e couldn’t see as well as she could, even with his glasses, but when he squinted he could tell Josie was right. It made his chest hurt to watch, as if his ribs were suddenly a size too small. What kind of person would do that?

He answered his own question: The kind who doesn’t see any other way out.

“Do you think they could get us here?” Josie whispered.

Peter glanced at her. He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he didn’t feel all that great himself and he didn’t know if there were even any words in the English language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn’t the place you thought it was.

He turned back to the screen so that he didn’t have to answer Josie. More people leaped out of the windows of the north tower; then there was a massive roar as if the ground itself were opening its jaws. When the building collapsed, Peter let out the breath he’d been holding-relieved, because now he couldn’t see anything at all.

The switchboards to the schools were completely jammed, and so parents fell into two categories: the ones who didn’t want to scare their kids to death by showing up at school and shepherding them into a basement bunker, and those who wanted to ride out this tragedy with their children close at hand.

Lacy Houghton and Alex Cormier both fell into the latter category, and both arrived at the school simultaneously. They parked beside each other in the bus circle and got out of their cars, and only then recognized each other-they had not seen each other since the day Alex marched her daughter out of Lacy’s basement, where the guns were kept. “Is Peter-” Alex began.

“I don’t know. Josie?”

“I’m here to get her.”

They went into the main office together, and were directed down the hall to the media center. “I can’t believe they’re letting them watch the news,” Lacy said, running beside Alex.

“They’re old enough to understand what’s happening,” Alex said.

Lacy shook her head. “I’m not old enough to understand what’s happening.”

The media center was spread with students-on chairs, on tables, sprawled on the floor. It took Alex a moment to realize what was so unnatural about the crowd: no one was making a sound. Even the teachers stood with their hands over their mouths, as if they were afraid to let out any of the emotion, because once the floodgates opened, everything else in their path would be swept away.

In the front of the room was a single television, and every eye was on it. Alex spotted Josie because she had stolen one of Alex’s headbands-a leopard print. “Josie,” she called, and her daughter whipped around, then nearly climbed over other kids in her effort to reach Alex.

Josie hit her like a hurricane, all emotion and fury, but Alex knew that somewhere inside was the eye of that storm. And then, like any force of nature, you had to brace yourself for another onslaught before things went back to normal. “Mommy,” she sobbed. “Is it over?”

Alex didn’t know what to say. As the parent, she was supposed to have all the answers, but she didn’t. She was supposed to be able to keep her daughter safe, but she couldn’t promise that either. She had to put on a brave face and tell Josie it was going to be fine, when she really didn’t know that herself. Even driving here from court, she had been aware of the fragility of the roads beneath her wheels, of the divider of sky that could so easily be breached. She passed wells and thought about drinking-water contamination; she wondered how far away the closest nuclear power plant was.

And yet, she had spent years being the judge others expected her to be-someone cool and collected, someone who could reach conclusions without getting hysterical. She could certainly put on that demeanor for her daughter, too.

“We’re fine,” Alex said calmly. “It’s over.” She did not know that even as she spoke, a fourth plane was crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. She did not realize that her fierce grip on Josie contradicted her words.

Over Josie’s shoulder Alex nodded to Lacy Houghton, who was leaving with her two sons in tow. With some shock she realized Peter was tall now, nearly as tall as a man.

How many years had it been since she’d seen him?

You could lose track of someone when you blinked, Alex realized. She vowed not to let that happen to her and her daughter. Because when it came down to it, being a judge didn’t matter nearly as much as being a mother. When Alex’s clerk had told her the news about the World Trade Center, her first thought had not been for her constituents…only for Josie.

For a few weeks, Alex held to her promises. She rearranged her docket so that she was home when Josie got there; she left legal briefs in the office instead of bringing them home to read on weekends; every night, over dinner, they talked-not just chatter, but real conversation: about why To Kill a Mockingbird might very well be the best book ever written; about how you could tell if you’d fallen in love; even about Josie’s father. But then, one week, a particularly knotty case had her staying late at the office. And Josie started being able to sleep through the night again, instead of waking up screaming. Part of going back to normal meant erasing the boundaries of what was abnormal, and within a few months, the way Alex had felt on 9/11 was slowly forgotten, like a tide washing out a message she’d once scrawled on the sand.

Peter hated soccer, but he was on the middle school team. They had an anyone-can-play policy, so that even kids who might not normally make varsity or JV or-who was he kidding? the team, period-could join. It was this-plus his mother’s belief that part of fitting in meant being in the crowd to begin with-that led him to a season of afternoon practices where he found himself doing passing drills and running after the ball more often than he returned it; and games twice a week where he warmed middle school soccer field benches all over Grafton County.

There was only one thing Peter hated more than soccer, and that was getting dressed for it. After school, he’d purposely find something to do at his locker, or a question to ask a teacher, so that he wound up in the locker room after most of his teammates were outside stretching and warming up. Then, in a corner section, Peter would strip without having to listen to anyone make fun of the way his chest sort of caved in at the bottom, or having the elastic of his boxers twisted to give him a wedgie. They called him Peter Homo, instead of Peter Houghton, and even when he was the only one in the locker room he could still hear the slap of their high-fives and the laughter that rolled toward him like an oil slick.

After practice, he usually was able to do something that ensured he would be the last one in the locker room-picking up the practice balls, asking the coach a question about an upcoming game, even retying his cleats. If he was really lucky, by the time he reached the showers, everyone else would already have left for home. But today, just as practice had ended, a thunderstorm had rolled in. The coach herded all the kids off the field and into the locker room.

Peter walked slowly into his corner bank of lockers. Several guys were already headed to the showers, towels wrapped around their waists. Drew, for one, and his friend Matt Royston. They were laughing as they walked, punching each other in the arms to see who could land the harder hit.

Peter turned his back to the other locker sections and skimmed off his uniform, then covered himself quickly with a towel. His heart was pounding. He could already imagine what everyone else saw when they looked at him, because he saw it, too, in the mirror: skin white as the belly of a fish; knobs sticking out of his spine and collarbones. Arms without a single rope of muscle.

The last thing Peter did was take off his glasses and put them on the shelf of his open locker. It made everything blissfully fuzzy.

He ducked his head and walked into the shower, pulling off his towel at the last possible minute. Matt and Drew were already soaping themselves up. Peter let the spray hit him in the forehead. He imagined being an adventurer on some wild white river, being pummeled by a waterfall as he was sucked into a vortex.

When he wiped his eyes and turned around, he could see the blurred edges of the bodies that were Matt and Drew. And the dark patch between their legs-pubic hair.

Peter didn’t have any yet.

Matt suddenly twisted sideways. “Jesus Christ. Stop looking at my dick.”

“Fucking fag,” Drew said.

Peter immediately turned away. What if it turned out they were right? What if that was the reason his gaze had fallen right there at that moment? Worse, what if he got hard right now, which was happening more and more lately?

That would mean he was gay, wouldn’t it?

“I wasn’t looking at you,” Peter blurted. “I can’t see anything.”

Drew’s laughter bounced against the tile walls of the shower. “Maybe your dick’s too small, Mattie.”

Suddenly Matt had Peter by the throat. “I don’t have my glasses on,” Peter choked out. “That’s why.”

Matt let go, shoving Peter against the wall, then stalked out of the shower. He reached over and plucked Peter’s towel from a hook, tossing it into the spray. It fell, soaked, to cover the central drain.

Peter picked it up and wrapped it around his waist. The cotton was sopping wet, and he was crying, but he thought maybe people couldn’t tell because the rest of him was dripping, too. Everyone was staring.

When he was around Josie, he didn’t feel anything-didn’t want to kiss her or hold her hand or anything like that. He didn’t think he felt those things about guys, either; but surely you had to be gay or straight. You couldn’t be neither.

He hurried to the corner bank of lockers and found Matt standing in front of his. Peter squinted, trying to see what Matt was holding, and then he heard it: Matt took his glasses, slammed the locker door on them, and let the mangled frames drop to the floor. “Now you can’t look at me,” he said, and he walked away.

Peter knelt down on the floor, trying to pick up the broken pieces of glass. Because he couldn’t see, he cut his hand. He sat, cross-legged, with the towel puddled in his lap. He brought his palm closer to his face, until everything was clear.

In her dream, Alex was walking down Main Street stark naked. She went into the bank and deposited a check. “Your Honor,” the teller said, smiling. “Isn’t it beautiful out today?”

Five minutes later, she went into the coffee shop and ordered a latte with skim milk. The barista was a girl with improbable purple hair and a straight piercing that went across the bridge of her nose at the level of her eyebrows; when Josie was little and they’d come here, Alex would have to tell her not to stare. “Would you like biscotti with that, Judge?” the barista asked.

She went into the bookstore, the pharmacy, and the gas station, and in each place, she could feel people staring at her. She knew she was naked. They knew she was naked. But no one said anything until she got to the post office. The postal clerk in Sterling was an old man who had been working there, probably, since the changeover from the Pony Express. He handed Alex a roll of stamps, and then furtively covered her hand with his own. “Ma’am, it might not be my place to say so…”

Alex lifted her gaze, waited.

The worry lines on the clerk’s forehead smoothed. “But that’s a beautiful dress you’ve got on, Your Honor,” he said.

Her patient was screaming. Lacy could hear the girl sobbing all the way down the hall. She ran as fast as she could, turning the corner and entering the hospital room.

Kelly Gamboni was twenty-one years old, orphaned, and had an IQ of 79. She had been gang-raped by three high school boys who were now awaiting trial at a juvy facility in Concord. Kelly lived at a group home for Catholics, so abortion was never an option. But now, an ER doctor had deemed it medically necessary to induce Kelly, at thirty-six weeks. She lay in the hospital bed with a nurse trying ineffectually to comfort her, as Kelly clutched a teddy bear. “Daddy,” she cried, to a parent who had died years ago. “Take me home. Daddy, it hurts!”

The doctor walked into the room, and Lacy rounded on him.

“How dare you,” she said. “This is my patient.”

“Well, she was brought into the ER and became mine,” the doctor countered.

Lacy looked at Kelly and then walked into the hall; it would do Kelly no good to have them fighting in front of her. “She came in complaining of wetting her underwear for two days. The exam was consistent with premature rupture of membranes,” the doctor said. “She’s afebrile and the fetal monitor tracing is reactive. It’s completely reasonable to induce. And she signed off on the consent form.”

