looked too thin, and behind his glasses, his eyes were so empty-but then she tamped down whatever she was feeling and offered him a brilliant smile. She would pretend that it didn’t bother her to see her son in a prison jumpsuit; that she hadn’t had to sit in the car and fight a panic attack after pulling into the jail lot; that it was perfectly normal to be surrounded by drug dealers and rapists while you asked your son if he was getting enough to eat.

“Peter,” she said, folding him into her arms. It took a moment, but he hugged her back. She pressed her face to his neck, the way she used to when he was a baby, and she thought she would devour him-but he did not smell like her son. For a moment she let herself entertain the pipe dream that this was all a mistake-Peter’s not in jail! This is someone else’s unfortunate child!-but then she realized what was different. The shampoo and deodorant he had to use here were not what he’d used at home; this Peter smelled sharper, coarser.

Suddenly there was a tap on her shoulder. “Ma’am,” the correctional officer said, “you’ll have to let go now.”

If only it was that easy, Lacy thought.

They sat down on opposite sides of the red line.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m still here.”

The way he said it-as if he’d totally expected otherwise by now-made Lacy shudder. She had a feeling he wasn’t talking about being let out on bail, and the alternative-the idea of Peter killing himself-was something she could not hold in her head. She felt her throat funnel tight, and she found herself doing the one thing she’d promised herself she would not do: she started to cry. “Peter,” she whispered. “Why?”

“Did the police come to the house?” Peter asked.

Lacy nodded-it seemed as if it had happened so long ago.

“Did they go to my room?”

“They had a warrant-”

“They took my things?” Peter exclaimed, the first emotion she’d seen from him. “You let them take my things?”

“What were you doing with those things?” she whispered. “Those bombs. The guns…?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Then make me, Peter,” she said, broken. “Make me understand.”

“I haven’t been able to make you understand in seventeen years, Mom. Why should it be any different now?” His face twisted. “I don’t even know why you bothered to come.”

“To see you-”

“Then look at me,” Peter cried. “Why won’t you fucking look at me?”

He put his head in his hands, his narrow shoulders rounding with the sound of a sob.

It came down to this, Lacy realized: You stared at the stranger in front of you and decided, categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or you made the decision to find whatever scraps of your child you still could in what he had become.

Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother?

People could argue that monsters weren’t born, they were made. People could criticize her parenting skills, point to moments when Lacy had let Peter down by being too lax or too firm, too removed or too smothering. The town of Sterling would analyze to death what she had done to her son-but what about what she would do for him? It was easy to be proud of the kid who got straight A’s and who made the winning basket-a kid the world already adored. But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated. What if the things she had or hadn’t done for Peter were the wrong criteria for measurement? Wasn’t it just as telling a mark of motherhood to see how, from this awful moment on, she behaved?

She reached across the red line until she could embrace Peter. She didn’t care if it was allowed or not. The guards could come and pull her off him, but until that happened, Lacy was not planning to let her son go.

On the surveillance video taken from the cafeteria, students were carrying trays and doing homework and chatting when Peter entered the room holding a handgun. There was a discharge of bullets and a cacophony of screaming. A smoke alarm went off. When everyone started to run, he shot again, and this time two girls fell down. Other students ran right over them in an effort to get away.

When the only people left in the cafeteria were Peter and the victims, he walked through the rows of tables, surveying his handiwork. He passed by the boy he’d shot who lay in a puddle of blood on top of a book, but he stopped to pick up an iPod that had been left on the table and put the earphones in his ears before turning it off and setting it down again. He turned the page in an open notebook. And then he sat down at one untouched tray and placed the gun on it. He opened a box of Rice Krispies and poured them into a Styrofoam bowl. He added the contents of a milk container and ate all the cereal before standing up again, retrieving his pistol, and exiting the cafeteria.

It was the most chilling, deliberate thing Patrick had ever seen in his life.

He looked down at the bowl of ramen noodles he had cooked himself for dinner, and realized he’d lost his appetite. Setting it aside on a stack of old newspapers, he rewound the video and forced himself to watch it again.

