ordan reached for Sam’s jar of vanilla custard and scraped out the leftovers with his forefinger. “There is now,” he said, and he savored the last of the sweet.

Patrick sat at his office computer in the dark, moving a cursor through the video game created by Peter Houghton.

You started by picking a character-one of three boys: the spelling bee champ, the math genius, the computer nerd. One was small and thin, with acne. One wore glasses. One was grossly overweight.

You did not come equipped with a weapon. Instead, you had to go to various rooms of the school and use your wits: the teachers’ lounge had vodka, to make hand grenades. The boiler room had a bazooka. The science lab had burning acid. The English classroom had heavy books. The math room had compasses for stabbing and metal rulers for slicing. The computer room had wires, for garrotes. The wood shop had chain saws. The home arts class had blenders and knitting needles. The art room had a kiln. You could combine materials to make combo assault weapons: flaming bullets from the bazooka and vodka, acid daggers from the chemicals and compasses, snares from the computer wires and the heavy books.

Patrick maneuvered the cursor through hallways and up staircases, through locker rooms and into the janitor’s office. It struck him, as he was turning virtual corners, that he’d walked this map before. It was the floor plan of Sterling High.

The object of the game was to aim for the jocks, the bullies, and the popular kids. Each was worth a certain amount of points. Kill two at once, you got triple the points. However, you could be wounded, too. You might be sucker-punched, slammed into a wall, shoved in a locker.

If you accrued 100,000 points, you got a shotgun. If you reached 500,000 points, you received a machine gun. Cross a million, and you’d find yourself straddling a nuclear missile.

Patrick watched a virtual door fly open. Freeze, his speakers cried, and a phalanx of policemen in SWAT jackets stormed onto the screen. He positioned his hand on the arrow keys again, readying himself. Twice now, he’d gotten this far and had been killed or had killed himself-which meant losing.

This time, though, he raised his virtual machine gun and watched the officers fall in a spray of bright blood.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE WON HIDE-N-SHRIEK! the screen read.

DO YOU WANT TO PLAY AGAIN?

On the tenth day after the shooting at Sterling High, Jordan sat in his Volvo in the parking lot of the district courthouse. As he’d expected, there were white news vans everywhere, their satellites pointed to the sky like the faces of sunflowers. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the Wiggles CD, which was doing its effortless job of keeping Sam from throwing a fit in the backseat.

Selena had already slipped into the court undeterred-no one in the media would recognize her as anyone connected to this case. As she approached the car again, Jordan got out and took the piece of paper she offered him. “Great,” he said.

“See you later.” She bent down to unbuckle Sam from the car seat as Jordan headed into the courthouse. As soon as one reporter saw him, there was a domino effect-flashbulbs burst like a string of fireworks; microphones were thrust in front of him. He pushed them away with one outstretched arm, muttered “No comment,” and hustled inside.

Peter had already been brought to the holding cell of the sheriff’s office, awaiting his appearance in court. He was pacing in a small circle, talking to himself, when Jordan was brought into the cell. “So today’s the day,” Peter said, a little nervous, a little breathless.

“Funny you should mention that,” Jordan said. “Do you remember why we’re here today?”

“Is this some kind of test?”

Jordan just stared at him.

“A probable cause hearing,” Peter said. “That’s what you told me last week.”

“Well. What I didn’t tell you is that we’re going to waive it.”

“Waive it?” Peter said. “What does that mean?”

“It means we fold before the hand’s even played,” Jordan replied. He handed Peter the piece of paper Selena had brought him in the car. “Sign it.”

Peter shook his head. “I want a new lawyer.”

“Anyone worth their salt is going to tell you the same thing-”

“What? To give up without even trying? You said-”

“I said I’d give you the best defense I can,” Jordan interrupted. “There’s already probable cause to believe that you committed a crime, since there are hundreds of witnesses claiming to have seen you shooting in the school that day. The issue isn’t whether or not you did it, Peter, it’s why you did it. Having a probable cause hearing today means they score a lot of points, and we score none-it would just be a way for the prosecution to release evidence to the media and the public before they get a chance to hear our side of the story.” He thrust the paper at Peter again. “Sign it.”

Peter met his gaze, fuming. Then he took the paper from Jordan, and a pen. “This sucks,” he said as he scrawled his signature.

“It would suck more if we did the probable cause hearing.” Jordan took the paper and left the cell, heading out of the sheriff’s office to give the waiver to the clerk. “I’ll see you in there.”

By the time he reached the courtroom, it was packed to the rafters. The media that had been allowed in stood in the back row, their cameras ready. Jordan sought out Selena-she was juggling Sam in the middle of the third row behind the prosecution’s table. So? she asked, a shorthand lift of her brows.

Jordan nodded the slightest bit. Done.

The judge presiding was inconsequential to him: someone who would rubber-stamp this process and turn it over to the court where Jordan would have to put on his dog-and-pony show. The Honorable David Iannucci: what Jordan remembered about him was that he had hair plugs, and when you appeared before him you had to do your absolute best to keep your eyes trained on his ferret-face instead of on the seeded line of his scalp.

The clerk called Peter’s case, and two bailiffs led him through a doorway. The gallery, which had been buzzing with quiet conversation, fell silent. Peter didn’t look up as he entered; he continued to stare at the ground even as he was shuttled into place beside Jordan.

Judge Iannucci scanned the paper that had been set in front of him. “I see, Mr. Houghton, that you wish to waive your probable cause hearing.” At this news-as Jordan had expected-there was a collective sigh from the media, all of whom had been hoping for a spectacle.

“Do you understand that I would have had the obligation today to find whether or not there was probable cause to believe that you committed the acts for which you are charged, and that by waiving the probable cause hearing, you are not requiring me to find that probable cause; you will now be bound over to the grand jury, and I will bind this case over to the superior court?”

Peter turned to Jordan. “Was that English?”

“Say yes,” Jordan answered.

“Yes,” Peter repeated.

Judge Iannucci stared at him. “Yes, Your Honor,” he corrected.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Peter turned to Jordan again and, under his breath, muttered, “This still sucks.”

“You’re excused,” the judge said, and the bailiffs hefted Peter out of his seat again.

Jordan stood, giving way to the next defense attorney for the next case. He approached Diana Leven at the prosecutor’s table, still organizing the files she never had a chance to use. “Well,” she said, not bothering to look up at him. “I can’t say that was a surprise.”

“When are you going to send me discovery?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t remember getting your letter requesting it yet.” She pushed past him, hurrying up the aisle. Jordan made a mental note to get Selena to type something up and send it off to the prosecutor’s office, a formality, but one that he knew Diana would uphold. In a case this big, the DA followed every rule to the letter, so that if the case ever went up on appeal, procedure would not be the downfall of the original verdict.

Just outside the double doors of the courtroom, he was waylaid by the Houghtons. “What the hell was that?” Lewis demanded. “Aren’t we paying you to work in court?”

Jordan counted to five under his breath. “I spoke about this with my client, Peter. He gave me permission to waive the hearing.”

“But you didn’t say anything,” Lacy argued. “You didn’t even give him a chance.”

“Today’s hearing wouldn’t have benefited Peter. It would, however, have put your family under the microscope of every camera outside the courthouse today. That’s going to happen anyway. Did you really want it to be sooner rather than later?” He looked from Lacy Houghton to her husband, and then back again. “I did you a favor,” Jordan said, and he left them holding the truth between them, a stone that got heavier with every passing moment.