“It may be reasonable, but it’s not advisable. She’s mentally retarded. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her right now; she’s terrified. And she certainly doesn’t have the ability to consent.” Lacy turned on her heel. “I’m calling psych.”

“Like hell you are,” the doctor said, grabbing her arm.

“Let go of me!”

They were still screaming at each other five minutes later when the psych consult arrived. The boy who stood in front of Lacy looked to be about Joey’s age. “You’ve got to be kidding,” the doctor said, the first comment he’d made that she agreed with.

They both followed the shrink into Kelly’s room. By now, the girl was curled into a ball around her belly, whimpering. “She needs an epidural,” Lacy muttered.

“It’s not safe to give one at two centimeters,” the doctor argued.

“I don’t care. She needs one.”

“Kelly?” the psychiatrist said, squatting down in front of her. “Do you know what a C-section is?”

“Uh-huh,” Kelly groaned.

The psychiatrist stood up. “She’s capable of consent, unless a court’s ruled otherwise.”

Lacy’s jaw dropped. “That’s it?”

“I have six other consults waiting for me,” the psychiatrist snapped. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

Lacy yelled after him. “I’m not the one you’re disappointing!” She sank down beside Kelly and squeezed her hand. “It’s okay. I’m going to take care of you.” She winged a prayer to whoever might move the mountains that could be men’s hearts. Then she lifted her face to the doctor’s. “First do no harm,” she said softly.

The doctor pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll get her an epidural,” he sighed; and only then did Lacy realize she had been holding her breath.

The last place Josie wanted to go was out to dinner with her mother, so that she could spend three hours watching maître d’s and chefs and other guests suck up to her. This was Josie’s birthday celebration, so she didn’t really understand why she couldn’t just demand take-out Chinese and a video. But her mother was insisting that it wouldn’t be a celebration if they just stayed at home, and so here she was, trailing after her mother like a lady-in-waiting.

She’d been counting. There were four Nice to see you, Your Honors. Three Yes, Your Honors. Two My pleasure, Your Honors. And one For Your Honor, we have the best table in the house. Sometimes Josie read about celebrities in People magazine who were always getting handouts from purse companies and shoe stores and free tickets to opening nights on Broadway and Yankee Stadium-when you got right down to it, her mother was a celebrity in the town of Sterling.

“I cannot believe,” her mother said, “that I have a twelve-year-old.”

“Is that my cue to say something like, you must have been a child prodigy?”

Her mother laughed. “Well, that would work.”

“I’m going to be driving in three and a half years,” Josie pointed out.

Her mother’s fork clattered against the plate. “Thanks for that.”

The waiter came over to the table. “Your Honor,” he said, setting a platter of caviar down in front of Josie’s mother, “the chef would like you to have this appetizer with his compliments.”

“That’s so gross. Fish eggs?”

“Josie!” Her mother smiled stiffly at the waiter. “Please thank the chef.”

She could feel her mother’s eyes on her as she picked at her food. “What?” she challenged.

“Well, you sounded like a spoiled brat, that’s all.”

“Why? Because I don’t like fish embryos sitting under my nose? You don’t eat them either. I was at least being honest.”

“And I was being discreet,” her mother said. “Don’t you think that the waiter is going to tell the chef that Judge Cormier’s daughter is a piece of work?”

“Like I care?”

“I do. What you do reflects on me, and I have a reputation I have to protect.”

“As what? A suck-up?”

“As someone who’s above criticism both in and out of the courtroom.”

Josie tilted her head to one side. “What if I did something bad?”

“Bad? How bad?”

“Let’s say I was smoking pot,” Josie said.

Her mother froze. “Is there something you want to tell me, Josie?”

“God, Mom, I’m not doing it. This is hypothetical.”

“Because you know, now that you’re in middle school, you’re going to start coming across kids who do things that are dangerous-or just plain stupid-and I would hope you’d be-”

“-strong enough to know better than that,” Josie finished, echoing her in a singsong. “Yeah. Got it. But what if, Mom? What if you came home and found me getting stoned in the living room? Would you turn me in?”

“What do you mean, turn you in?”

“Call the cops. Hand over my stash.” Josie grinned. “Of hash.”

“No,” her mother said. “I would not report you.”

Josie used to think, when she was younger, that she would grow up to look like her mother-fine-boned, dark-haired, light-eyed. The combination of elements were all there in her features, but as she’d gotten older, she started to look like someone else entirely-someone she had never met. Her father.

She wondered if her father-like Josie herself-could memorize things in a snap and picture them on the page just by closing his eyes. She wondered if her father sang off key and liked to watch scary movies. She wondered if he had the straight slash of eyebrows, so different from her mother’s delicate arches.

She wondered, period.

“If you didn’t report me because I’m your daughter,” Josie said, “then you’re not really being fair, are you?”

“I’d be acting like a parent, not a judge.” Her mother reached across the table and put her hand on Josie’s, which felt weird-her mother wasn’t one of these touchy-feely types. “Josie, you can come to me, you know. If you need to talk, I’m there to listen. You’re not going to get into legal trouble, no matter what you tell me-not if it’s about you, not even if it’s about your friends.”

To be perfectly honest, Josie didn’t have many of those. There was Peter, who she’d known forever-although Peter no longer came to her house and vice versa, they still hung out together in school, and he was the last person in the world Josie could ever imagine doing anything illegal. She knew that one of the reasons other girls excluded Josie was because she always stuck up for Peter, but she told herself that it didn’t matter. She didn’t really want to be surrounded by people who only cared about what happened on One Life to Live and who saved their babysitting money to go to The Limited; they seemed so fake sometimes that Josie thought if she poked one of them with a sharp pencil they’d burst like a balloon.

So what if she and Peter weren’t popular? She was always telling Peter it didn’t matter; she might as well start to believe it herself.

Josie pulled her hand away from her mother and pretended to be fascinated by her cream of asparagus soup. There was something about asparagus that she and Peter found hilarious. They’d done an experiment, once, to see how much you had to eat before your pee smelled weird, and it was less than two bites, swear to God.

“Stop using your Judge Voice,” Josie said.

“My what?”

“Your Judge Voice. It’s the one you use when you answer the phone. Or when you’re out in public. Like now.”

Her mother frowned. “That’s crazy. It’s the same voice I-”

The waiter glided over, as if he were skating across the dining room. “I don’t mean to interrupt…is everything to your liking, Your Honor?”

Without missing a beat, her mother turned her face up to the waiter. “It’s gorgeous,” she said, and she smiled until he walked away. Then she turned to Josie. “It’s the same voice I always use.”

Josie looked at her, and then at the waiter’s back. “Maybe it is,” she said.

The other kid on the soccer team who would rather have been anywhere else was named Derek Markowitz. He’d introduced himself to Peter when they were sitting on the bench during a game against North Haverhill. “Who forced you to play?” Derek had asked, and Peter had told him his mother. “Mine too,” Derek admitted. “She’s a nutritionist and she’s nuts about fitness.”

At dinner, Peter would tell his parents that practice was going fine. He made up stories based on plays he’d seen other kids execute-athletic feats that he himself could never have done. He did this so that he could see his mother glance at Joey and say things like, “Guess there’s more than one athlete in this family.” When they came to cheer him on during games, and Peter never left the bench, he said it was because Coach played his favorites; and in a way, that was true.

Like Peter, Derek was just about the worst soccer player on the planet. He was so fair that his veins looked like a road map underneath his skin, and he had such pale hair that you had to search hard to find his eyebrows. Now, when they were at games, they sat next to each other on the bench. Peter liked him because he smuggled Snickers bars into practice and ate them when Coach wasn’t looking, and because he knew how to tell a good joke: Why did the ref stop the leper hockey game? There was a face-off in the corner. What’s more fun than stapling Drew Girard to a wall? Ripping him off. It got to the point where Peter actually was looking forward to soccer practice, just to hear what Derek had to say-although then Peter began to worry again if he liked Derek just because he was Derek, or because Peter was gay; and then he’d sit a little farther away, or tell himself that no matter what, he wouldn’t look Derek in the eye for the whole practice, so that he didn’t get the wrong idea.

They were sitting on the bench one Friday afternoon, watching everyone else play Rivendell. Sterling was expected to be able to kick their collective ass with their eyes closed (not that that was reason enough for the coach to put Peter or Derek in to actually play during a real league game). The score was climbing to something humiliating in the last minute of the final quarter-Sterling 24, Rivendell 2-and Derek was telling Peter another joke.

“A pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder, a peg leg, and a steering wheel on his pants,” Derek said. “The bartender says, ‘Hey, you’ve got a steering wheel on your pants.’ And the pirate goes, ‘Arrrgh, I know. It’s driving me nuts.’”

“Good game,” the coach said, congratulating each of the players with a handshake. “Good game. Good game.”

“You coming?” Derek asked, standing up.

“I’ll meet you in there,” Peter said, and as he leaned down to retie his cleats he saw a pair of lady’s shoes stop in front of him-a pair he recognized, because he was always tripping over them in the mudroom.

“Hi, baby,” his mother said, smiling down.

Peter choked. What middle school kid had Mommy come to pick him up right at the field, as if he were leaving nursery school and needed a hand crossing the street?

“Just give me a second, Peter,” his mother said.

He glanced up long enough to see that the team had not gone into the locker room, as usual, but hung around to watch this latest humiliation. Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, his mother marched up to the coach. “Coach Yarbrowski,” she said. “Could I have a word?”

Kill me now, Peter thought.

“I’m Peter’s mother. And I’m wondering why you don’t play my son during the games.”

“It’s a matter of teamwork, Mrs. Houghton, and I’m just giving Peter the chance to come up to speed with some of the other-”

“It’s halfway through the season, and my son has just as much right to play on this soccer team as any of the other boys.”

“Mom,” Peter interrupted, wishing that there were earthquakes in New Hampshire, that a ravine would open under her feet and swallow her mid-sentence. “Stop.”

“It’s all right, Peter. I’m taking care of it.”

The coach pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll put Peter in on Monday’s game, Mrs. Houghton, but it isn’t going to be pretty.”

“It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to be fun.” She turned around and smiled, clueless, at Peter. “Right?”

Peter could barely hear her. Shame was a shot that rang in his ears, broken only by the buzz of his teammates. His mother squatted down in front of him. He had never really understood what it meant to love someone and hate them at the same time, but now he was starting to get it. “Once he sees you on that field, you’ll be playing first string.” She patted his knee. “I’ll wait for you in the parking lot.”