When the phone rang, he picked it up, still distracted by the sight of Peter on his television screen. “Yeah.”

“Well, hello to you, too,” Nina Frost said.

He melted when he heard her voice; old habits died hard. “Sorry. I’m just in the middle of something.”

“I can imagine. It’s all over the news. How are you holding up?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, when what he really meant was that he was not sleeping at night; that he saw the faces of the dead whenever he closed his eyes; that his mouth was full of the questions he was certain he’d forgotten to ask.

“Patrick,” she said, because she was his oldest friend and because she knew him better than anyone, including himself, “don’t blame yourself.”

He bent his head. “It happened in my town. How can’t I?”

“If you had a videophone, I’d be able to tell if you’re wearing your hair shirt or your cape and boots,” Nina said.

“It’s not funny.”

“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “But you must know it’s a slam dunk at trial. You have, what? A thousand witnesses?”

“Something like that.”

Nina grew quiet. Patrick did not have to explain to her-a woman who’d lived with regret as a constant companion-that convicting Peter Houghton was not enough. For Patrick to lay this to rest, he’d have to understand why Peter had done this in the first place.

So that he could keep it from happening again.

From an FBI investigatory report, published by special agents in charge of examining school shootings around the globe:

Among school shooters, we have seen a similarity of family dynamics. Often the shooter will have a turbulent relationship with his parents, or will have parents who accept pathological behavior. There is a lack of intimacy within the family. There are no limits for television or computer use imposed on the shooter, and sometimes there is access to weapons.

Within the school environment, we found a tendency toward detachment from the learning process on the part of the shooter. The school itself tended to tolerate disrespectful behavior, exhibited inequitable discipline and an inflexible culture-with certain students enjoying prestige given to them by teachers and staff.

Shooters are more likely to have access to violent movies, television, and video games; to use drugs and alcohol; to have a peer group that exists outside of school and supports their behavior.

In addition, prior to a violent act, there is evidence of leakage-aclue that something is coming. These hints might take the form of poems, writings, drawings, Internet posts, or threats made in person or in absentia.

In spite of the commonalities described within, we caution the use of this report to create a checklist that might predict future school shooters. In the hands of the media, this might result in labeling many nonviolent students as potentially lethal. In fact, a great many adolescents who will never commit violent acts will show some of the traits on the list.

Lewis Houghton was a creature of habit. Every morning, he woke up at 5:35 and went for a run on the treadmill in the basement. He showered and he ate a bowl of cornflakes while he scanned the headlines in the paper. He wore the same overcoat, no matter how cold or hot the weather, and he parked in the same spot in the faculty lot.

He’d once tried to mathematically figure the effect of routine on happiness, but there was an interesting twist to the calculation: The measure of joy brought by the familiar was amplified or reduced by the individual’s resistance to change. Or-as Lacy would have said, English, Lewis-for every person like himself who liked the worn grooves of the familiar, there was another person who found it stifling. In those cases, the comfort quotient became a negative number, and doing what came habitually actually detracted from happiness. It was that way, he supposed, for Lacy, who wandered around the house as if she’d never seen it before, who couldn’t stand the thought of going back to her practice. How can you expect me to think of someone else’s child right now? she had argued.

She kept insisting that they needed to do something, but Lewis didn’t know what that was supposed to be. And because he couldn’t comfort either his wife or his son, Lewis decided he was left to comfort himself. After sitting at home for five days after Peter’s arraignment, one morning he woke up and packed his briefcase, ate his cornflakes, read the paper, and headed off to work.

He was thinking of the equation for happiness as he headed to the office. One of the tenets of his breakthrough-H = R/E, or happiness equals reality divided by expectation-was based on the universal truth that you always had some expectation for what was to come. In other words, E was always a real number, since you could not divide by zero. But recently, he wondered about the truth of that. Math could only take a man so far. In the middle of the night, when he was wide awake and staring up at the ceiling, knowing that his wife lay beside him pretending to be asleep and doing the very same thing, Lewis had come to believe that you might be conditioned to expect absolutely nothing from one’s life. That way, when you lost your first son, you didn’t grieve. When your second son was jailed for a massacre, you were not shattered. You could divide by zero; it felt like a canyon where your heart used to be.