Patrick had been heading to the probable cause hearing for Peter Houghton when he received a cell phone call that sent him screaming in the opposite direction, to Smyth’s Gun Shop in Plainfield. The owner of the store, a round little man with a tobacco-stained beard, was sitting outside on the curb, sobbing, when Patrick arrived. Beside him was a patrol officer, who jerked his chin in the direction of the open door.

Patrick sat down beside the owner. “I’m Detective Ducharme,” he said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

The man shook his head. “It was so fast. She asked to see a pistol, a Smith and Wesson. Said she wanted to keep it in the house, for protection. She asked if I had any literature on that model, and when I turned my back to find some…she…” He shook his head and went silent.

“Where did she get the bullets?” Patrick asked.

“I didn’t sell them to her,” the owner said. “She must have had them in her purse.”

Patrick nodded. “You stay here with Officer Rodriguez. I might have some more questions.”

Inside the gun shop, there was a spray of blood and brain matter on the right-hand wall. The medical examiner, Guenther Frankenstein, was already bent over the body, lying sideways on the floor. “How the hell did you get here so fast?” Patrick asked.

Guenther shrugged. “I was in town at a baseball card collectors’ show.”

Patrick squatted beside him. “You collect baseball cards?”

“Well, I can’t very well collect livers, can I?” He glanced at Patrick. “We really have to stop meeting like this.”

“I wish.”

“Pretty self-explanatory,” Guenther said. “She stuck the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.”

Patrick noticed the purse on the glass counter. He rifled through it, finding a box of ammunition and the Wal-Mart receipt for them. Then he opened the woman’s wallet to find her ID, just at the same time Guenther rolled the body over.

Even with the gunshot residue blackening her features, Patrick recognized her before he saw her name. He’d spoken to Yvette Harvey; he’d been the one to tell her that her only child-a daughter with Down syndrome-had not survived the shooting at Sterling High.

Indirectly, Patrick realized, Peter Houghton’s casualty count was still rising.

“Just because someone collects guns doesn’t mean they intend to use them,” Peter said, scowling.

It was unseasonably warm for late March-a freakish eighty-five degrees-and the air-conditioning at the jail was broken. The inmates were walking around in their boxers; the guards were all on edge. The HVAC patrol, which had been called in on the pretense of humane incarceration, was working so slowly that Jordan figured they’d master their trade just in time for the snow to start falling again outside. He’d been sitting in a sweatbox of a conference room with Peter for over two hours now, and felt as if he’d soaked through every last fiber of his suit.

He wanted to quit. He wanted to go home and tell Selena that he never should have taken this case, and then he wanted to drive with his family to the eighteen stingy miles of beach that New Hampshire was blessed with and jump fully clothed into the frigid Atlantic. Dying of hypothermia couldn’t be any worse than the slow kill Diana Leven and the DA’s office had in store for him in court.

Whatever small hope Jordan had kindled by discovering a valid defense-albeit one that had never been used before a judge-had been steadily eroded in the weeks following the hearing by the discovery that had arrived from the DA’s office: stacks of paperwork, photos, and evidence. Given all this information, it was hard to imagine a jury caring why Peter had killed ten people-just that he had.

Jordan pinched the bridge of his nose. “You were collecting guns,” he repeated. “I suppose you just happened to be storing them under your bed until you could get a nice glass display case.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“People who collect guns do not hide them. People who collect guns do not have hit lists with photos circled.”

Perspiration beaded on Peter’s forehead, around the collar of his prison uniform, and his mouth tightened.

Jordan leaned forward. “Who’s the girl that got erased?”

“What girl?”

“In the photos. You circled her, and then you wrote LET LIVE.”

Peter looked away. “She’s just someone I used to know.”

“What’s her name?”

“Josie Cormier.” Peter hesitated, then faced Jordan again. “She’s okay, right?”

Cormier, Jordan thought. The only Cormier he knew was the judge sitting on Peter’s case.

It couldn’t be.

“Why?” he asked. “Did you hurt her?”

Peter shook his head. “That’s a loaded question.”

Had something happened here that Jordan didn’t know about?

“Was she your girlfriend?”

Peter smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “No.”

Jordan had been in Judge Cormier’s district court a few times. He liked her. She was tough, but she was fair. In fact, she was the best judge Peter could have drawn for his case-the alternative superior court justice was Judge Wagner, who was a very old, prosecution-biased judge. Josie Cormier had not been a victim of the shooting, but that wasn’t the only scenario that would compromise Judge Cormier as the justice for the trial. Suddenly Jordan was thinking of witness tampering, of the hundred things that could go wrong. He was wondering how he could find out what Josie Cormier knew about the shooting, without anyone else learning that he’d been looking into it.

He was wondering what she knew that might help Peter’s case.

“Have you talked to her since you’ve been in here?” Jordan said.

“If I’d talked to her, would I be asking you if she was okay?”

“Well, don’t talk to her,” Jordan instructed. “Don’t talk to anyone except me.”

“That’s like talking to a brick wall,” Peter muttered.

“You know, I could rattle off a thousand things I’d rather be doing than sitting with you in a conference room that’s as hot as hell.”

Peter narrowed his eyes. “Then why don’t you go do some of them? You don’t listen to a word I say, anyway.”

“I listen to every word, Peter. I listen to it, and then I think about the boxes of evidence the DA dropped at my door, all of which make you look like a cold-blooded killer. I hear you tell me you were collecting guns, like you’re some kind of Civil War buff.”

Peter flinched. “Fine. You want to know if I was going to use the guns? Yeah, I was. I planned it. I ran through the whole thing in my head. I worked out the details, down to the last second. I was going to kill the person I hated the most. But then I didn’t get to do it.”

“Those ten people-”

“Just got in the way,” Peter said.

“Then who were you trying to kill?”

On the opposite side of the room, the air conditioner suddenly choked to life. Peter turned away. “Me,” he said.

One Year Before

I still don’t think this is a good idea,” Lewis said as he opened the back door of the van. The dog, Dozer, was lying on his side, fighting to breathe.

“You heard the vet,” Lacy said, stroking the retriever’s head. Good dog. They’d gotten him when Peter was three; now, at twelve, his kidneys had shut down. Keeping him alive with medications was only for their benefit, not his: it was too hard to imagine their house without the dog padding through its halls.

“I wasn’t talking about putting him down,” Lewis clarified. “I was talking about bringing everyone along.”

The boys fell out of the back of the van like heavy stones. They squinted in the sunlight, hunched their shoulders. Their broad backs made Lacy think of oak trees that tapered to the ground; they both had the same habit of turning in their left foot when they walked. She wished they could have seen how very alike they were.

“I can’t believe you dragged us here,” Joey said.

Peter kicked at the gravel in the parking lot. “This sucks.”

“Language,” Lacy warned. “And as for all of us being here, I cannot believe you’d be selfish enough to not want to say good-bye to a member of the family.”

“We could have said good-bye at home,” Joey muttered.

Lacy put her hands on her hips. “Death is a part of life. I’d want to be surrounded by people I love when it’s my time, too.” She waited for Lewis to haul Dozer into his arms, then closed the hatch of the door.

Lacy had requested the last appointment of the day, so that the doctor wouldn’t be rushed. They sat alone in the waiting room, the dog draped like a blanket over Lewis’s legs. Joey picked up a Sports Illustrated magazine from three years ago and started to read. Peter folded his arms and stared up at the ceiling.

“Let’s all talk about our best Dozer memory,” Lacy said.

Lewis sighed. “For God’s sake…”

“This is lame,” Joey added.

“For me,” Lacy said, as if they hadn’t even spoken, “it was when Dozer was a puppy, and I found him on the dining room table with his head stuck inside the turkey.” She stroked the dog’s head. “That was the year we had soup for Thanksgiving.”