The other players laughed as he pushed past them. “Mama’s boy,” they said. “Does she fight all your battles, homo?”

In the locker room, he sat down and pulled off his cleats. He had a hole in the toe of one sock, and he stared at it as if he were truly amazed by that fact, instead of because he was trying so hard not to cry.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt someone sit down beside him. “Peter,” Derek said. “You okay?”

Peter tried to say yes, but just couldn’t get the lie through his throat.

“What’s the difference between this team and a porcupine?” Derek asked.

Peter shook his head.

“A porcupine has pricks on the outside.” Derek grinned. “See you Monday.”

Courtney Ignatio was a spaghetti-strap girl. That’s what Josie called that posse, for lack of a better term-the girls who wore belly-baring tanks and who, during the student-run recitals, made up dances to the songs “Booty-licious” and “Lady Marmalade.” Courtney had been the first seventh grader to get a cell phone. It was pink, and sometimes it even rang in class, but teachers never got angry at her.

When she was paired with Courtney in social studies to make a timeline of the American Revolution, Josie had groaned-she was sure she’d be pulling all the weight. But Courtney had invited her over to work on the project, and Josie’s mother told her that if she didn’t go, she would be stuck doing all the work, so now she was sitting on Courtney’s bed, eating chocolate chip cookies and organizing note cards.

“What?” Courtney said, standing in front of her with her hands on her hips.

“What what?”

“Why do you have that look on your face?”

Josie shrugged. “Your room. It’s totally different than mine.”

Courtney glanced around, as if seeing her bedroom for the first time. “Different how?”

Courtney had a wild purple shag rug and beaded lamps strung with gauzy silk scarves for atmosphere. An entire dresser top was dedicated to makeup. A poster of Johnny Depp hung on the back of her door, and a shelf sported a state-of-the-art stereo system. She had her own DVD player.

Josie’s room, in comparison, was spartan. She had a bookshelf, a desk, a dresser, and a bed. Her comforter looked like an old-lady quilt, compared to Courtney’s satin one. If Josie had any style at all, it was Early American Dork.

“Just different,” Josie said.

“My mom’s a decorator. She thinks this is what every teenage girl dreams of.”

“Do you?”

Courtney shrugged. “I kind of think it looks like a bordello, but I don’t want to ruin it for her. Let me just go get my binder, and we can start…”

When she left to go back downstairs, Josie found herself staring into the mirror. Drawn forward to the dresser with makeup on it, she found herself picking up tubes and bottles that were completely unfamiliar. Her mother rarely wore any makeup-maybe lipstick, but that was it. Josie lifted a mascara wand and unscrewed the cap, ran her finger over the black bristles. She uncapped a bottle of perfume and sniffed.

In the reflection of the mirror, she watched the girl who looked just like her take a tube of lipstick-“Positively Hot!” the label read-and apply it. It put a bloom of color in her face; it brought her to life.

Was it really that easy to become someone else?

“What are you doing?”

Josie jumped at the sound of Courtney’s voice. She watched in the mirror as Courtney came forward and took the lipstick out of her hands.

“I…I’m sorry,” Josie stammered.

To her surprise, Courtney Ignatio grinned. “Actually,” she said, “it suits you.”

Joey got better grades than his younger brother; he was a better athlete than Peter. He was funnier; he had more common sense; he could draw more than a straight line; he was the one people gravitated toward at a party. There was only one thing, as far as Peter could tell (and he’d been counting), that Joey could not do, and that was stand the sight of blood.

When Joey was seven and his best friend went over the handlebars of his bike and opened a cut over his forehead, it was Joey who passed out. When a medical show was on television, he had to leave the room. Because of this, he’d never gone hunting with his father, although Lewis had promised his boys that as soon as they turned twelve, they were old enough to come out with him and learn how to shoot.

It seemed as if Peter had been waiting all fall for this weekend. He had been reading up on the rifle his father was going to let him use-a Winchester Model 94 lever action 30-30 that had been his father’s, before the purchase of the bolt-action Remington 721 30.06 he used now to hunt deer. Now, at 4:30 in the morning, Peter could barely believe he was holding it in his hands, the safety carefully locked. He crept through the woods behind his father, his breath crystallizing in the air.

It had snowed last night-which was why the conditions were perfect for deer hunting. They’d been out yesterday to find fresh scrapes-spots on live trees where a buck had rubbed his antlers and returned to scrape over and over, marking its territory. Now it was just a matter of finding the same spot and checking for fresh tracks, to see if the buck had come through yet.

The world was different when there was no one in it. Peter tried to match his father’s footsteps, setting his boot into the print left behind by his father. He pretended he was in the army, on a guerrilla mission. The enemy was right around the corner. At any moment now, he might be surprised into an exchange of fire.

“Peter,” his father hissed over his shoulder. “Keep your rifle pointed up!”

They approached the ring of trees where they’d seen the rub. Today, the antler scrapes were fresh, the white flesh of the tree and the pale green strip of peeled bark chafed raw. Peter looked down at his feet. There were three sets of tracks-one much larger than the other two.

“He’s already been through here,” Peter’s father murmured. “He’s probably following the does.” Deer in rut weren’t as smart as usual-they were so focused on the does they were chasing, they forgot to avoid the humans who might be hunting them.

Peter and his father walked softly through the woods, following tracks toward the swamp. Suddenly, his father stuck out his hand-a signal to stop. Glancing up, Peter could see two does-one older, one a yearling. His father turned, mouthing, Don’t move.

When the buck stepped out from behind the tree, Peter stopped breathing. It was massive, majestic. Its thick neck supported the weight of a six-point rack. Peter’s father nodded imperceptibly at the gun. Go ahead.

Peter fumbled with the rifle, which felt thirty pounds heavier. He lifted it to his shoulder and got the deer in his sights. His pulse was pounding so hard that the gun kept shaking.

He could hear his father’s instructions as if they were being whispered aloud even now: Shoot underneath the front leg, low on the body. If you hit the heart, you’ll kill it instantly. If you miss the heart, you’ll get the lungs, so it will run for a hundred yards or so and then drop.

Then the deer turned and looked at him, eyes trained on Peter’s face.

Peter squeezed the trigger, sending the shot wide.

On purpose.

The three deer ducked in unison, unsure of where the danger was. Just as Peter wondered whether or not his father had noticed that he wimped out-or simply assumed Peter was a lousy shot-a second shot rang from his father’s rifle. The does bolted away; the buck dropped like a stone.

Peter stood over the deer, watching blood pump from its heart. “I didn’t mean to steal your shot,” his father said, “but if you’d reloaded, they would have heard you and run.”

“No,” Peter said. He could not tear his eyes from the deer. “It’s okay.” Then he vomited into the scrub brush.

He could hear his father doing something behind him, but he wouldn’t turn around. Instead Peter stared hard at a patch of snow that had already begun to melt. He felt his father approach. Peter could smell the blood on his hands, the disappointment.

Peter’s father reached out, patting his shoulder. “Next time,” he sighed.

Dolores Keating had transferred to the middle school this year in January. She was one of those kids that slipped by unnoticed-not too pretty, not too smart, not a troublemaker. She sat in front of Peter in French class, her ponytail bobbing up and down as she conjugated verbs out loud.

One day, as Peter was doing his best not to fall asleep to Madame’s recitation of the verb avoir, he noticed that Dolores was sitting in the middle of an ink stain. He thought that was pretty funny, given that she was wearing white pants, and then he realized that it wasn’t ink at all.

“Dolores has her period!” he cried out loud, out of sheer shock. In a house full of males-with the exception of his mother, of course-menstruation was one of those great mysteries about women, like how do they put on mascara without poking out their eyes and how can they hook a bra behind themselves, without seeing what they’re doing?

Everyone in the class turned, and Dolores’s face went as scarlet as her pants. Madame ushered her into the hall, suggesting she go to the nurse. On the seat in front of Peter was a small red puddle of blood. Madame called the custodian, but by then, the class was out of control-whispers raging like a brush fire about how much blood there was, how Dolores was now one of the girls that everyone knew had her period.

“Keating’s bleeding,” Peter said to the kid sitting next to him, whose eyes lit up.

“Keating’s bleeding,” the boy repeated, and the chant went around the room. Keating’s bleeding. Keating’s bleeding. Across the room, Peter caught Josie’s eye-Josie, who’d started to wear makeup lately. She was singing along with the rest of them.

Belonging felt like helium; Peter felt himself swell inside. He’d been the one to start this; by drawing a line around Dolores, he’d become part of the inner circle.

At lunch that day, he was sitting with Josie when Drew Girard and Matt Royston came over with their trays. “We heard that you saw it happen,” Drew said, and they sat down so that Peter could tell them the details. He began embellishing-a teaspoon of blood became a cup; the stain on her white pants grew from a modest spot to a Rorschach blot of enormous proportion. They called over their friends-some who were kids on Peter’s soccer team, yet hadn’t spoken to him all year. “Tell them, too, it’s hilarious,” Matt said, and he smiled at Peter as if Peter were one of them.

Dolores stayed out of school. Peter knew that it wouldn’t have made any difference if she was gone for a month or more-the memories of sixth graders were steel traps, and for the rest of her high school career, Dolores would always be remembered as the girl who got her period in French class and bled all over the seat.

The morning that she came back, she stepped off the bus and was immediately flanked by Drew and Matt. “For a woman,” they said, drawing out the words, “you sure don’t have any boobs.” She pushed away from them, and Peter didn’t see her again until French class.

Someone-he really didn’t know who-had come up with a plan. Madame was always late to class; she had to come from the other end of the school. So before the bell rang, everyone would walk up to Dolores’s desk and hand her a tampon they’d been given by Courtney Ignatio, who’d pilfered a box from her mother.

Drew was first. As he set the tampon on her desk he said, “I think you might have dropped this.” Six tampons later, the bell still hadn’t rung, and Madame wasn’t in the room yet. Peter walked up, holding the wrapped tube in his fist, ready to drop it-and noticed Dolores was crying.

It wasn’t loud, and it was barely even visible. But as Peter reached out with the tampon, he suddenly realized that this was what it looked like from the other side, when he was being put through hell.