As soon as he set foot on the campus, Lewis felt better. Here, he was not the father of the shooter and never had been. He was Lewis Houghton, professor of economics. Here, he was still at the top of his game; he didn’t have to look at the body of his research and wonder at what point it had begun to unravel.

Lewis had just pulled a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase that morning when the chair of the econ department poked his head through the open doorway. Hugh Macquarie was a big man-Huge Andhairy is what the college students called him behind his back-who had taken over the position with gusto. “Houghton? What are you doing here?”

“Last I checked, the college was still paying me to work,” Lewis said, trying to make a joke. He couldn’t make jokes, never had been able to do so. His timing was off; he gave away punch lines by accident.

Hugh walked into the room. “My God, Lewis, I don’t know what to say.” He hesitated.

Lewis didn’t blame Hugh. He barely knew what to say himself. There were Hallmark cards for bereavement, for loss of a beloved pet, for getting laid off from a job, but no one seemed to have the right words of comfort for someone whose son had just killed ten people.

“I thought about calling you at home. Lisa even wanted to bring a casserole or something. How’s Lacy holding up?”

Lewis pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Oh,” he said. “You know. We’re trying to keep things as normal as possible.”

When he said this, he pictured his life as a graph. Normal was a line that stretched on and on, teasing its way closer to an axis but never really reaching it.

Hugh sat down in the chair across from Lewis’s desk-the same chair that was sometimes filled by a student who needed a tutorial in microeconomics. “Lewis, take some time off,” he said.

“Thanks, Hugh. I appreciate that.” Lewis glanced at an equation on the far blackboard that he’d been puzzling out. “Right now, though, I really need to be here. It keeps me from thinking about being there.” Reaching for some chalk, Lewis began to print across the board, a long and lovely stream of numbers that calmed him inside.

He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

Hugh put his hand on Lewis’s arm, stilling it mid-equation. “Maybe I said that wrong. We need you to take time off.”

Lewis stared at him. “Oh. Um. I see,” he said, although he didn’t. If Lewis was willing to segregate his work life from his home life, why couldn’t Sterling College do the same?

Unless.

Had that been his mistake in the first place? If you were uncertain in the decisions you made as a father, could you patch over your insecurities with the confidence you had as a professional? Or would the fix always be flimsy, a paper wall that couldn’t bear weight?

“It’s just for a bit,” Hugh said. “It’s what’s best.”

For whom? Lewis thought, but he remained silent until he heard Hugh close the door behind himself on his way out.

When the chairman was gone, Lewis lifted the chalk again. He stared at the equations until they melded together, and then he began to scrawl furiously, a composer with a symphony moving too fast for his fingers. Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation divided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation.

Lewis stepped back from the blackboard, surveying his handiwork. Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.

He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

And that made Lewis think of his son.

He stood in front of the blackboard and started to cry, his hands and his sleeves covered in fine white chalk dust, as if he had become a ghost.

The office of the Geek Squad, as Patrick affectionately referred to the tech guys who hacked into hard drives to find proof of pornography and downloads from The Anarchist Cookbook, was filled with computers. Not just the one seized from Peter Houghton’s room, but also several from Sterling High, including the one from the secretary’s main office and another batch from the library.

“He’s good,” said Orestes, a tech that Patrick would have sworn was not old enough to have graduated from high school himself. “We’re not just talking HTML programming. Guy knew his shit.”

He pulled up a few files from the bowels of Peter’s computer, graphics files that didn’t make much sense to Patrick until the tech typed a few buttons and suddenly a three-dimensional dragon appeared on the screen and breathed fire at them. “Wow,” Patrick said.

“Yeah. From what I can tell, he actually made up a few computer games, even posted them for gamers on a couple of sites where you can do that and get feedback.”

“Any message boards on those sites?”

“Dude, give me an iota of credit,” Orestes said, and he clicked onto one he’d already flagged. “Peter went by the screen name DeathWish. They’re a-”

“-band,” Patrick finished. “I know.”