Joey slapped the magazine back on the end table and sighed.

Marcia, the vet’s assistant, was a woman with a long braid that reached past her hips. Lacy had delivered her twin sons five years ago. “Hi, Lacy,” she said, and she came right up and folded her in her arms. “You okay?”

The thing about death, Lacy knew, was that it robbed you of your vocabulary for comfort.

Marcia walked up to Dozer and rubbed him behind the ears. “Did you want to wait out here?”

“Yes,” Joey mouthed toward Peter.

“We’re all coming in,” Lacy said firmly.

They followed Marcia into one of the treatment rooms and settled Dozer on the examination table. He scrabbled for purchase, his claws clicking against the metal. “That’s a good boy,” Marcia said.

Lewis and the boys filed into the room, standing against the wall like a police lineup. When the vet walked in, bearing his hypodermic, they shrank back even further. “Would you like to help hold him?” the vet asked.

Lacy moved forward, nodding, and settled her arms around Marcia’s.

“Well, Dozer, you put up a fine fight,” the vet said. He turned to the boys. “He won’t feel this.”

“What is it?” Lewis asked, staring at the needle.

“A combination of chemicals that relax the muscles and terminate nerve transmission. And without nerve transmission, there’s no thought, no feeling, no movement. It’s a bit like drifting off to sleep.” He felt around for a vein in the dog’s leg, while Marcia kept Dozer steady. He injected the solution and rubbed Dozer’s head.

The dog took a deeper breath, and then stopped moving. Marcia stepped away, leaving Dozer in Lacy’s arms. “We’ll give you a minute,” she said, and she and the vet left the room.

Lacy was used to holding new life in her hands, not feeling it pass from the body in her arms. It was just another transition-pregnancy to birth, child to adult, life to death-but there was something about letting go of the family pet that was even more difficult, as if it were silly to have feelings this strong for something that wasn’t human. As if admitting that you loved a dog-one that was always underfoot and scratching the leather and tracking mud into the house-as much as you loved your biological children were foolish.

And yet.

This was the dog who had stoically and silently allowed two-year-old Peter to ride him like a horse around the yard. This was the dog who had barked the house down when Joey had fallen asleep on the couch while his dinner was cooking, until the entire oven was on fire. This was the dog who sat beneath the desk on Lacy’s feet in the dead of winter as she answered email, sharing the heat of his pale, pinkened belly.

She bent over the dog’s body and began to weep-quietly, at first, and then with loud sobs that made Joey turn away and Lewis wince.

“Do something,” she heard Joey say, his voice thick and ropy.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and assumed it was Lewis, but then Peter began to speak. “When he was a puppy,” Peter said. “The time we went to pick him out from the litter. All his brothers and sisters were trying to climb over the pen, and he was on the top of the stairs, and he looked at us and tripped and fell down them.” Lacy raised her face and stared at him. “That’s my best memory,” Peter said.

Lacy had always considered herself lucky to have somehow received a child who was not the cookie-cutter American boy, one who was sensitive and emotional and so in tune with what others felt and thought. She let go of her fist-grip on the dog’s fur and opened her arms so that Peter could move into them. Unlike Joey, who was already taller than her and more muscular than Lewis, Peter still fit into her embrace. Even that square span of his shoulder blades-so expansive underneath a cotton shirt-seemed more delicate underneath her hands. Unfinished and rough-hewn, a man still waiting to happen.

If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up.

At every school concert and play in Josie’s life, she’d had only one parent in the audience. Her mother-to her credit-had rearranged court dates so that she could watch Josie be plaque in the school dental hygiene play, or hear her five-note solo in the Christmas chorale. There were other kids who also had single parents-the ones who came from divorced families, for example-but Josie was the only person in the school who had never met her father. When she was little and her second-grade class was making necktie cards for Father’s Day, she was relegated to sitting in the corner with the girl whose dad had died prematurely at age forty-two of cancer.

Like any curious kid, she’d asked her mother about this when she was growing up. Josie wanted to know why her parents weren’t married anymore; she hadn’t expected to hear that they were never married. “He wasn’t the marrying type,” she’d told Josie, and Josie hadn’t understood why that also meant he wasn’t the type to send a present for his daughter’s birthday, or to invite her to his home for a week during the summer, or to even call to hear her voice.

This year, she was supposed to be taking biology, and she was already nervous about the unit on genetics. Josie didn’t know if her father had brown eyes or blue ones; if he had curly hair or freckles or six toes. Her mother had shrugged off Josie’s concerns. “Surely there’s someone in your class who’s adopted,” she said. “You know fifty percent more about your background than they do.”

This is what Josie had pieced together about her father:

His name was Logan Rourke. He’d been a teacher at the law school her mother had attended.

His hair had gone white prematurely, but-her mother assured her-in a cool, not creepy, way.

He was ten years older than her mother, which meant he was fifty.

He had long fingers and played the piano.

He couldn’t whistle.

Not quite enough to fill a standard biography, if you asked Josie, not that anyone ever bothered to.

She was sitting in bio lab next to Courtney. Josie ordinarily would not have picked Courtney as a lab partner-she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier-but that didn’t seem to matter. Mrs. Aracort was the teacher-adviser to the cheerleaders, and Courtney was one of those. No matter how skimpy their lab reports turned out, they still always managed to get A’s.

A dissected cat brain was sitting on the front desk next to Mrs. Aracort. It smelled of formaldehyde and looked like roadkill, which would have been bad enough, but in addition, last period had been lunchtime. (“That thing,” Courtney had shuddered, “is going to make me even more bulimic.”) Josie was trying not to look at it while she worked on her class project: each student had been given a wireless-enabled Dell laptop to surf the Net for examples of humane animal research. So far Josie had catalogued a primate study being done by an allergy pill manufacturer, where monkeys were made asthmatic and then cured, and another one that involved SIDS and puppies.

She hit a browser button by mistake and got a home page for The Boston Globe. Splashed across the screen was election coverage: the race between the incumbent district attorney and his challenger, the dean of students at Harvard Law School, a man named Logan Rourke.

Butterflies rose inside Josie’s chest. There couldn’t be more than one, could there? She squinted, leaning closer to the screen, but the photograph was grainy and there was a sunlight glare. “What’s wrong with you?” Courtney whispered.

Josie shook her head and closed the cover of her laptop, as if it, too, could hold fast to this secret.

He never used a urinal. Even if Peter just had to pee, he didn’t want to do it standing next to some gargantuan twelfth grader who might make a comment about, well, the fact that he was a puny ninth grader, particularly in his nether regions. Instead, he’d go into a stall and close the door for privacy.

He liked to read the bathroom walls. One of the stalls had a running series of knock-knock jokes. Others blurted the names of girls who gave blow jobs. There was one scribble that Peter found his eye veering toward repeatedly: TREY WILKINS IS A FAGGOT. He didn’t know Trey Wilkins-didn’t think he was even a student at Sterling High anymore-but Peter wondered if Trey had come into the bathroom and used the stalls to pee, too.

Peter had left English in the middle of a pop quiz on grammar. He truly didn’t think that in the grand scheme of life, it was going to matter whether or not an adjective modified a noun or a verb or just dropped off the face of the earth, which is what he was sincerely hoping would happen before he had to go back to class. He had already done his business in the bathroom; now he was just wasting time. If he failed this quiz, it would be the second in a row. It wasn’t even his parents’ anger that Peter was worried about. It was the way they’d look at him, disappointed that he hadn’t turned out more like Joey.

He heard the door of the bathroom open, and the busy slice of hallway noise that trailed on the heels of the two kids who entered. Peter ducked down, scanning beneath the stall door. Nikes. “I’m sweating like a pig,” said one voice.