Peter crushed the tampon in his fist. “Stop,” he said softly, and then he turned around to the next three students waiting in line to humiliate Dolores. “Just stop already.”

“What’s your problem, homo?” Drew asked.

“It’s not funny anymore.”

Maybe it was never funny. It was just that it hadn’t been him, and that was good enough.

The boy behind him shoved Peter out of the way and flicked his tampon so that it bounced off Dolores’s head, rolled underneath Peter’s seat. And then it was Josie’s turn.

She looked at Dolores, and then she looked at Peter. “Don’t,” he murmured.

Josie pressed her lips together and let the tampon roll from her outstretched fingers onto Dolores’s desk. “Oops,” she said, and when Matt Royston laughed, she went to stand beside him.

Peter was lying in wait. Although Josie hadn’t been walking with him for a few weeks now, he knew what she was doing after school-usually strolling into town to get an iced tea with Courtney & Co. and then window-shopping. Sometimes he stood back at a distance and watched her the way you’d stare at a butterfly that you’d only known as a caterpillar, wondering how the hell change could be that dramatic.

He waited until she’d left the other girls, and then he followed her down the street that led to her house. When he caught up to her and grabbed her arm, she shrieked.

“God!” she said. “Peter, why don’t you just scare me to death!”

He had worked out what he was going to ask her in his mind, because words didn’t come easily to him, and he knew that he had to practice them more than others would; but when he had Josie this close, after everything that had happened, every question felt like a slap. Instead, he sank onto the curb, spearing his hands through his hair. “Why?” he asked.

She sat down next to him, folding her arms over her knees. “I’m not doing it to hurt you.”

“You’re such a fake with them.”

“I’m just not the way I am with you,” Josie said.

“Like I said: fake.”

“There’s different kinds of real.”

Peter scoffed. “If that’s what those jerks are teaching you, it’s bullshit.”

“They’re not teaching me anything,” Josie argued. “I’m there because I like them. They’re fun and funny and when I’m with them-” She broke off abruptly.

“What?” Peter prompted.

Josie looked him in the eye. “When I’m with them,” she said, “people like me.”

Peter guessed change could be that dramatic: in an instant, you could go from wanting to kill someone to wanting to kill yourself.

“I won’t let them make fun of you anymore,” Josie promised. “That’s a silver lining, right?”

Peter didn’t respond. This wasn’t about him.

“I just…I just can’t really hang out with you right now,” Josie explained.

He lifted his face. “Can’t?”

Josie stood up, backing away from him. “I’ll see you around, Peter,” she said, and she walked out of his life.

You can feel people staring; it’s like heat that rises from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don’t have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it’s about you.

I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me.

Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.

That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

Ten Days After

Josie waited until she could no longer hear the television in her mother’s bedroom-Leno, not Letterman-and then rolled onto her side to watch the LED acrobatics of the digital clock. When it was 2:00 a.m., she decided it was safe, and she pulled back her covers and got out of bed.

She knew how to sneak downstairs. She’d done it a couple of times before, meeting Matt outside in the backyard. One night, he’d texted her on her cell-1/2 2 C U now. She had gone out to him in her pajamas, and for a moment when he touched her she actually thought she would slip through his fingers.

There was only one landing where the floorboards creaked, and Josie knew enough to step over it. Downstairs, she rummaged through the stack of DVDs for the one she wanted-the one she didn’t want to be caught viewing. Then she turned on the television, muting the sound so low she had to sit right on top of the screen and its built-in speakers to hear.

The first person shown was Courtney. She held up her hand, blocking whoever had been videotaping. She was laughing, though; her long hair falling over her features like a screen of silk. Offscreen, Brady Pryce’s voice: Give us something for Girls Gone Wild, Court. The camera fuzzed out for a moment, and then there was a close-up of a birthday cake. HAPPY SWEET SIX-TEEN, JOSIE. A run of faces, including Haley Weaver’s, singing to her.

Josie paused the DVD. There was Courtney, and Haley, and Maddie, and John, and Drew. She touched her finger to each of their foreheads, getting a tiny electric shock each time.

At her birthday party, they’d had a barbecue at Storrs Pond. There were hot dogs and hamburgers and sweet corn. They had forgotten the ketchup and someone had to drive back into town to buy some at a mini-mart. Courtney’s card had been signed BFF, best friends forever, even though Josie knew she’d written the same thing on Maddie’s card a month earlier.

By the time the screen fuzzed out again and her own face came on, Josie was crying. She knew what was coming; she remembered this part. The camera panned back and there was Matt, his arms around her as she sat on his lap on the sand. He had taken off his shirt, and Josie remembered that his skin had been warm where it pressed up against hers.

How could you be so alive one moment, and then have everything stop-not just your heart and your lungs, but the way you smiled slowly, the left side of your mouth curling before the right; and the pitch of your voice; and the habit you had of tugging at your hair when you were doing your math homework?

I can’t live without you, Matt used to say, and now Josie realized he wouldn’t have to.

She couldn’t stop sobbing, so Josie pushed her fist into her mouth to keep herself from making noise. She watched Matt on the screen the way you might study an animal you had never seen before, if you had to memorize it and tell the world later what you’d found. Matt’s hand splayed across her bare stomach, grazed the edge of her bikini top. She watched herself push him away, blush. “Not here,” her voice said, a funny voice, a voice that didn’t sound like Josie to her own ears. You never did, when you heard yourself on tape.

“Then let’s go somewhere else,” Matt said.

Josie ruched up the edge of her pajama top, until she could reach underneath. She spread her own hand across her belly. She edged her thumb up, like Matt had, to the curve of her breast. She tried to pretend it was him.

He had given her a gold locket for that birthday, one she hadn’t taken off since that day nearly six months ago. Josie was wearing it on the DVD. She remembered that when she’d looked at it in the mirror, Matt’s thumbprint had been on the back, left behind after he clasped it around her neck. That had seemed so intimate, and for a few days, she had done everything she could to keep it from rubbing off.

On the night that Josie had met Matt out in her own backyard, beneath the moon, he’d laughed at her pajamas, printed all over with pictures of Nancy Drew. What were you doing when I texted you? he asked.

Sleeping. Why did you have to see me in the middle of the night?

To make sure you were dreaming about me, he said.

On the DVD, someone called out Matt’s name. He turned, grinning. His teeth were wolf’s teeth, Josie thought. Sharp, impossibly white. He stamped a kiss on Josie’s mouth. “Be right back,” he said.

Be right back.

She pressed Pause again, just as Matt stood up. Then she reached around her neck and ripped the locket off its thin gold chain. She unzipped one of the couch cushions and pushed the necklace deep inside the stuffing.

She turned off the television. She pretended that Matt would be suspended like that forever, inches away from Josie so that she could still reach out and grab him, even though she knew that the DVD would reset itself even before she left the room.

Lacy had known they were out of milk; that morning, as she and Lewis sat like zombies at the kitchen table, she had brought it up:

I hear it’s going to rain again.

We’re out of milk.

Have you heard from Peter’s lawyer?

It devastated Lacy to know that she could not visit Peter again for another week-jail rules. It killed her to know Lewis hadn’t been there to see him at all yet. How was she supposed to go through the motions of an ordinary day, knowing that her son was sitting in a cell less than twenty miles away?

There was a point where the events of your life became a tsunami; Lacy knew, because she’d been washed away once before by grief. When that happened, you would find yourself days later on unfamiliar ground, rootless. The only other choice you had was to move to higher ground while you still could.

Which is why Lacy found herself at a gas station buying a carton of milk, although all gut instinct told her to crawl under the covers and sleep. This was not as easy as it seemed: to get the milk, she had to first back out of her garage with reporters slapping the car windows and blocking her path. She had to elude the news van that followed her to the highway. As a result, she found herself paying for the milk at a service station in Purmort, New Hampshire-one she rarely frequented.

“That’s $2.59,” the cashier said.

Lacy opened her wallet and extracted three dollar bills. Then she noticed the small, hand-lettered display at the register. Memorial Fund for the Victims of Sterling High, the sign read, and there was a coffee can to hold the donations.

She started shaking.

“I know,” the cashier sympathized. “It’s just tragic, isn’t it?”

Lacy’s heart was pounding so fiercely she was certain the clerk would hear it.

“You’ve got to wonder about the parents, don’t you? I mean, how could they not have known?”

Lacy nodded, afraid that even the sound of her voice would ruin her anonymity. It was almost too easy to agree: Had there ever been a more awful child? A worse mother?

It was simple to say that behind every terrible child stood a terrible parent, but what about the ones who had done the best they could? What about the ones, like Lacy, who had loved unconditionally, protected ferociously, cherished mightily-and still had raised a murderer?

I didn’t know, Lacy wanted to say. It’s not my fault.

But she stayed silent because-truth be told-she wasn’t quite sure she believed that.

Lacy emptied the contents of her wallet into the coffee can, bills and coins. Numb, she walked out of the gas station, leaving the carton of milk on the counter.

She had nothing left inside. She’d given it all to her son. And that was the greatest heartbreak of all-no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

Ervin Peabody, the professor of psychiatry at the college, offered to run a grief session for the entire town of Sterling at the white clapboard church in its center. There was a tiny line item in the daily paper and purple flyers posted at the coffee shop and bank, but that was enough to spread the word. By the time the meeting convened at 7:00 p.m., cars were parked as far as a half mile away; people spilled through the open doors of the church onto the street. The press, which had come en masse to cover the meeting, was turned away by a battalion of Sterling policemen.

Selena pressed the baby closer against her chest as another wave of townspeople pushed past her. “Did you know it was going to be like this?” she whispered to Jordan.

He shook his head, eyes roaming over the crowd. He recognized some of the same people who’d come to the arraignment, but also a host of other faces that were new, and that wouldn’t have been intimately connected to the high school: the elderly, the college kids, the couples with young babies. They had come because of the ripple effect, because one person’s trauma is another’s loss of innocence.

Ervin Peabody sat in the front of the room, beside the police chief and the principal of Sterling High. “Hello,” he said, standing up. “We’ve called this session tonight because we’re all still reeling. Nearly overnight, the landscape’s changed around us. We may not have all the answers, but we thought it might be beneficial for us to start to talk about what’s happened. And maybe more importantly, to listen to each other.”