“They’re not just a band,” Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “They’re the modern voice of the collective human conscience.”

“Tell that to Tipper Gore.”

“Who?”

Patrick laughed. “She was before your time, I guess.”

“What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?”

“The cavemen, banging rocks together,” Patrick said dryly.

The screen filled with a series of posts from DeathWish. Most of them were entries about how to enhance a certain graphic or reviews of other games that had been posted on the site. Two quoted lyrics from the band Death Wish. “This is my personal favorite,” Orestes said, and he scrolled down.

From: DeathWish

To: Hades 1991

This town blows. This weekend there is a craft festival where old bags come to show off the ticky tacky shit they made. They should call it a CRAP festival. I’m gonna hide in the bushes outside the church. Target practice as they cross the street-ten points each! Yee ha!

Patrick leaned back in the chair. “Well, that doesn’t prove anything.”

“Yeah,” Orestes said. “Craft festivals do kind of suck. But check this out.” He swiveled in his own chair to reach another terminal, set up on a table. “He hacked into the school’s secure computer system.”

“To do what? Change his grades?”

“Nope. The program he wrote broke through the firewalls on the school system at 9:58 a.m.”

“That’s when the car bomb went off,” Patrick murmured.

Orestes pivoted the monitor so that Patrick could see. “This was on every single screen on every single computer at the school.”

Patrick stared at the purple background, the flaming red letters that scrolled like a marquee: READY OR NOT…HERE I COME.

Jordan was already sitting at the table of the conference room when Peter Houghton was brought in by a correctional officer. “Thanks,” he said to the guard, his eyes on Peter, who immediately canvassed the room, his gaze lighting on the only window. Jordan had seen this over and over in prisoners he’d represented-an ordinary human could so quickly turn into a caged animal. Then again, it was a chicken-and-egg conundrum: were they animals because they were in jail…or were they in jail because they were animals?

“Have a seat,” he said, and Peter remained standing.

Unfazed, Jordan started talking. “I want to lay out the ground rules, Peter,” he said. “Everything I say to you is confidential. Everything you say to me is confidential. I can’t tell anyone what you say. I can tell you, however, not to talk to the media or the police or anyone else for that matter. If anyone tries to contact you, you contact me immediately-call me collect. As your lawyer, I get to do the talking for you. From now on, I’m your best friend, your mother, your father, your priest. Are we clear on that?”

Peter glared at him. “Crystal.”

“Good. So.” Jordan pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase, a pencil. “I imagine you’ve got a few questions; we can start with those.”

“I hate it here,” Peter burst out. “I don’t get why I have to stay here.”

Most of Jordan’s clients started out quiet and terrified in jail-which quickly gave way to anger and indignation. But at that moment Peter sounded like any other ordinary teenage kid-like Thomas had sounded at his age, when the world apparently revolved around him and Jordan just happened to be living on it as well. However, the lawyer in Jordan trumped the parent in him, and he started to wonder if Peter Houghton truly might not know why he was in jail. Jordan would be the first to tell you insanity defenses rarely worked and were grossly overrated, but maybe Peter could be passed off as the real deal-and that was the key to securing an acquittal. “What do you mean?” he pressed.

“They’re the ones who did this to me, and now I’m the one who’s being punished.”

Jordan sat back and crossed his arms. Peter didn’t feel remorse for what he’d done, that much was clear. In fact, he considered himself a victim.

And here was the remarkable thing about being a defense attorney: Jordan didn’t really care. There was no room in his line of work for his own personal feelings. He had worked with the scum of the earth before-killers and rapists who fancied themselves martyrs. His job wasn’t to believe them or to pass judgment. It was simply to do or say whatever he had to in order to get them free. In spite of what he’d just told Peter, he was not a clergyman or a shrink or a friend to a client. He was simply a spin doctor.

“Well,” Jordan said evenly, “you need to understand the jail’s position. To them, you’re just a murderer.”

“Then they’re all hypocrites,” Peter said. “If they saw a roach, they’d step on it, wouldn’t they?”