The second kid laughed. “That’s because you’re a lard-ass.”

“Yeah, right. I could beat you on a basketball court with one hand tied behind my back.”

Peter could hear a faucet running, water splashing.

“Hey, you’re getting me soaked!”

“Aaaah, much better,” the first voice said. “At least now I’m not sweating. Hey, check out my hair. I look like Alfalfa.”

“Who?”

“What are you, retarded? The kid from the Little Rascals with the cowlick thing on the back of his head.”

“Actually, you look like a total fag…”

“You know…” More laughter. “I do sort of look like Peter.”

As soon as Peter heard his name, his heart thumped hard. He slid open the bolt in the stall door and stepped outside. Standing in front of the bank of sinks was a football player he knew only by sight, and his own brother. Joey’s hair was dripping wet, standing up on the back of his head the way Peter’s sometimes did, even when he tried to slick it down with his mother’s hair gel.

Joey flicked a glance his way. “Get lost, freak,” he ordered, and Peter hurried out of the bathroom, wondering if that was even possible when you’d been missing most of your life.

The two men standing in front of Alex’s bench shared a duplex, but hated each other. Arliss Undergroot was a Sheetrock installer with tattoos up and down both arms, a shaved head, and enough piercings in his head to have set off the metal detectors at the courthouse. Rodney Eakes was a vegan bank teller with a prized record collection of original cast recordings from Broadway shows. Arliss lived downstairs, Rodney lived upstairs. A few months back, Rodney had brought home a bale of hay, planning to use it for mulching his organic garden, but he never got around to it and the hay bale remained on Arliss’s porch. Arliss asked Rodney to get rid of the hay, but Rodney hadn’t moved fast enough. So one night, Arliss and his girlfriend cut the twine and spread the hay out over the front lawn.

Rodney called the police, and they had actually arrested Arliss on the grounds of criminal mischief: legal speak for destroying a bale of hay.

“Why are the taxpayers of New Hampshire shelling out money for a case like this to be tried in court?” Alex asked.

The police prosecutor shrugged. “The Chief asked me to pursue it,” he said, but then he rolled his eyes.

He had already proven that Arliss had taken the bale of hay and spread it over the lawn-the burden of proof fulfilled. But a conviction in this case would mean Arliss would have a criminal record for the rest of his life.

He might have been a lousy neighbor, but he didn’t deserve that.

Alex turned to the prosecutor. “How much did the victim pay for that bale of hay?”

“Four dollars, Your Honor.”

Then she faced the defendant. “Do you have four dollars with you today?”

Arliss nodded.

“Good. Your case is filed without a finding conditional upon your paying the victim. Take four dollars out of your wallet and give it to the police officer over there, who will bring it to Mr. Eakes in the back of the courtroom.” She glanced at her clerk. “We’re taking a fifteen-minute recess.”

In chambers, Alex stripped off her robe and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. She took the back stairs to the bottom floor of the building and lit up, inhaling deeply. There were days when she was proud of her job, and then there were others, like today, when she wondered why she even bothered.

She found Liz, the groundskeeper, raking the lawn in front of the courthouse. “I brought you a cigarette,” Alex said.

“What’s wrong?”

“How did you know something was wrong?”

“Because you’ve been working here for how many years, and you’ve never brought me a cigarette.”

Alex leaned against the tree, watching leaves as bright as jewels catch in the tines of Liz’s rake. “I just wasted three hours on a case that never should have made it to a courthouse. I have a splitting headache. And I ran out of toilet paper in the bathroom in chambers and had to call the clerk in to get me a roll from maintenance.”

Liz glanced up at the tree as a gust of wind sent a new score of leaves onto the raked grass. “Alex,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you got laid?”

Alex turned, her mouth dropping open. “What does that have to-”

“Most people who go to work spend their time wondering how long till they get back home to do whatever it is they really want to do. For you, it’s the other way around.”

“That’s not true. Josie and I-”

“What did you two do for fun this weekend?”

Alex plucked a leaf and shredded it. In the past three years, Josie’s social calendar had become crammed with phone calls and sleepovers and packs of kids going to a movie or hanging out in someone’s basement lair. This weekend, Josie had gone shopping with Haley Weaver, a junior who’d just gotten her driver’s license. Alex had written two decisions and cleaned out the fruit and vegetable drawers in her refrigerator.

“I’m setting you up on a blind date,” Liz said.

There were a number of business establishments in Sterling that hired teenagers for after-school employment. After his first summer at QuikCopy, Peter had deduced that this was because the jobs mostly sucked, and they couldn’t find anyone else to do them.

He was responsible for photocopying most of the course material for Sterling College, which professors brought in. He knew how to shrink a document down to one-thirty-second of its original size, and how to add toner. When customers paid, he liked to guess what size bill they were going to pull out of their wallets just by the way they dressed or wore their hair. College kids always used twenties. Moms with strollers whipped out a credit card. Professors used crumpled singles.

The reason he was working was because he needed a new computer with a better graphics card, so that he could do some of the gaming design he and Derek had been into lately. It never failed to amaze Peter how you could take a seemingly senseless string of commands and-magic!-it would become a knight or a sword or a castle on the screen. He liked the very concept: that something the ordinary person might dismiss as gibberish was actually vibrant and eye-catching, if you knew how to look at it.

Last week, when his boss said he’d hired another high school student, Peter had become so nervous that he actually had to lock himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes until he could act like it was no big deal. As stupid and boring as this job was, it was a haven. Peter was alone here most of the afternoon; he didn’t have to worry about crossing paths with the cool kids.

But if Mr. Cargrew was hiring someone else from Sterling High, then that person knew who Peter was. And even if the kid wasn’t part of the popular crowd, the copy center would no longer be a comfortable place. Peter would have to think twice about what he said or did, because otherwise, it would become fodder for rumors around school.

To Peter’s great surprise, however, his co-worker turned out to be Josie Cormier.

She had walked in behind Mr. Cargrew. “This is Josie,” he said, by way of introduction. “You two know each other?”

“Sort of,” Josie had replied, as Peter answered, “Yeah.”

“Peter will show you the ropes,” Mr. Cargrew said, and then he left to go play golf.

Occasionally when Peter walked down the hall in school and he saw Josie with her new group of friends, he didn’t recognize her. She dressed differently now-in jeans that showed off her flat belly and a rainbow of T-shirts layered one over the other. She wore makeup that made her eyes look enormous. And a little sad, he sometimes thought, but he doubted she knew that.

The last major conversation he’d had with Josie had been five years ago, when they were in sixth grade. He had been certain that the real Josie would come out of this fog of popularity and realize that the people she was hanging around with were about as scintillating as cardboard cutouts. He was sure that as soon as they started ripping on other people, she’d come back to Peter. Oh my God, she would say, and they’d laugh about her journey to the underworld. What was I thinking?

But Josie never came crawling back to him, and then he started to hang out with Derek from the soccer team, and by the time he was in seventh grade he found it really hard to believe that once, he and Josie had spent two weeks coming up with a secret handshake that no one else would ever be able to duplicate.

“So,” Josie had said that first day, as if she’d never met him before, “what do we do?”

They had been working together for a week now. Well, not together-it was more like they were doing a dance punctuated with the sighs and throaty grumbles of the copiers and the shrill ring of the telephone. Mostly, if they spoke, it was informational: Do we have any more toner for the color copier? How much do I charge someone to receive a fax here?