A man stood up in the second row, holding his jacket in his hands. “I moved here five years ago, because my wife and I wanted to get away from the craziness of New York City. We were starting a family, and were looking for a place that was…well, just a little bit kinder and gentler. I mean, when you drive down the street in Sterling you get honked at by people who know you. You go to the bank and the teller remembers your name. There aren’t places like that in America anymore, and now…” He broke off.

“And now Sterling’s not one either,” Ervin finished. “I know how difficult it can be when the image you’ve had of something doesn’t match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.”

“Monster?” Jordan whispered to Selena.

“Well, what is he supposed to say? That Peter was a time bomb? That’ll make them all feel safe.”

The psychiatrist looked out over the crowd. “I think that the very fact that you’re all here tonight shows that Sterling hasn’t changed. It may not ever be normal again, as we know it…. We’re going to have to figure out a new kind of normal.”

A woman raised her hand. “What about the high school? Are our kids going to have to go back inside there?”

Ervin glanced at the police chief, the principal. “It’s still the site of an active investigation,” the chief said.

“We’re hoping to finish out the year in a different location,” the principal added. “We’re in talks with the superintendent’s office in Lebanon, to see if we can use one of their empty schools.”

Another woman’s voice: “But they’re going to have to go back sometime. My daughter’s only ten, and she’s terrified about walking into that high school, ever. She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. She thinks there’s someone with a gun there, waiting for her.”

“Be happy she’s able to have nightmares,” a man replied. He was standing next to Jordan, his arms folded, his eyes a livid red. “Go in there every night, when she cries, and hold her and tell her you’ll keep her safe. Lie to her, just like I did.”

A murmur rolled through the church, like a ball of yarn being unraveled. That’s Mark Ignatio. The father of one of the dead.

Just like that, a fault line opened up in Sterling-a ravine so deep and bleak that it would not be bridged for many years. There was already a difference in this town, between those who had lost children and those who still had them to worry about.

“Some of you knew my daughter Courtney,” Mark said, pushing away from the wall. “Maybe she babysat for your kids. Or served you a burger at the Steak Shack in the summer. Maybe you’d recognize her by sight, because she was a beautiful, beautiful girl.” He turned to the front of the stage. “You want to tell me how I’m supposed to figure out a new kind of normal, Doc? You wouldn’t dare suggest that one day, it gets easier. That I’ll be able to move past this. That I’ll forget my daughter is lying in a grave, while some psychopath is still alive and well.” Suddenly the man turned to Jordan. “How can you live with yourself?” he accused. “How the hell can you sleep at night, knowing you’re defending that sonofabitch?”

Every eye in the room turned to Jordan. Beside him, he could feel Selena press Sam’s face against her chest, shielding the baby. Jordan opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t find a single word.

The sound of boots coming up the aisle distracted him. Patrick Ducharme was headed straight for Mark Ignatio. “I can’t imagine the pain you’re feeling, Mark,” Patrick said, his gaze locked on the grieving man’s. “And I know you have every right to come here and be upset. But the way our country works, someone’s innocent until they’re proven guilty. Mr. McAfee’s just doing his job.” He clapped his hand on Mark’s shoulder and lowered his voice. “Why don’t you and I grab a cup of coffee?”

As Patrick led Mark Ignatio toward the exit, Jordan remembered what he had wanted to say. “I live here, too,” he began.

Mark turned around. “Not for long.”

Alex was not short for Alexandra, like most people assumed. Her father had simply given her the name of the son he would have preferred to have.

After Alex’s mother had died of breast cancer when she was five, her father had raised her. He wasn’t the kind of dad who showed her how to ride a bike or to skip stones-instead, he taught her the Latin words for things like faucet and octopus and porcupine; he explained to her the Bill of Rights. She used academics to get his attention: winning spelling bees and geography contests, netting a string of straight A’s, getting into every college she applied to.

She wanted to be just like her father: the kind of man who walked down the street and had storekeepers nod to him in awe: Good afternoon, Judge Cormier. She wanted to hear the change in tone of a receptionist’s voice when the woman heard it was Judge Cormier on the line.

If her father never held her on his lap, never kissed her good night, never told her he loved her-well, it was all part of the persona. From her father, Alex learned that everything could be distilled into facts. Comfort, parenting, love-all of these could be boiled down and explained, rather than experienced. And the law-well, the law supported her father’s belief system. Any feelings you had in the context of a courtroom had an explanation. You were given permission to be emotional, in a logical setting. What you felt for your clients was not really what was in your own heart, or so you could pretend, so that no one ever got close enough to hurt you.

Alex’s father had had a stroke when she was a second-year law student. She had sat on the edge of his hospital bed and told him she loved him.

“Oh, Alex,” he’d sighed. “Let’s not bother with that.”

She hadn’t cried at his funeral, because she knew that’s what he would have wanted.

Had her own father wished, as she did now, that the basis of their relationship had been different? Had he eventually given up hoping, settling for teacher and student instead of parent and child? How long could you march along on a parallel track with your child before you lost any chance of intersecting her life?

She’d read countless websites about grief and its stages; she’d studied the aftermath of other school shootings. She could do research, but when she tried to connect with Josie, her daughter looked at her as if she’d never seen her before. At other times, Josie burst into tears. Alex didn’t know how to combat either outcome. She felt incompetent-and then she’d remember that this wasn’t about her, it was about Josie-and she’d feel even more like a failure.

The great irony hadn’t escaped Alex: she was more like her father than he ever might have guessed. She felt comfortable in her courtroom, in a way she did not feel in the confines of her own home. She knew just what to say to a defendant who’d come in with his third DUI charge, but she couldn’t sustain a five-minute conversation with her own child.

Ten days after the shooting at Sterling High, Alex went into Josie’s bedroom. It was midafternoon and the curtains were shut tight; Josie was hidden in the cocoon she’d made of her bedcovers. Although her immediate instinct was to snap open the shades and let the sunlight in, Alex lay down on the bed instead. She wrapped her arms around the bundle that was her daughter. “When you were little,” Alex said, “sometimes I’d come in here and sleep with you.”

There was a shifting, and the sheets fell away from Josie’s face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face swollen. “Why?”

She shrugged. “I was never a big fan of thunderstorms.”

“How come I never woke up and found you here?”

“I always went back to my own bed. I was supposed to be the tough one…. I didn’t want you to think I was scared of anything.”

“Supermom,” Josie whispered.

“But I’m scared of losing you,” Alex said. “I’m scared it’s already happened.”

Josie stared at her for a moment. “I’m scared of losing me, too.”

Alex sat up and tucked Josie’s hair behind her ear. “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.

Josie froze. “I don’t want to go out.”

“Sweetheart, it would be good for you. It’s like physical therapy, but for the brain. Go through the motions, the pattern of your everyday life, and eventually you remember how to do it naturally.”

“You don’t understand…”

“If you don’t try, Jo,” she said, “then that means he wins.”

Josie’s head snapped up. Alex didn’t have to tell her who he was. “Did you guess?” Alex heard herself asking.

“Guess what?”

“That he might do this?”

“Mom, I don’t want to-”

“I keep thinking about him as a little boy,” Alex said.

Josie shook her head. “That was a really long time ago,” she murmured. “People change.”

“I know. But sometimes I can still see him handing you that rifle-”

“We were little,” Josie interrupted, her eyes filling with tears. “We were stupid.” She pushed back the covers, in a sudden hurry. “I thought you wanted to go somewhere.”

Alex looked at her. A lawyer would press the point. A mother, though, might not.

Minutes later, Josie was sitting in the passenger seat of the car beside Alex. She buckled the seat belt, then unlatched it, then secured it again. Alex watched her tug on the belt to make sure it would lock up.

She pointed out the obvious as they drove-that the first daffodils had pushed their brave heads through the snow on the median strip of Main Street; that the Sterling College crew team was training on the Connecticut River, the bows of their boats breaking through the residual ice. That the temperature gauge in the car said it was more than fifty degrees. Alex intentionally took the long route-the one that did not go past the school. Only once did Josie’s head turn to look at the scenery, and that was when they passed the police station.

Alex pulled into a parking spot in front of the diner. The street was filled with lunchtime shoppers and busy pedestrians, carrying boxes to be mailed and talking on cell phones and glancing into store windows. To anyone who didn’t know better, it was business as usual in Sterling. “So,” Alex said, turning to Josie. “How are we doing?”

Josie looked down at her hands in her lap. “Okay.”

“It’s not as bad as you thought, is it?”

“Not yet.”

“My daughter the optimist.” Alex smiled at her. “You want to split a BLT and a salad?”

“You haven’t even looked at a menu yet,” Josie said, and they both got out of the car.

Suddenly a rusted Dodge Dart ran the light at the head of Main Street, backfiring as it sped away. “Idiot,” Alex muttered, “I should get his plate number…” She broke off when she realized that Josie had vanished. “Josie!”

Then Alex saw her daughter, pressed against the sidewalk, where she’d flattened herself. Her face was white, her body trembling.

Alex knelt beside her. “It was a car. Just a car.” She helped Josie to her knees. All around them, people were watching and pretending not to.

Alex shielded Josie from their view. She had failed again. For someone renowned for her good judgment, she suddenly seemed to be lacking any. She thought of something she’d read on the Internet-how sometimes, when it came to grief, you could take one step forward and then three steps back. She wondered why the Internet did not add that when someone you loved was hurting, it cut you right to the bone, too. “All right,” Alex said, her arm anchored tight around Josie’s shoulders. “Let’s get you back home.”

Patrick had taken to living, eating, and sleeping his case. At the station, he acted cool and in command-he was the point man, after all, for all those investigators-but at home, he questioned every move he made. On his refrigerator were the pictures of the dead; on his bathroom mirror he’d created a dry-erase marker timeline of Peter’s day. He sat awake in the middle of the night, writing lists of questions: What was Peter doing at home before leaving for school? What else was on his computer? Where did he learn to shoot? How did he get guns? Where did the anger come from?

During the day, however, he plowed through the massive amount of information to be processed, and the even more massive amount of information to be gleaned. Now, Joan McCabe sat across from him. She had cried her way through the last box of Kleenex at the station, and was now wadding paper towels up in her fist. “I’m sorry,” she said to Patrick. “I thought this would get easier the more I do it.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” he said gently. “I do appreciate you taking the time to speak to me about your brother.”

Ed McCabe had been the only teacher killed in the shooting. His classroom had been at the top of the stairs, en route to the gymnasium; he’d had the bad fortune to come out and try to stop what was happening. According to school records, Peter had had McCabe as a math teacher in tenth grade. He’d gotten B’s. No one else could remember his not getting along with McCabe that year; most of the other students hadn’t even recalled Peter being in the class.