“Is that how you’d describe what happened at the school?”

Peter flicked his eyes away. “Do you know that I’m not allowed to read magazines?” he said. “I can’t even go into the exercise yard like everyone else.”

“I’m not here to register your complaints.”

“Why are you here?”

“To help you get out,” Jordan said. “And if that’s going to happen, then you need to talk to me.”

Peter folded his arms across his chest and glanced from Jordan’s collared shirt to his tie to his polished black shoes. “Why? You don’t really give a shit about me.”

Jordan stood up and stuffed his notebook into his briefcase. “You know what? You’re right. I don’t really give a shit about you. I’m just doing my job, because unlike you, I won’t have the state paying my room and board for the rest of my life.” He started for the door, but was called back by the sound of Peter’s voice.

“Why is everyone so upset that those jerks are dead?”

Jordan turned slowly, making a mental note that kindness had not worked especially well with Peter, nor had the voice of authority. What had made him respond was pure and simple anger.

“I mean, people are crying over them…and they were assholes. Everyone’s saying I ruined their lives, but no one seemed to care when my life was the one being ruined.”

Jordan sat down on the edge of the table. “How?”

“Where do you want me to start,” Peter answered, bitter. “In nursery school, when the teacher would bring out snacks, and one of them would pull out my chair so I’d fall down and everyone else would crack up? Or in second grade, when they held my head down in the toilet and they flushed it over and over, just because they knew they could? Or that time they beat me up on my way home from school and I needed stitches?”

Jordan picked up his pad and wrote STITCHES. “Who’s they?”

“A whole bunch of kids,” Peter said.

The ones you wanted to kill? Jordan thought, but he didn’t ask. “Why do you think they targeted you?”

“Because they’re dickheads? I don’t know. They’re like a pack. They have to make someone else feel like shit in order to feel good about themselves.”

“What did you try to do to stop it?”

Peter snorted. “In case you haven’t noticed, Sterling’s not exactly a metropolis. Everyone knows everyone. You wind up in high school with the same kids who were in the sandbox in your preschool.”

“Couldn’t you stay out of their path?”

“I had to go to school,” Peter said. “You’d be surprised how small it gets when you’re there for eight hours every day.”

“So did they do this outside of school, too?”

“When they could catch me,” Peter said. “If I was by myself.”

“How about harassment-phone calls, letters, threats?” Jordan asked.

“Online,” Peter said. “They’d send me instant messages, saying I was a loser, things like that. And they took an email I wrote and spammed it out to the whole school…made it a joke…” He looked away, falling silent.

“Why?”

“It was…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Jordan made a note on his pad. “Did you ever tell anyone about what was going on? Parents? Teachers?”

“No one gives a crap,” Peter said. “They tell you to ignore it. They say they’ll be watching out to make sure it doesn’t happen, but they never watch.” He walked to the window and pressed his palms against the glass. “There was this kid in my first-grade class who had that disease, the one where your spine grows outside your body-”

“Spina bifida?”

“Yeah. She had a wheelchair and she couldn’t sit up or anything, and before she came to class the teacher told us we had to treat her like she was just like us. The thing is, she wasn’t like us, and we all knew it, and she knew it. So we were supposed to lie to her face?” Peter shook his head. “Everyone talks like it’s all right to be different, but America’s supposed to be this melting pot, and what the hell does that mean? If it’s a melting pot, then you’re really just trying to make everyone the same, aren’t you?”

Jordan found himself thinking about his son Thomas’s transition to middle school. They’d moved from Bainbridge to Salem Falls, a small enough school system that the cliques had already developed thick cellular walls against outsiders. For a while, Thomas had been a chameleon-he’d come home from school and hole up in his room, emerging as a soccer player, a thespian, a “mathlete.” It took him several sheddings of his own adolescent skin to find a group of friends who let him be whoever he wanted; and the rest of Thomas’s high school career was a fairly peaceful one. But what if he hadn’t found that group of friends? What if he’d continued peeling off layers of himself until there was nothing left at his core?