This afternoon, Peter was photocopying articles for a psychology course at the college. Every now and then, as the pages whipped through the automatic collating machine, he’d see brain scans of schizophrenics-bright pink circles at the frontal lobes that reproduced in shades of gray. “What’s that word you use when you call something by its brand name instead of what it really is?”

Josie was stapling together another job. She shrugged.

“Like Xerox,” Peter said. “Or Kleenex.”

“Jell-O,” Josie answered after a moment.

“Google.”

Josie glanced up. “Band-Aid,” she said.

“Q-tip.”

She thought for a second, a grin spreading over her face. “FedEx. Wiffle ball.”

Peter smiled. “Rollerblade. Frisbee.”

“Crock-Pot.”

“That’s not-”

“Go look it up,” Josie said. “Jacuzzi. Post-it.”

“Magic Marker.”

“Ping-Pong!”

By now they’d both stopped working. They were standing next to each other, laughing, when the bell over the door chimed.

Matt Royston walked into the store. He was wearing a Sterling hockey cap-even though the season wouldn’t start for another month, everyone knew he would be tapped for varsity, even as a freshman. Peter-who’d been reveling in the miracle that here was Josie, again, like she used to be-watched her turn to Matt. Her cheeks pinkened; her eyes leaped like the brightest part of a flame. “What are you doing here?”

He leaned against the counter. “Is that how you treat all your customers?”

“Do you need something copied?”

Matt’s mouth cocked up in a grin. “No way. I’m an original.” He glanced around the store. “So this is where you work.”

“No, I just come here for the free caviar and champagne,” Josie joked.

Peter watched this exchange from behind the counter. He waited for Josie to tell Matt that she was in the middle of doing something, which might not necessarily be true, but they had been having a conversation. Sort of.

“When do you get off?” Matt asked.

“Five.”

“Some of us are going over to Drew’s tonight to hang out.”

“Is that an invitation?” she said, and Peter noticed that when she smiled, really hard, she had a dimple he’d never noticed before. Or maybe she just hadn’t smiled that way around him.

“Do you want it to be?” Matt answered.

Peter walked toward the counter. “We have to get back to work,” he blurted out.

Matt’s eyes flicked over Peter. “Stop looking at me, homo.”

Josie moved so that her body was blocking Peter’s view of Matt. “What time?”

“Seven.”

“I’ll see you over there,” she said.

Matt rapped his hands against the counter. “Cool,” he replied, and he walked out of the store.

“Saran Wrap,” Peter said. “Vaseline.”

Josie turned to him, confused. “What? Oh. Right.” She picked up the materials she’d been stapling, stacked a few more packets on top of each other, aligned their edges.

Peter added paper to the machine that was working on his job. “Do you like him?” he asked.

“Matt? I guess.”

“Not like that,” Peter said. He pressed the Copy button, watched the machine begin to birth a hundred identical babies.

When Josie didn’t answer, he went to stand next to her at the sorting table. He gathered a packet of papers in his hands and stapled it, then handed it to her. “What does it feel like?” he asked.

“What does what feel like?”

Peter thought for a moment. “Being at the top.”

Josie reached across him for another packet of material and fed it into the stapler. She did three of these, and Peter was certain that she was going to ignore him, but then she spoke. “Like if you take one wrong step,” she said, “you’re going to fall.”

When she said that, Peter could hear a note in her voice that was like a lullaby. He could vividly remember sitting on Josie’s driveway in the heat of July, trying to make a fire with sawdust, sunlight, and his glasses. He could hear her yelling over her shoulder as they ran home from school, daring Peter to catch up. He saw a faint flush paint her face and realized that the Josie who used to be his friend was still there, trapped inside several cocoons, like one of those Russian nesting dolls that hides another and another, until you reach the one that fits snug in the palm of your hand.

If he could just somehow make her remember those things, too. Maybe being popular wasn’t what had made Josie start hanging out with Matt and Company. Maybe it was just because she’d forgotten that she liked hanging out with Peter.

From the corner of his eye, he looked at Josie. She was biting her lower lip, concentrating hard on getting the staple straight. Peter wished he knew how to be as easy and natural as Matt, but all his life, he’d always seemed to laugh just a little too loud or too late; to be oblivious to the fact that he was the one being laughed at. He didn’t know how to be anyone except who he’d always been, so he took a deep breath and told himself that not too long ago, that had been good enough for Josie anyway.

“Hey,” he said. “Check this out.” He walked into the adjoining office, the one where Mr. Cargrew kept a picture of his wife and kids and his computer, which was firmly off-limits and password-encoded.

Josie followed him and stood behind the chair as Peter sat down. He keyed a few strokes, and suddenly the screen opened up for access.

“How did you do that?” Josie asked.

Peter shrugged. “I’ve been playing around with computers a lot. I hacked into Cargrew’s last week.”

“I don’t think we should-”

“Wait.” Peter picked his way through the computer until he reached a well-hidden file of downloads and opened up the first porn site.

“Is that…a dwarf?” Josie murmured. “And a donkey?”

Peter tilted his head. “I thought it was a really big cat.”

“Either way, it’s totally gross.” She shuddered. “Ugh. How am I going to take a paycheck from that guy’s hand now?” Then she looked down at Peter. “What else can you do with that computer?”

“Anything,” he bragged.

“Like…hack into other places? Schools and stuff?”

“Sure,” Peter said, although he didn’t really know about that. He was just starting to learn about encryption and how to make wormholes through it.

“What about finding an address?”

“Piece of cake,” Peter answered. “Whose?”

“Someone totally random,” she said, and she leaned over him to type. He could smell her hair-apples-and felt the press of her shoulder against his. Peter closed his eyes, waiting for lightning to strike. Josie was pretty, and she was a girl, and yet…he felt nothing.

Was that because she was too familiar-like a sister?

Or because she wasn’t a he?

Stop looking at me, homo.

He did not tell Josie this, but when he’d first found Mr. Cargrew’s porn site, he’d found himself staring at the guys, not the girls. Did that mean he was attracted to them? Then again, he’d looked at the animals, too. Couldn’t it just have been curiosity? Comparison, even, between the men and him?

What if it turned out that Matt-and everyone else-was right?

Josie clicked on the mouse a few times until the screen was filled with an article from The Boston Globe. “There,” she said, pointing. “That guy.”

Peter squinted at the caption. “Who’s Logan Rourke?”

“Who cares,” Josie said. “Someone who looks like he has an unlisted address, anyway.”

He did, but then, Peter figured that anyone running for public office probably was smart enough to take their personal information out of the phone book. It took him ten minutes to figure out that Logan Rourke had worked for Harvard Law School, and another fifteen to hack into the human resources files there.

“Ta-da,” Peter said. “He lives in Lincoln. Conant Road.”

He looked over his shoulder and saw his smile spread, contagious, over Josie’s face. She stared at the screen for a long moment. “You are good,” she said.

Economists, it was often said, knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Lewis considered this as he opened up the enormous file on his office computer, the World Values Survey. Gathered by Norwegian social scientists, here was data collected from hundreds of thousands of people around the world-an endless array of details. Simple ones-like age, gender, birth order, weight, religion, marital status, number of children-and more complex accounts, like political views and religious affiliations. The survey had even considered time allocation: how long a person spent at work, how often he went to church, how many times a week he had sex and with how many partners.

What would have seemed tedious to most people was, to Lewis, like a roller-coaster ride. When you started to sort out the patterns in data this massive, you didn’t know where you’d twist or turn, how steep the fall or how soaring the heights. He’d examined these numbers often enough to know that he’d be able to quickly crank out a paper for next week’s conference. It didn’t have to be perfect-the gathering was small, and his higher-ranking peers wouldn’t be present. He could always take whatever he eked out now and polish it later for publication in an academic journal.