“There’s really nothing else I can tell you,” Joan said. “Maybe Philip remembers something.”

“Your husband?”

Joan looked up at him. “No. That’s Ed’s partner.”

Patrick leaned back in his chair. “Partner. As in-”

“Ed was gay,” Joan said.

It might be something, but then again, it might not. For all Patrick knew, Ed McCabe-who’d been just a hapless victim a half hour ago-could have been the reason Peter started shooting.

“No one at the school knew,” Joan said. “I think he was afraid of backlash. He told people in town that Philip was his old college roommate.”

Another victim-one who was still alive-was Natalie Zlenko. She’d been shot in the side and had to have her liver resected. Patrick thought he remembered seeing her name listed as president of the GLAAD club at Sterling High. She’d been one of the first people shot; McCabe had been one of the last.

Maybe Peter Houghton was homophobic.

Patrick handed Joan his card. “I’d really like to talk to Philip,” he said.

Lacy Houghton set a teapot and a plate of celery in front of Selena. “I don’t have any milk. I went to buy some, but…” Her voice trailed off, and Selena tried to fill in the blanks.

“I really appreciate you talking to me,” Selena said. “Whatever you can tell me, we’ll use to help Peter.”

Lacy nodded. “Anything,” she said. “Anything you want to know.”

“Well, let’s start with the easy stuff. Where was he born?”

“Right at Dartmouth-Hitchcock,” Lacy said.

“Normal delivery?”

“Totally. No complications.” She smiled a little. “I used to walk three miles every day when I was pregnant. Lewis thought I’d wind up delivering in someone’s driveway.”

“Did you nurse him? Was he a good eater?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t see why…”

“Because we have to see if there might be a brain disorder,” Selena said matter-of-factly. “An organic problem.”

“Oh,” Lacy said faintly. “Yes. I nursed him. He’s always been healthy. A little smaller than other kids his age, but neither Lewis nor I are very big people.”

“How was his social development as a child?”

“He didn’t have a lot of friends,” Lacy said. “Not like Joey.”

“Joey?”

“Peter’s older brother. Peter is a year younger, and much quieter. He got teased because of his size, and because he wasn’t as good an athlete as Joey….”

“What kind of relationship does Peter have with Joey?”

Lacy looked down at her knotted hands. “Joey died a year ago. He was killed in a car accident, by a drunk driver.”

Selena stopped writing. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yes,” Lacy said. “Me, too.”

Selena leaned back slightly in her chair. It was crazy, she knew, but just in case misfortune was contagious, she did not want to get too close. She thought of Sam, how she’d left him sleeping this morning in his crib. During the night he’d kicked off a sock; his toes were plump as early peas; it was all she could do not to taste his caramel skin. So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was sustenance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

She turned back to Lacy. “Did Peter get along with Joey?”

“Oh, Peter adored his big brother.”

“He told you that?”

Lacy shrugged. “He didn’t have to. He’d be at all of Joey’s football games, and cheering just as loud as the rest of us. When he got to the high school, everyone expected great things of him, because he was Joey’s little brother.”

Which could be, Selena knew, just as much a source of frustration as it was of pride. “How did Peter react to Joey’s death?”

“He was devastated, just like we were. He cried a lot. Spent time in his room.”

“Did your relationship with Peter change after Joey died?”

“I think it got stronger,” Lacy said. “I was so overwhelmed. Peter…he let us lean on him.”

“Did he lean on anyone else? Have any intimate relationships?”

“You mean with girls?”

“Or boys,” Selena said.

“He was still at that awkward age. I know he’d asked a few girls out, but I don’t think anything ever came of it.”

“How were Peter’s grades?”

“He wasn’t a straight-A student like his brother,” Lacy said, “but he’d get B’s and the occasional C. We always told him to just do the best he could.”

“Did he have any learning disabilities?”

“No.”

“What about outside of school? What did he like to do?” Selena asked.

“He’d listen to music. Play video games. Like any other teenager.”

“Did you ever listen to his music, or play those games?”

Lacy let a smile ghost over her face. “I actively tried not to.”

“Did you monitor his Internet use?”

“He was only supposed to be using it for school projects. We had long talks about chat rooms and how unsafe the Internet can be, but Peter had a good head on his shoulders. We-” She broke off, looking away. “We trusted him.”

“Did you know what he was downloading?”

“No.”

“What about weapons? Do you know where he got them from?”

Lacy took a deep breath. “Lewis hunts. He took Peter out with him once, but Peter didn’t like it very much. The shotguns are always locked in a gun case-”

“And Peter knew where the key was.”

“Yes,” Lacy murmured.

“What about the pistols?”

“We’ve never had those in our house. I have no idea where they came from.”

“Did you ever check his room? Under the bed, in the closets, that kind of thing?”

Lacy met her gaze. “We’ve always respected his privacy. I think it’s important for a child to have his own space, and-” She pressed her lips shut.

“And?”

“And sometimes when you start looking,” Lacy said softly, “you find things you don’t really want to see.”

Selena leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “When did that happen, Lacy?”

Lacy walked to the window, drawing aside the curtain. “You would have had to know Joey to understand. He was a senior, an honors student, an athlete. And then, a week before graduation, he was killed.” She let her hand trail the edge of the fabric. “Someone had to go through his room-pack it up, get rid of the things we didn’t want to keep. It took me a while, but finally, I did it. I was going through his drawers when I found the drugs. Just a little powder, in a gum wrapper, and a spoon and a needle. I didn’t know it was heroin until I looked it up on the Internet. I flushed it down the toilet and threw the hypodermic out at work.” She turned toward Selena, her face red. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I’ve never told anyone, not even Lewis. I didn’t want him-or anyone-to think anything bad about Joey.”

Lacy sat down on the couch again. “I didn’t go into Peter’s room on purpose, because I was afraid of what I’d find,” she confessed. “I didn’t know that it could be even worse.”

“Did you ever interrupt him when he was in his room? Knock on the door, pop your head inside?”

“Sure. I’d come in to say good night.”

“What was he usually doing?”

“He was on his computer,” Lacy said. “Almost always.”

“Didn’t you see what was on the screen?”

“I don’t know. He’d close the file.”

“How did he act when you interrupted him unexpectedly? Did he seem upset? Annoyed? Guilty?”

“Why does it feel like you’re judging him?” Lacy said. “Aren’t you supposed to be on our side?”

Selena met her gaze steadily. “The only way I can thoroughly investigate this case is to ask you the facts, Mrs. Houghton. That’s all I’m doing.”

“He was like any other teenager,” Lacy said. “He’d suffer while I kissed him good night. He didn’t seem embarrassed. He didn’t act like he was hiding anything from me. Is that what you want to know?”

Selena put down her pen. When the subject started getting defensive, it was time to end the interview. But Lacy was still talking, unprompted.

“I never thought there was any problem,” she admitted. “I didn’t know Peter was upset. I didn’t know he wanted to kill himself. I didn’t know any of those things.” She began to cry. “All those families out there, I don’t know what to say to them. I wish I could tell them that I lost someone, too. I just lost him a long time ago.”

Selena folded her arms around the smaller woman. “It’s not your fault,” she said, words she knew Lacy Houghton needed to hear.

In a fit of high school irony, the principal of Sterling High had placed the Bible Study Club next door to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance. They met Tuesdays, at three-thirty, in Rooms 233 and 234 of the high school. Room 233 was, during the day, Ed McCabe’s classroom. One member of the Bible Study Club was the daughter of a local minister, named Grace Murtaugh. She’d been killed in the hallway leading to the gymnasium, shot in front of a water fountain. The leader of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance was still in the hospital: Natalie Zlenko, a yearbook photographer, had come out as a lesbian after her freshman year, when she’d wandered into the GLAAD meeting in Room 233 to see if there was anyone else on this planet like herself.

“We’re not supposed to give out names.” Natalie’s voice was so faint that Patrick had to lean over the hospital bed to hear her. Natalie’s mother hovered at his shoulder. When he’d come in to ask Natalie a few questions, she said that he’d better leave or else she’d call the police. He reminded her that he was the police.

“I’m not asking for names,” Patrick said. “I’m just asking you to help me help a jury understand why this happened.”

Natalie nodded. She closed her eyes.

“Peter Houghton,” Patrick said. “Did he ever attend a meeting?”

“Once,” Natalie said.

“Did he say or do anything that sticks in your mind?”

“He didn’t say or do anything, period. He showed up the one time, and he never came back.”

“Does that happen often?”

“Sometimes,” Natalie said. “People wouldn’t be ready to come out. And sometimes we got jerks who just wanted to know who was gay so that they could make life hell for us in school.”

“In your opinion, did Peter fit into either one of these categories?”

She was silent for a long time, her eyes still closed. Patrick drew away, thinking that she’d fallen asleep. “Thanks,” he said to her mother, just as Natalie spoke again.

“Peter was getting ragged on long before he ever showed up at that meeting,” she said.

Jordan was on diaper detail while Selena interviewed Lacy Houghton, and Sam was appallingly bad at going to sleep on his own. However, a ten-minute ride in the car could knock the kid out like a prizefighter, so Jordan bundled the baby up and strapped him into the car seat. It wasn’t until he put the Saab into reverse that he realized his wheel rims were grinding against the driveway; all four of his tires had been slashed.

“Fuck,” Jordan said, as Sam started to wail again in the backseat. He plucked the baby out, carried him back inside, and tethered him into the Snugli that Selena wore around the house. Then he called the police to report the vandalism.

Jordan knew he was in trouble when the dispatch officer didn’t ask him to spell his last name-he already knew it. “We’ll get to it,” the officer said. “But first we’ve got a squirrel up a tree that needs a hand climbing down.” The line went dead.

Could you sue the cops for being unsympathetic bastards?

Through some miracle-pheromones of stress, probably-Sam fell asleep, but startled, bawling, when the doorbell rang. Jordan yanked the door open to find Selena outside. “You woke up the baby,” he accused as she lifted Sam out of the carrier.

“Then you shouldn’t have locked the door. Oh, hi, you sweet man,” Selena cooed. “Has Daddy been a monster the whole time I’ve been gone?”

“Someone slashed my tires.”