As if he could read Jordan’s mind, Peter suddenly stared at him. “Do you have kids?”

Jordan did not talk about his personal life with clients. Their relationship existed in the confines of a court, and that was that. The few times in his career when this unwritten rule had been broken had nearly wrecked him personally and professionally. But he met Peter’s gaze and said, “Two. A six-month-old baby and a son at Yale.”

“Then you get it,” Peter said. “Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’s attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.”

Jordan found himself at a loss for words. There was the finest line between unique and odd, between what made a child grow up to be as well adjusted as Thomas versus unstable, like Peter. Did every teenager have the capacity to fall on one side or the other of that tightrope, and could you identify a single moment that tipped the balance?

He suddenly thought of Sam this morning, when Jordan was changing his diaper. The baby had grabbed hold of his own toes, fascinated to have located them, and immediately stuffed his foot into his mouth. Look at that, Selena had joked over his shoulder, like father like son. As Jordan had finished dressing Sam, he’d marveled at the mystery life must be for someone that young. Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn’t even know existed.

When you don’t fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else’s eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you’re still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.

You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can’t remove his mask, the bionic man who’s missing all his limbs and none of his heart.

You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can’t even remember what it was like.

Six Years Before

Peter knew he was doomed, the first day of sixth grade, when his mother presented him with a gift over breakfast. “I know how much you wanted one,” she said, and she waited for him to open the wrapping paper.

Inside was a three-ring binder with a graphic of Superman on the cover. And he had wanted one. Three years ago, when that was a cool thing to have.

He had managed a smile. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, and she beamed at him, while he imagined all the ways carrying this totally stupid notebook would be used against him.

Josie, as usual, had come to his rescue. She told the school custodian that her bike handlebars were all screwed up and that she needed some duct tape to jury-rig it until she got home. In reality, she didn’t bike to school-she walked with Peter, who lived a little farther out of town but picked her up along the way. Although they never saw each other outside of school-and hadn’t in years, thanks to some blowout fight between his mother and hers that neither of them could really remember the details about-Josie still hung out with Peter. And thank God for that, because no one else really did. They sat together during lunch, they read each other’s rough drafts in English, they were always each other’s lab partners. Summers were always tough. They could email, and every now and then they saw each other at the town pond, but that was about it. And then, come September, they fell back in step as if they’d never missed a beat. That, Peter figured, was the very definition of a best friend.

Today, thanks to the Superman binder, they’d started off the year with a crisis. With Josie’s help, he’d made a slipcover of sorts from the tape and an old newspaper they stole from the science lab. He could take it off when he was home, she reasoned, so that his mother wouldn’t be offended.

The sixth graders had lunch fourth period, when it was only 11:00 a.m., but by that point it felt like they hadn’t eaten in months. Josie bought-her mother’s cooking skills, she said, were limited to writing a check to the cafeteria ladies-and Peter stood beside her in the snaking line to pick up a carton of milk. His mother would have packed him a sandwich with the crusts cut off, a bag of carrot sticks, an organic fruit that might or might not be bruised.

Peter slid his binder onto the cafeteria tray, embarrassed even though it was still covered up by the newspaper. He popped a straw into his milk carton. “You know, it shouldn’t make a difference what binder you’ve got,” Josie said. “What do you care what they think?”

As they headed into the lunchroom, Drew Girard slammed into Peter. “Watch where you’re going, retard,” Drew said, but it was too late-Peter had already dropped his tray.

His milk spilled all over his splayed binder, melting the newspaper into a muddy clot and revealing the Superman graphic beneath it.

Drew started to laugh. “Are you wearing your Underoos, too, Houghton?”

“Shut up, Drew.”

“Or what? Will you melt me with your X-ray vision?”

Mrs. McDonald, the art teacher who was patrolling the lunchroom-and who Josie swore she’d once caught sniffing glue in the supply closet-took a halfhearted step forward. By seventh grade, there were kids like Drew and Matt Royston who were taller than the teachers and had deep voices and were shaving; but there were also kids like Peter, who prayed every night that puberty would hit but hadn’t seen any viable signs yet. “Peter, why don’t you just go take a seat…” Mrs. McDonald sighed. “Drew will bring you another carton of milk.”