The focus of his paper involved putting a price on the variables of happiness. Everyone always said that money bought happiness, but how much? Did income have a direct or causal effect on happiness? Were happier people more successful in their jobs, or were they given a higher wage because they were happier people?

Happiness wasn’t limited to one’s income, either. Was marriage more valuable in America or Europe? Did sex matter? Why did churchgoers report higher levels of happiness than nonchurchgoers? Why did Scandinavians-who scored high on the happiness scale-have one of the highest suicide rates in the world?

As Lewis set about picking through the variables of the survey using multivariate regression analysis on STATA, he thought about the value he’d have put on the variables of his own happiness. What monetary compensation would have made up for not having a woman like Lacy in his life? For not getting a tenured position at Sterling College? For his health?

It didn’t do the average person much good to know that marital status was associated with a 0.07 level increase in happiness (with a standard error of 0.02 percent). On the other hand, tell the Average Joe that being married had the same effect on overall happiness as an additional $100,000 a year, and it put things into perspective.

These were the findings he’d reached so far:

Higher income was associated with higher happiness, but in diminishing returns. For example, someone who made $50,000 reported being happier than the man with a salary of $25,000. But the incremental gain in happiness that came from getting a raise from $50K to $100K was much less.

In spite of material improvements, happiness is flat over time-relative income might be more important than absolute income gains.

Well-being was greatest among women, married people, the highly educated, and those whose parents didn’t divorce.

Women’s happiness was declining over time, possibly because they’d reached greater equality with men in the labor market.

Blacks in the U.S. were much less happy than whites, but their life satisfaction was on the upswing.

Calculations indicated that “reparation” for being unemployed would take $60,000 per year. “Reparation” for being black would take $30,000 per year. “Reparation” for being widowed or separated would take $100,000 per year.

There was a game Lewis used to play with himself, after the kids were born, when he was feeling so ridiculously lucky that surely tragedy was bound to strike. He’d lie in bed and force himself to choose what he was first willing to lose: his marriage, his job, a child. He would wonder how much a man could take before he reduced himself to nothing.

He closed the data window and stared at the screen saver on his computer. It was a picture taken when the kids were eight and ten, at a petting zoo in Connecticut. Joey had hoisted his brother up, piggyback, and they were grinning, with a striated pink sunset in the background. Moments later, a deer (deer on steroids, Lacy had said) had knocked Joey’s feet out from beneath him and both boys had fallen and dissolved into tears…but that was not the way Lewis liked to recall it.

Happiness wasn’t just what you reported; it was also how you chose to remember.

There was one other finding he’d catalogued: happiness was U-shaped. People were happiest when they were very young and very old. The trough came, roughly, when you hit your forties.

Or in other words, Lewis thought with relief, this is as bad as it gets.

Although Josie got A’s in math and liked the subject, it was the one grade she had to fight for. Numbers did not come easily to her, although she could reason with logic and write an essay without breaking a sweat. In this, she supposed, she was like her mother.

Or possibly her father.

Mr. McCabe, their math teacher, was walking through the rows of desks, tossing a tennis ball against the ceiling and singing a bastardized Don McLean song:

“Bye, bye, what’s the value of pi

Gotta fidget with the digits

Till this class has gone by…

Them ninth graders were workin’ hard with a sigh

Sayin’, Mr. McCabe, come on, why?

Oh Mr. McCabe, come on, why-y-y…”

Josie erased a coordinate from the graph paper in front of her. “We’re not even using pi,” one kid said.

The teacher whirled around and tossed the tennis ball so that it bounced on the boy’s desk. “Andrew, I’m so glad to see you woke up in time to notice that.”

“Does this count as a pop quiz?”

“No. Maybe I should go on TV,” Mr. McCabe mused. “Is there a Math Idol?”

“God, I hope not,” Matt muttered from the desk behind Josie. He poked her shoulder and she pushed her paper to the upper left corner of her desk, because she knew he could see the homework answers better there.

This week they were working on graphing. In addition to a bazillion assignments that made you take data and force it into bar graphs and charts, each student had had to create and present a graph of something near and dear to them. Mr. McCabe left ten minutes at the end of each class period for the presentation. Yesterday, Matt had shown off a graph of relative age of hockey players in the NHL. Josie, who was presenting hers tomorrow, had polled her friends to see if there was a ratio between the number of hours you spent doing your homework and your grade point average.

Today was Peter Houghton’s turn. She had seen him carrying his graph into school, a rolled-up piece of poster board. “Well, look at that,” Mr. McCabe said. “Turns out we are talking about pie. The other one, that is.”

Peter’s graph was a pie chart. It had been clearly shaded with colors, and computer labels identified each section. The title at the top of the chart said POPULARITY.

“Whenever you’re ready, Peter,” Mr. McCabe said.

Peter looked a little bit like he was going to pass out, but then, Peter always looked like that. Since Josie had started working at the copy shop, they’d been talking again, but-by unwritten rule-only outside of school. Inside was different: a fishbowl where anything you said and did was being watched by everyone else.

When they were kids, Peter had never seemed to notice when he was drawing attention just by being himself. Like when he’d decide to speak Martian during recess, for example. Josie supposed that the flip side of this, the optimistic angle, was that Peter never tried to be like anyone else. She couldn’t lay claim to that herself.

Peter cleared his throat. “My graph is about status in this school. My statistical sample came from the twenty-four students in this class. You can see here”-he pointed at one wedge of the pie-“that a little less than a third of the class are popular.”

Shaded violet-the color of popularity-were seven wedges, each sporting a different classmate’s name. There was Matt, and Drew. A few girls who hung out at lunchtime with Josie. But the class clown was also lumped in that group, Josie noticed, and the new kid who’d transferred from Washington, D.C.

“Over here are the geeks,” Peter said, and Josie could see the names of the class brain and the girl who played tuba in the marching band. “The largest group is what I call normal. And roughly five percent are outcasts.”

Everyone had grown quiet. This was one of those moments, Josie realized, when the guidance counselors would get called in to give everyone a booster shot of tolerance for differences. She could see Mr. McCabe’s brow furrow like origami as he tried to figure out how to turn Peter’s presentation into an After School Special moment; she saw Drew and Matt grinning at each other; and most of all, she noticed Peter, who was blissfully unaware that all hell was about to break loose.

Mr. McCabe cleared his throat. “You know, Peter, maybe you and I should-”

Matt’s hand shot up. “Mr. McCabe, I have a question.”

“Matt-”

“No, seriously. I can’t read that skinny piece of the pie chart. The orange one.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “That’s a bridge. You know. A person who can fit into more than one category, or who hangs out with different kinds of people. Like Josie.”

He turned to her, beaming, and Josie felt everyone’s eyes on her-a hail of arrows. She curled over her desk like a midnight rose, letting her hair fall over her face. To be honest, she was used to being stared at-walk anywhere with Courtney and it was bound to happen-but there was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.

At the very least, kids would remember that once, Josie had been an outcast who used to hang out with Peter. Or they’d assume that Peter had some weird crush on her, which was just sick, and she’d never hear the end of it. A murmur ran through the classroom like an electric shock. Freak, someone whispered, and Josie prayed prayed prayed that they were not talking about her.

Because there was a God, the bell rang.

“So, Josie,” Drew said. “Are you the Tobin or the Golden Gate?”

Josie tried to stuff her books into her backpack, but they scattered to the ground, pages splayed. “London,” John Eberhard snickered. “Look, she’s falling down.”

By now, someone in her math class had surely told someone else down the hall what had happened. Josie would hear laughter following her like a kite’s tail for that whole day-maybe even longer.