Selena glanced at him over the baby’s head. “Well, you sure know how to win friends and influence people. Let me guess-the cops aren’t exactly scrambling to take your report?”

“Not quite.”

“Comes with the territory, I guess,” Selena said. “You’re the one who took this case.”

“How about a little spousal understanding?”

Selena shrugged. “Wasn’t in the vows I took. If you want to have a pity party, set the table for one.”

Jordan ran a hand through his hair. “Well, did you at least get anything out of the mother? Like, for example, that Peter had a psychiatric diagnosis?”

She peeled off her jacket while juggling Sam in one hand and then the other, unbuttoned her blouse, and sat down on the couch to nurse. “No. But he did have a sibling.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. A dead one, who-prior to being killed by a drunk driver-was the All-American Son.”

Jordan sank down beside her. “I can use this…”

Selena rolled her eyes. “Just for once, could you not be a lawyer and focus instead on being a human? Jordan, this family was in so deep they didn’t have a chance. The kid was a powder keg. The parents were dealing with their own grief and were asleep at the wheel. Peter had no one to turn to.”

Jordan glanced up at her, a grin splitting his face. “Excellent,” he said. “Our client’s just become sympathetic.”

One week after the school shooting at Sterling High, the Mount Lebanon School-a primary grade school that had become an administrative building when the population of students in Lebanon dipped-was outfitted to be the temporary home for high school kids to finish out their school year.

On the day that classes were beginning again, Josie’s mother came into her bedroom. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “You can take a few more weeks off, if you want.”

There had been a flurry of phone calls, a pulse of panic that began a few days ago when each student received the written word that school would be starting again. Are you going back? Are you? There were rumors: whose mother wouldn’t let them return; who was getting transferred to St. Mary’s; who was going to take over Mr. McCabe’s class. Josie had not called any of her friends. She was afraid to hear their answers.

Josie did not want to go back to school. She could not imagine having to walk down a hallway, even one not physically located at Sterling High. She didn’t know how the superintendent and the principal expected everyone to act-and they would all be doing that: acting-because to feel anything real would be devastating. And yet there was another part of Josie that understood she had to go back to school; it was where she belonged. The other students at Sterling High were the only ones who really understood what it was like to wake up in the morning and crave those three seconds before you remembered your life wasn’t what it used to be; who had forgotten how easy it was to trust that the ground beneath your feet was solid.

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?

“Josie?” her mother said, prompting.

“It’s fine,” she lied.

Her mother left, and Josie started to gather her books. She realized, suddenly, that she’d never taken her science test. Catalysts. She didn’t remember anything about them anymore. Mrs. Duplessiers wouldn’t be evil enough to hand out the test on their first day back, would she? It wasn’t like time had stopped during these three weeks-it had changed completely.

The last morning she had gone to school, she hadn’t been thinking of anything in particular. That test, maybe. Matt. How much homework she’d have that night. Normal things, in other words. A normal day. There had been nothing to set it apart from any other morning at school; so how could Josie be sure that today wouldn’t dissolve at the seams, too?

When Josie reached the kitchen, her mother was wearing a suit-work clothes. It took her by surprise. “You’re going back today?” she asked.

Her mother turned, holding a spatula. “Oh,” she answered, faltering. “I just figured that since you were…You can always reach me through the clerk, if there’s a problem. I swear to God, Josie, I’ll be there in less than ten minutes….”

Josie sank into a chair and closed her eyes. Somehow, it didn’t matter that Josie herself was leaving the house for the day-she’d still imagined her mother sitting home waiting for her, just in case. But that was stupid, wasn’t it? It had never been like that, so why should now be any different?

Because, a voice whispered in Josie’s head. Everything else is.

“I’ve rearranged my schedule so I’ll be able to pick you up from school. And if there’s any problem-”

“Yeah. Call the clerk. Whatever.”

Her mother sat down across from her. “Honey, what did you expect?”

Josie glanced up. “Nothing. I stopped that a long time ago.” She stood up. “You’re burning your pancakes,” she said, and she walked back upstairs to her bedroom.

She buried her face in her pillow. She didn’t know what the hell was wrong with her. It was as if, after, there were two Josies-the little girl who kept hoping it might be a nightmare, might never have happened, and the realist who still hurt so badly she lashed out at anyone who got too close. The thing was, Josie didn’t know which persona was going to take over at any given moment. Here was her mother, for God’s sake, who couldn’t boil water but was now attempting pancakes for Josie before she went back to school. When she was younger, she had imagined living in the kind of house where on the first day of school your mother had a whole spread of eggs and bacon and juice to start the day off right-instead of a lineup of cereal boxes and a paper napkin. Well, she’d gotten what she wished for, hadn’t she? A mother who sat at her bedside when she was crying, a mother who had temporarily abandoned the job that defined her to hover over Josie instead. And what did Josie do? She pushed her away. She said, in all the spaces between her words, You never cared about anything that happened in my life when nobody was watching, so don’t think you can just start now.

Suddenly, Josie heard the roar of an engine pulling into the driveway. Matt, she thought, before she could stop herself; and by then, every nerve in her body was stretched to the point of pain. Somehow, she hadn’t really thought about how she would physically be transported to school-Matt had always picked her up en route. Her mother, of course, would have driven her. But Josie wondered why she hadn’t worked through these logistics earlier. Because she was afraid to? Didn’t want to?

From her bedroom window she watched Drew Girard get out of his battered Volvo. By the time she reached the front door to open it, her mother had come out of the kitchen, too. She held the smoke detector in her hand, popped off its plastic snap on the ceiling.

Drew stood in a shaft of sunlight, shading his eyes with his free hand. His other arm was still in a sling. “I should have called.”

“That’s okay,” Josie said. She felt dizzy. She realized that, in the background, the birds had come back from wherever they went in the winter.

Drew looked from Josie to her mother. “I thought maybe, you know, you might need a ride.”

Suddenly Matt was standing there with them; Josie could feel his fingers on her back.

“Thanks,” her mother said, “but I’m going to take Josie in today.”

The monster in Josie uncoiled. “I’d rather go with Drew,” she said, grabbing her backpack off the newel post of the banister. “I’ll see you at pickup.” Without turning around to see her mother’s face, Josie ran to the car, which gleamed like a sanctuary.

Inside, she waited for Drew to turn over the ignition and pull out of the driveway. “Are your parents like that?” Josie asked, closing her eyes as they sped down the street. “Like you can’t breathe?”

Drew glanced at her. “Yeah.”

“Have you talked to anyone?”

“Like the police?”

Josie shook her head. “Like us.”

He downshifted. “I went over to the hospital to see John a couple of times,” Drew said. “He couldn’t remember my name. He can’t remember the words for things like forks or hairbrushes or stairs. I kind of sat there and told him stupid things-who’d won the last few Bruins games, things like that-but the whole time I was wondering if he even knows he can’t walk anymore.” At a stoplight, Drew turned to her. “Why not me?”

“What?”

“How come we got to be the lucky ones?”

Josie didn’t know what to say to that. She looked out the window, pretending to be fascinated by a dog that was pulling its owner, instead of the other way around.

Drew pulled into the parking lot of the Mount Lebanon School. Beside the building was a playground-this had been an elementary school, after all, and even once it became administrative, neighborhood kids would still come to use the monkey bars and the swings. In front of the school’s main doors stood the principal and a line of parents, calling out the names of students and encouraging them as they walked inside.

“I have something for you,” Drew said, and he reached behind his seat and held out a baseball cap-one Josie recognized. Whatever embroidery had once been on it had long since unraveled; the brim was frayed and curled tight as a fiddlehead. He handed it to Josie, who ran a finger gently along the inside seam.

“He left it in my car,” Drew explained. “I was going to give it to his parents…after. But then I kind of thought you might want it instead.”

Josie nodded, as tears rose along the watermark of her throat.

Drew bent his head against the wheel. It took Josie a moment to realize that he was crying, too.

She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. “Thank you,” Josie managed, and she settled Matt’s baseball cap onto her head. She opened the passenger door and reached for her knapsack, but instead of heading toward the school she walked through the rusted gates onto the playground. She strode into the middle of the sandbox and stared at her shoe prints, wondered how much wind or weather it would take to make them disappear.

Twice Alex had excused herself from the courtroom to call Josie’s cell, even though she knew Josie kept it turned off during classroom hours. The message she left both times was the same:

It’s me. I just wanted to know how you were holding up.

Alex told her clerk, Eleanor, that if Josie called back, she was to be disturbed. No matter what.

She was relieved to be back at work, but had to force herself to pay attention to the case in front of her. There was a defendant on the stand who claimed to have no experience with the criminal justice system. “I don’t understand the court process,” the woman said, turning to Alex. “Can I go now?”

The prosecutor was in the middle of his cross-examination. “First, why don’t you tell Judge Cormier about the last time you were in court.”

The woman hesitated. “Maybe for a speeding ticket.”

“What else?”

“I can’t remember,” she said.

“Aren’t you on probation?” the prosecutor asked.

“Oh,” the woman replied. “That.”

“What are you on probation for?”

“I can’t remember.” She looked up at the ceiling, her brow wrinkling in thought. “It begins with an F. F…F…F…felony! That’s it!”

The prosecutor sighed. “Didn’t it have to do with a check?”

Alex looked at her watch, thinking that if she got this woman off the damn stand, she could see if Josie had called in yet. “How about forgery,” she interrupted. “That starts with an F.”

“So does fraud,” the prosecutor pointed out.

The woman faced Alex blankly. “I can’t remember.”

“I’m calling a one-hour recess,” Alex announced. “Court will resume at eleven a.m.”

As soon as she was through the door that took her to her chambers, she stripped off her robes. They felt suffocating today, something that Alex didn’t really understand-this was where she had always felt comfortable. Law was a set of rules she understood-a code of behavior where certain actions had certain consequences. She could not say the same of her personal life, where a school that was supposed to be safe turned into a slaughterhouse, where a daughter carved from her own body had become someone Alex no longer understood.

Okay, if she was going to be honest, that she’d never understood.

Frustrated, she stood up and walked into her clerk’s office. Twice, before the trial began, she’d called on Eleanor for trivial things, hoping that instead of hearing “Yes, Your Honor,” the clerk would let down her guard and ask Alex how she was doing, how Josie was doing. That for a half a moment, she wouldn’t be a judge to someone, just another parent who’d had the scare of a lifetime.