Probably poisoned, Peter thought. He started mopping off his binder with a wad of napkins. Even after it dried, it would reek, now. Maybe he could tell his mother that he’d spilled his milk on it at lunch. It was the truth, after all, even if he’d had a little help doing it. And it just might be enough incentive for her to buy him a new, normal notebook, one like everyone else’s.

Inside, Peter was grinning: Drew Girard had actually just done him a favor.

“Drew,” the teacher said. “I meant now.”

As Drew took a step toward the interior of the cafeteria toward the pyramid of milk cartons, Josie stuck out her foot surreptitiously so that he tripped, landing flat on his face. In the lunchroom, other kids started to laugh. That was the way this society worked: you were only at the bottom of the totem pole until you could find someone else to take your place. “Watch out for kryptonite,” Josie whispered, just loud enough for Peter to hear.

The two best things about being a district court judge, in Alex’s mind, were, first, being able to address people’s problems and make them feel as if they are being listened to, and second, the intellectual challenge. You had so many factors to balance when you were making decisions: the victims, the police, law enforcement, society. And all of them had to be considered in the context of precedent.

The worst part of the job was that you couldn’t give people what they really needed when they came to court: for a defendant-the sentencing that would really offer treatment, instead of a punishment. For a victim-an apology.

Today there was a girl standing in front of her who wasn’t much older than Josie. She was wearing a NASCAR jacket and a black pleated skirt, and had blond hair and acne. Alex had seen kids like her, hanging out in parking lots after the Mall of New Hampshire was closed for the night, spinning 360s in their boyfriends’ I-Rocs. She wondered what this girl would have been like if she’d grown up with a judge for a mother. She wondered if, at some point, this girl had played with stuffed animals underneath the kitchen table and read books beneath her covers with a flashlight when she was supposed to be going to bed. It never failed to amaze Alex how, with the brush of a hand, the track of someone’s life might veer in a completely different direction.

The girl had been charged with receiving stolen property-a $500 gold necklace that her boyfriend gave her. Alex looked down at her from the bench. There was a reason it was up so high in a courtroom-it had nothing to do with logistics and everything to do with intimidation. “Are you knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently waiving your rights? And you understand that by pleading guilty, you’re admitting to the truth of the charge?”

The girl blinked. “I didn’t know it was stolen. I thought it was a present from Hap.”

“If you read the face of the complaint, it says you’re charged with knowingly receiving this necklace, knowing it was stolen. If you didn’t know it was stolen, you have the right to go to trial. You have the right to mount a defense. You have the right to have me appoint a lawyer to represent you because you are charged with a Class A misdemeanor and this is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. You have a right to have the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. You have the right to see, hear, and question all the witnesses against you. You have the right to have me subpoena into court any evidence and/or witnesses in your favor. You have the right to appeal your decision to the Supreme Court, or the Superior Court for a jury trial de novo if I make an error of law or if you don’t agree with my decision. By pleading guilty, you give up these rights.”

The girl swallowed. “Well,” she repeated. “I did pawn it.”

“That’s not the essence of the charge,” Alex explained. “The essence of the charge is that you took that necklace even after you knew it was stolen.”

“But I want to plead guilty,” the girl said.

“You’re telling me you didn’t do what the charge said you did. You can’t plead guilty to something you didn’t do.”

In the rear of the courtroom, a woman stood up. She looked like a poorly aged carbon copy of the defendant. “I told her to plead not guilty,” the girl’s mother said. “She came here today and she was going to do that, but then the prosecutor said she’d get a better deal if she said she was guilty.”

The prosecutor sprung out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. “I never said that, Your Honor. I told her what the deal on the table was, today, if she was pleading guilty, plain and simple. And that if she pled not guilty instead and went to trial, the deal was off the table and Your Honor would make the decision that you wanted to make.”

Alex tried to imagine what it would be like to be this girl, completely overwhelmed by the massive stature of this legal system, unable to speak its language. She would look at the prosecutor and see Monty Hall. Do you take the money? Or do you choose Door Number One-which might reveal a convertible, or might reveal a chicken?