She realized that someone was trying to help her pick up her books, and then-one beat later-that this someone was Peter. “Don’t,” Josie said, holding up a hand, a force field that stopped Peter in his tracks. “Don’t ever talk to me again, all right?”

In the hallway, she turned corners blindly until she found the little alley that led to the wood shop. Josie had been so naïve, thinking that once she belonged, she was firmly entrenched. But In only existed because someone had drawn a line in the sand, so that everyone else was Out; and that line changed constantly. You might find yourself, through no fault of your own, suddenly standing on the wrong side.

What Peter hadn’t graphed was how fragile popularity was. Here was the irony: she wasn’t a bridge at all; she’d completely crossed over to become part of her group. She’d excluded other people to get to where she so badly wanted to be. Why would those kids ever welcome her back?

“Hey.”

At the sound of Matt’s voice, Josie drew in a sharp breath. “Just so you know, I’m not friends with him.”

“Well, actually, he’s right about you.”

Josie blinked at him. She’d witnessed, firsthand, Matt’s cruelty-how he’d shoot rubber bands at ESL students who didn’t know the words to report him to the faculty; how he called one overweight girl the Walking Earthquake; how he’d hide a shy kid’s math textbook in order to watch him freak out, thinking it was lost. It was funny then, because it hadn’t been about Josie. But being the object of his humiliation felt like a slap. She’d thought, mistakenly, that hanging with the right crowd granted her immunity, but that turned out to be a joke. They’d cut you down anyway, as long as it made them seem funnier, cooler, different from you.

Seeing Matt with that grin on his face, as if he’d thought she was a total joke all along, hurt even more, because she’d considered him a friend. Well, to be honest, sometimes she wished for even more than that: when a fringe of hair fell over his eyes and his smile lit as slowly as a fuse, she went totally monosyllabic. But Matt had that effect on everyone-even Courtney, who’d gone out with him in sixth grade for two weeks.

“I never thought anything the homo said would be worth listening to, but bridges take you from one place to another,” Matt said. “And that’s what you do to me.” He took Josie’s hand, pressed it up against his chest.

His heart was beating so hard she could feel it, as if possibility were something you might cup in your palm. She looked up at him, keeping her eyes wide open as he leaned in to kiss her, so that she would not miss a single, startling moment. Josie could taste the heat of him like cinnamon candy, the kind that burned.

Finally, when Josie remembered that she had to breathe, she tore away from Matt. She had never been so aware of every inch of her skin; even the bits hidden under layers of T-shirt and sweater had come alive.

“Jesus,” Matt said, backing away.

She panicked. Maybe he had just remembered he was kissing a girl who five minutes ago had been a social pariah. Or maybe she’d done something wrong during the kiss. It’s not like there was a manual you could read so you’d know how to do it right.

“I’m guess I’m not very good at that,” Josie stammered.

Matt raised his brows. “If you get much better…you might kill me.”

Josie felt a smile start inside her like a candle flame. “Really?”

He nodded.

“That was my first kiss,” she admitted.

When Matt touched her lower lip with his thumb, Josie could feel it everywhere-from her fingertips to her throat to the heat between her legs. “Well,” he said. “It’s not going to be your last.”

Alex was getting ready in her bathroom when Josie wandered in, looking for a new razor. “What’s that?” Josie had asked, scrutinizing Alex’s face in the mirror as if it belonged to a stranger.

“Mascara?”

“Well, I know what it is,” Josie said. “I meant, what’s it doing on you?”

“Maybe I felt like wearing makeup.”

Josie sank down onto the lip of the bathtub, grinning. “And maybe I’m the Queen of England. What is it…a new photo for some law review?” Suddenly, her eyebrows shot up. “You’re not going on, like, a date, are you?”

“Not ‘like’ a date,” Alex said, brushing on blush. “It’s an honest-to-goodness one.”

“Oh, my gosh. Tell me about him.”

“I don’t know anything. Liz set me up.”

“Liz the custodian?”

“She’s a groundskeeper,” Alex said.

“Whatever. She must have told you something about this guy.” Josie hesitated. “It is a guy, right?”

“Josie!”

“Well, it’s been a really long time. The last date you went out on that I can remember was the man who wouldn’t eat anything green.”

“That wasn’t the issue,” Alex said. “It was that he wouldn’t let me eat anything green.”

Josie stood up and reached for a tube of lipstick. “This is a good color for you,” she said, and she swept the tube over Alex’s mouth.

Alex and Josie were exactly the same height; looking into her daughter’s eyes, Alex could see a tiny reflection of herself. She wondered why she’d never done this with Josie: sat her down in the bathroom and played with eye shadow, painted her toenails, curled her hair. They were memories that every other mother of a daughter seemed to have; only now was Alex realizing that it had been up to her to create them.

“There,” Josie said, turning Alex to look in the mirror. “What do you think?”

Alex was staring, but not at herself. Over her shoulder was Josie-and for the first time, Alex could really see a piece of herself in her daughter. It wasn’t so much the shape of the face but the shine of it; not the color of the eyes but the dream caught like smoke in them. There was no amount of expensive makeup that would make her look the way her Josie did; that was simply what falling in love did to a person.

Could you be jealous of your own child?

“Well,” Josie said, patting Alex’s shoulders. “I’d ask you out for a second date.”

The doorbell rang. “I’m not even dressed,” Alex said, panicked.

“I’ll stall him.” Josie hurried down the stairs; as Alex shimmied into a black dress and heels, she could hear conversation stir, rise up the stairs.

Joe Urquhardt was a Canadian banker who’d been roommates with Liz’s cousin in Toronto. He was, she had promised, a nice guy. Alex asked why, then, if he was so nice, he was still single.

How would you answer that question? Liz had asked, and Alex had to think for a moment.

I’m not that nice, she’d said.

She was pleasantly surprised to see that Joe was not troll-statured, that he had a head of wavy brown hair that did not seem to be attached by double-sided tape, and that he had teeth. He whistled when he saw Alex. “All rise,” he said. “And by all, I do mean Mr. Happy.”

The smile froze on Alex’s face. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” she asked, and she dragged Josie into the kitchen. “Shoot me now.”

“Okay, that was pretty awful. But at least he eats green food. I asked.”

“What if you go out there and say I’m violently ill?” Alex said. “You and I can get take-out. Rent a movie or something.”

Josie’s smile faded. “But, Mom, I’ve already got plans.” She peered out the doorway to where Joe was waiting. “I could tell Matt that-”

“No, no,” Alex said, forcing a smile. “One of us ought to be having a good time.”

She walked out of the kitchen and found Joe holding up a candlestick, scrutinizing the bottom. “I’m very sorry, but something’s come up.”

“Tell me about it, babe,” Joe said, leering.

“No, I mean that I can’t go out tonight. There’s a case,” she lied. “I have to go back into court.”

Maybe being from Canada was what kept Joe from understanding how incredibly unlikely it would be for court to be in session on a Saturday night. “Oh,” he said. “Well, far be it from me to keep those wheels of justice from grinding. Some other time?”

Alex nodded, ushering him outside. She took off her heels and padded upstairs to change into her rattiest sweats. She would eat chocolate for dinner; she would watch chick flicks until she was completely sobbed out. As she passed the bathroom, she could hear the shower running-Josie getting ready for her own date.

For a moment Alex stood with her hand on the door, wondering whether Josie would welcome her if she went in and guided her in putting on her makeup, offered to style her hair-just as Josie had done for her. But for Josie, that was natural-she’d spent a lifetime grabbing moments of Alex’s time, when Alex was busy preparing for something else. Somehow, Alex had assumed that time was infinite, that Josie would always be there waiting. She never guessed that she herself would one day be left behind.