“I need a cigarette,” Alex said. “I’m going downstairs.”

Eleanor glanced up. “All right, Your Honor.”

Alex, she thought. Alex Alex Alex.

Outside, Alex sat down on the cement block near the loading zone and lit a cigarette. She drew in deeply, closed her eyes.

“Those’ll kill you, you know.”

“So will old age,” Alex replied, and she turned around to see Patrick Ducharme.

He turned his face up to the sun, squinted. “I wouldn’t have expected a judge to have vices.”

“You probably think we sleep under the bench, too.”

Patrick grinned. “Well, that would be just plain silly. There’s not enough room for a mattress.”

She held out the pack. “Be my guest.”

“If you want to corrupt me, there are more interesting ways.”

Alex felt her face flame. He hadn’t just said that, had he? To a judge? “If you don’t smoke, why’d you come out here?”

“To photosynthesize. When I’m stuck in court all day it ruins my feng shui.”

“People don’t have feng shui. Places do.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

Alex hesitated. “Well. No.”

“There you go.” He turned to her, and for the first time she noticed that he had a white streak in his hair, right at the widow’s peak. “You’re staring.”

Alex immediately jerked her gaze away.

“It’s all right,” Patrick said, laughing. “It’s albinism.”

“Albinism?”

“Yeah, you know. Pale skin, white hair. It’s recessive, so I got a skunk streak. I’m one gene away from looking like a rabbit.” He faced her, sobering. “How’s Josie?”

She considered putting up that Chinese wall, telling him she didn’t want to talk about anything that could compromise her case. But Patrick Ducharme had done the one thing Alex had wished for-he’d treated her like a person instead of a public figure. “She went back to school,” Alex confided.

“I know. I saw her.”

“You…Were you there?”

Patrick shrugged. “Yeah. Just in case.”

“Did anything happen?”

“No,” he said. “It was…ordinary.”

The word hung between them. Nothing was going to be ordinary again, and both of them knew it. You could patch up whatever was broken, but if you were the one who had fixed it, you’d always know in your heart where the fault lines lay.

“Hey,” Patrick said, touching her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

She realized, mortified, that she was crying. Wiping her eyes, Alex moved out of his reach.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said, daring Patrick to challenge her.

He opened his mouth as if he was about to speak, but then snapped it shut. “I’ll leave you to your vices, then,” he said, and walked back inside.

It wasn’t until Alex was back in chambers that she realized the detective had used the plural. That he’d not only caught her smoking, but also lying.

There were new rules: All the doors except for the main entrance would be locked after school began, even though a shooter who was a student might already be inside. No backpacks were allowed in classrooms anymore, although a gun could be sneaked in under a coat or in a purse or even in a zippered three-ring binder. Everyone-students and staff-would get ID cards to wear around their necks. It was supposed to make everyone accountable, but Josie couldn’t help but wonder if this way, next time, it would be easier to tell who’d been killed.

The principal got on the loudspeaker during homeroom and welcomed everyone back to Sterling High, even if it wasn’t Sterling High. He suggested a moment of silence.

While other kids in her homeroom bowed their heads, Josie glanced around. She was not the only one who wasn’t praying. Some kids were passing notes. A couple were listening to their iPods. A guy was copying someone else’s math notes.

She wondered if they, like her, were afraid to honor the dead, because it made them feel more guilty.

Josie shifted, banging her knee against the desk. The desks and chairs that had been brought back to this makeshift school were for little children, not high school refugees. As a result, nobody fit. Josie’s knees were bent up to her chin. Some kids couldn’t even sit at the desks; they had to write with their binders on their laps.

I am Alice in Wonderland, Josie thought. Watch me fall.

Jordan waited for his client to sit down across from him in the conference room of the jail. “Tell me about your brother, Peter,” he said.

He scrutinized Peter’s face-saw the disappointment flash across it as he realized that Jordan had again unearthed something he’d hoped would stay hidden. “What about him?” Peter replied.

“You two get along?”

“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I wasn’t.” Jordan shrugged. “I’m just surprised you didn’t mention him earlier.”

Peter glared at him. “Like when? When I was supposed to shut up at the arraignment? Or after that, when you came here and told me you were going to do all the talking and I was going to listen?”

“What was he like?”

“Look. Joey’s dead, which you obviously know. So I don’t really get why talking about him is going to help me.”

“What happened to him?” Jordan pressed.

Peter rubbed his thumbnail against the metal edging of the table. “He got his golden boy straight-A self rammed by a drunk driver.”

“Hard to beat that,” Jordan said carefully.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your brother is the perfect kid, right? That’s tough enough right there, but then he dies and turns into a saint.”

Jordan had been playing devil’s advocate, to see if Peter would take the bait, and sure enough the boy’s face transformed. “You can’t beat it,” Peter said fiercely. “You can’t measure up.”

Jordan tapped his pencil on the edge of his briefcase. Had Peter’s anger been born of jealousy or loneliness? Or was his massacre a way to turn attention to himself, finally, instead of Joey? How could he formulate a defense that Peter’s act was one of desperation, not an attempt to one-up his brother’s notoriety?

“Do you miss him?” Jordan asked.

Peter smirked. “My brother,” he said, “my brother, the captain of the baseball team; my brother who placed first in the state in a French competition; my brother who was friends with the principal; my brother, my fabulous brother, used to drop me off a half mile away from the gates of the high school so that he didn’t have to be seen driving all the way in with me.”

“How come?”

“You don’t exactly get any perks for hanging around with me, or haven’t you noticed yet.”

Jordan had a flash of his car tires, slashed to their metal haunches. “Joey wouldn’t stick up for you if you were being bullied?”

“Are you kidding? Joey was the one to start it.”

“How?”

Peter walked toward the window in the small room. A mottled flush rose up his neck, as if memory could be burned into the flesh. “He used to tell people I was adopted. That my mother was a crack whore, and that’s why my brain was all fucked up. Sometimes he did it right in front of me, and when I’d get pissed off and whale on him he’d just laugh and knock me on my ass and then he’d look back to his friends, as if this was proof of everything he’d been saying in the first place. So, do I miss him?” Peter repeated, and he faced Jordan. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Jordan wasn’t often surprised, and yet Peter Houghton had shocked him several times already. Peter was, simply, what a person would look like if you boiled down the most raw emotions and filtered them of any social contract. If you hurt, cry. If you rage, strike out.

If you hope, get ready for a disappointment.

“Peter,” Jordan murmured, “did you mean to kill them?”

Immediately Jordan cursed himself-he’d just asked the one question a defense attorney is never supposed to ask, setting Peter up to admit to premeditation. But instead of answering, Peter threw a question back at him that had just as unsettling an answer. “Well,” he said, “what would you have done?”

Jordan stuffed another bite of vanilla pudding into Sam’s mouth and then licked the spoon himself.

“That’s not for you,” Selena said.

“It tastes good. Unlike that pea crap you make him eat.”

“Excuse me for being a good mother.” Selena took a wet washcloth and wiped down Sam’s mouth, then applied the same treatment to Jordan, who squirmed away from her hand.

“I am totally screwed,” he said. “I can’t make Peter sympathetic over losing his brother, because he hated Joey. I don’t even have a valid legal defense for him, unless I try for insanity, and it’s going to be impossible to prove that with the mountain of evidence the prosecution’s got for premeditation.”

Selena turned to him. “You know what the problem is here, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You think he’s guilty.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake. So are ninety-nine percent of my clients, and it’s never stopped me from getting acquittals before.”

“Right. But deep down, you don’t want Peter Houghton to get acquitted.”

Jordan frowned. “That’s crap.”

“It’s true crap. You’re scared of someone like him.”

“He’s a kid-”

“-who freaks you out, just a little bit. Because he wasn’t willing to sit down and let the world shit on him anymore, and that’s not supposed to happen.”

Jordan looked up at her. “Shooting ten students doesn’t make you a hero, Selena.”

“It does to the millions of other kids who wish they’d had the guts to do it,” she said flatly.

“Excellent. You can be the leader of Peter Houghton’s fan club.”

“I don’t condone what he did, Jordan, but I do see where he’s coming from. You were born with six silver spoons up your ass. I mean, honestly, have you ever not been in the elite group? At school, or in court, or wherever? People know you, people look up to you. You’re granted passage and you don’t even realize that other people never get to walk that way.”

Jordan folded his arms. “Are you about to do your African pride thing again? Because to tell you the truth-”

“You’ve never gone down the street and had someone cross it just because you’re black. You’ve never had someone look at you with disgust because you’re holding a baby and you forgot to put on your wedding ring. You want to do something about it-take action, scream at them, tell them they’re idiots-but you can’t. Being on the fringe is the most disempowering feeling, Jordan. You get so used to the world being a certain way, there seems to be no escape from it.”

Jordan smirked. “You took that last part from my closing in the Katie Riccobono case.”

“The battered wife?” Selena shrugged. “Well, even if I did, it fits.”

Suddenly Jordan blinked. He stood up, grabbed his wife, and kissed her. “You are so fucking brilliant.”

“I’m not going to argue, but do tell me why.”

“Battered woman syndrome. It’s a valid legal defense. Battered women get stuck in a world that slams them down; eventually they feel so constantly threatened that they take action, and truly believe they’re protecting themselves-even if their husbands are fast asleep. That fits Peter Houghton, to a T.”

“Far be it from me to point this out to you, Jordan,” Selena said, “but Peter’s not female, and he’s not married.”

“That’s not the point. It’s post-traumatic stress disorder. When these women go ballistic and shoot their husbands or slice off their dicks, they aren’t thinking about the consequences…just about stopping the aggression. That’s what Peter’s been saying all along-he just wanted it to stop. And this is even better, because I don’t have to fight the prosecutor’s usual rebuttal about a grown woman being old enough to know what she’s doing when she picks up the knife or the gun. Peter’s a kid. By definition, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Monsters didn’t grow out of nowhere; a housewife didn’t turn into a murderer unless someone turned her into one. The Dr. Frankenstein, in her case, was a controlling husband. And in Peter’s case, it was the whole of Sterling High School. Bullies kicked and teased and punched and pinched, all behaviors meant to force someone back where he belonged. It was at the hands of his tormentors that Peter learned how to fight back.

In the high chair, Sam started to fuss. Selena pulled him out and into her arms. “No one’s ever done this,” she said. “There is no bullied victim syndrome.”