This girl had taken the money.

Alex motioned the prosecutor to approach the bench. “Do you have any evidence from your investigation to prove she knew it was stolen?”

“Yes, Your Honor.” He produced the police report and handed it over. Alex scanned it-there was no way, given what she’d said to the cops and how they’d recorded it, that she hadn’t known it was stolen.

Alex turned to the girl. “Based on the facts of the police report, coupled with the offer of proof, I find that there’s a basis for your plea. There’s enough evidence here to substantiate the fact that you knew this necklace was stolen, and you took it anyway.”

“I don’t…I don’t understand,” the girl said.

“It means I’ll take your plea, if you still want me to. But,” Alex added, “first you have to tell me that you’re guilty.”

Alex watched the girl’s mouth tighten and start to tremble. “Okay,” she whispered. “I did it.”

It was one of those incredibly beautiful autumn days, the kind when you drag your feet on the sidewalk in the morning as you walk to school because you cannot believe you have to waste eight hours there. Josie was sitting in math class, staring at the blue of the sky-cerulean, that was a vocabulary word this week, and just saying it made Josie feel like her mouth was full of ice crystals. She could hear the seventh graders playing Capture the Flag in gym class in the recess yard, and the drone of the lawn mower as the custodian moved past their window. A piece of paper was dropped over her shoulder, into her lap. Josie unfolded it, read Peter’s note.

Why do we always have to solve for x? Why can’t x do it himself and spare us the HELL!!!!!

She turned around, giving him a half-smile. Actually, she liked math. She loved knowing that if she worked hard enough, at the end there was going to be an answer that made sense.

She didn’t fit in with the popular crowd at school because she was a straight-A student. Peter was different-he got B’s and C’s, and once a D. He didn’t fit in either, but it wasn’t because he was a brain. It was because he was Peter.

If there was a totem pole of unpopularity, Josie knew she still ranked relatively higher than some. Every now and then she wondered if she hung out with Peter because she enjoyed his company or because being with him made her feel better about herself.

While the class worked on the review sheet, Mrs. Rasmussin surfed the Internet. It was a schoolwide joke-who could catch her buying a pair of pants from Gap.com, or reading soap opera fansites. One kid swore he’d found her looking at porn one day when he went to her desk to ask a question.

Josie finished early, as usual, and looked up to see Mrs. Rasmussin at her computer…but there were tears streaming down her cheeks, in that strange way that happens when people do not even realize they are crying.

She stood up and walked out of the room without even saying a word to the class about being quiet in her absence.

The minute she left, Peter tapped on Josie’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with her?”

Before Josie could answer, Mrs. Rasmussin returned. Her face was as white as marble, and her lips were pressed together like a seam. “Class,” she said, “something terrible has happened.”

In the media center, where the middle school students had been herded, the principal told them what he knew: two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. Another one had just crashed into the Pentagon. The south tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed.

The librarian had set up a television so that they could all watch the unfolding coverage. Even though they had been pulled out of class-usually a cause for celebration-it was so quiet in that library that Peter could hear his own heart pounding. He looked around the walls of the room, at the sky outside the windows. This school wasn’t a safety zone. Nothing was, no matter what you’d been told.

Was this what it felt like to be at war?

Peter stared at the screen. People were sobbing and screaming in New York City, but you could barely see because of the dust and smoke in the air. There were fires everywhere, and the ululations of screaming fire engines and car alarms. It looked nothing like the New York Peter remembered the one time he’d vacationed there with his parents. They’d gone to the top of the Empire State Building and they were planning to have a fancy dinner at Windows on the World, but then Joey had gotten sick from eating too much popcorn and instead they’d headed back to the hotel.

Mrs. Rasmussin had left school for the day. Her brother was a bond trader in the World Trade Center.

Had been.

Josie was sitting next to Peter. Even with a few inches of space separating their chairs, he could feel her shaking. “Peter,” she whispered, horrified, “there’s people jumping.”