In the end, Alex drew away from the bathroom door without knocking, too afraid she might hear Josie say she did not need her mother’s help to even risk making that initial offer.

The one thing that had saved Josie from total social ruin in the wake of Peter’s math presentation was her simultaneous anointing as Matt Royston’s girlfriend. Unlike most of the other sophomores who were occasional couples-random hookups at parties, best-friend-with-benefits situations-she and Matt were an item. Matt walked her to her classes and often left her at the door with a kiss that everyone watched. Anyone stupid enough to mention Peter Houghton’s name in conjunction with Josie’s had to answer to him.

Everyone, that is, except for Peter himself. At work, he didn’t seem to be able to pick up on the clues that Josie gave him-turning her back when he came into the room, ignoring him when he asked her a question. He finally cornered her in the supply room one afternoon. How come you’re acting like this? he said.

Because when I was nice to you, you thought we were friends.

But we are friends, he replied.

Josie had faced him. You don’t get to decide that, she said.

One afternoon at work, when Josie went out to the Dumpster with a load of trash, Peter was already there. It was his fifteen-minute break; usually he walked across the street and bought himself an apple juice, but today he was leaning over the metal lip of the Dumpster. “Move,” she said, and she hefted the bags of garbage up and over.

As soon as they struck bottom, a shower of sparks rose.

Almost immediately, fire climbed up the cardboard stacked inside the Dumpster; it roared against the metal. “Peter, get down from there,” Josie yelled. Peter didn’t move. The flames danced in front of his face, the heat distorted his features. “Peter, now!” She reached up, grabbing his arm, pulling him down to the pavement as something-toner? oil?-exploded inside the Dumpster.

“We have to call 911,” Josie cried, and she scrambled to her feet.

The firemen arrived in minutes, spraying some noxious chemical into the Dumpster. Josie paged Mr. Cargrew, who’d been on the golf course. “Thank God you weren’t hurt,” he said to both of them.

“Josie saved me,” Peter replied.

While Mr. Cargrew spoke to the firemen, she went back into the copy shop with Peter following. “I knew you’d save me,” Peter said. “That’s why I did it.”

“Did what?” But Peter didn’t have to answer, because Josie already knew why Peter had been up on the Dumpster when he should have been on break. She knew who’d tossed the match, the moment he heard her exiting the back door with bags of garbage.

Josie told herself, even as she pulled Mr. Cargrew aside, that she was only doing what any responsible employee would do: tell the boss who had tried to destroy his property. She did not admit that she was scared by what Peter had said, by the truth of it. And she pretended not to feel that small fanning in her chest-a smaller version of the fire that Peter had started-which she identified, for the very first time in her life, as revenge.

When Mr. Cargrew fired Peter, Josie didn’t listen to the conversation. She felt his gaze on her-hot, accusing-as he left, but she focused her attention on a job from a local bank instead. As she stared at the papers coming out of the machine, she considered how strange it was to measure success by how closely each product resembled the one that had come before.

After school, Josie waited for Matt at the flagpole. He’d sneak up behind her and she’d pretend she didn’t notice him coming, until he kissed her. People watched, and Josie loved that. In a way, she thought of her status as a secret identity: now, if she got straight A’s or said she actually liked to read for fun, she wouldn’t be thought of as a freak, simply because when people saw her, they noticed her popularity first. It was, she figured, a little like what her mother experienced wherever she went: when you were the judge, no other trait really mattered.

Sometimes she had nightmares in which Matt realized she was a fraud-that she wasn’t beautiful; she wasn’t cool; she wasn’t anyone worthy of admiration. What were we thinking? she imagined her friends saying, and maybe for that reason, it was so hard even when she was awake to think of them as friends.

She and Matt had plans for this weekend-important plans that she could hardly keep to herself. As she sat on the stone steps leading up to the flagpole, waiting for him, she felt someone tap her on the shoulder. “You’re late,” she accused, grinning, and then she turned around to see Peter.

He looked just as shocked as she felt, even though he’d been the one to seek her out. In the months since Josie had gotten Peter fired from the copy shop, she had gone out of her way to avoid coming in contact with him-no easy feat, given that they were in math class together every day and passed in the halls numerous times. Josie would always make sure she had her nose in a book or her attention firmly focused on another conversation.

“Josie,” he said, “can we talk for a minute?”

Students were streaming out of the school; she could feel their glances flick over her like a whip. Were they staring at her because of who she was, or because of who she was with?

“No,” she said flatly.

“It’s just…I really need Mr. Cargrew to give me my job back. I know it was a mistake, what I did. I thought maybe-maybe if you told him…” He broke off. “He likes you,” Peter said.

Josie wanted to tell him to go away; that she didn’t want to work with him again, much less be seen having a conversation with him. But something had happened during the months since Peter had set that Dumpster fire. The payback she’d thought he was due, after his math-class elegy to Josie, had burned in her chest every time she thought about it. And Josie had started to wonder if maybe Peter had gotten the wrong idea not because he was crazy, but because she’d led him to it. After all, when no one was around at the copy shop, they’d talked to each other, they’d laughed. He was an okay kid-just not someone you wanted to be associated with, necessarily, in public. But feeling that way was different than acting on it, right? She wasn’t like Drew and Matt and John, who’d shove Peter into the wall when they walked by him in the halls, or who stole his brown-bag lunch and played monkey in the middle with it, until it ripped and the contents spilled onto the floor-was she?

She didn’t want to talk to Mr. Cargrew. She didn’t want Peter to think that she wanted to be his friend, that she even wanted to be his acquaintance.

But she didn’t want to be like Matt either, whose comments to Peter sometimes made her feel sick inside.

Peter was sitting across from her, waiting for an answer, and then suddenly he wasn’t. He tumbled down the stone steps as Matt stood over him. “Get away from my girlfriend, homo,” Matt said. “Go find a nice little boy to play with.”

Peter had landed facedown on the pavement. When he lifted his head, his lip was bleeding. He looked at Josie first, and to her surprise, he didn’t seem upset or even angry-just truly, deeply tired. “Matt,” Peter said, coming up on his knees. “Do you have a big dick?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Matt said.

“Not really.” Peter staggered to his feet. “I just wondered if it was long enough for you to go fuck yourself.”

Josie felt the air charge between them the moment before Matt was on Peter like a hurricane, punching him in the face, wrestling him bodily to the ground. “You like this, don’t you,” Matt spat as he pinned Peter down.

Peter shook his head, tears streaming down his cheeks, streaking the blood. “Get…off…”

“I bet you wish you could,” Matt sneered.

By now a crowd had gathered. Josie glanced around frantically, looking for a teacher, but it was after school and there were none around. “Stop,” she cried, watching Peter squirm away as Matt went after him again. “Matt, just stop it.”

He pulled his next punch and got to his feet, leaving Peter curled on his side like a fiddlehead. “You’re right. Why waste my time,” Matt said, and he started walking, waiting for Josie to fall into place beside him.

They were heading toward his car. Josie knew that they’d swing into town and grab a coffee before going back to her house. There, Josie would focus on her homework until it became impossible to ignore Matt rubbing her shoulders or kissing her neck, and then they’d make out until they heard her mother’s car pulling into the garage.

There was still an unleashed fury to Matt; his fists were curled at his sides. Josie reached for one, unfurled his hand, threaded their fingers together. “Can I say something without making you mad?” she asked.

This was rhetorical, Josie knew: Matt was already angry. It was the flip side to the passion that made her feel as if she’d gone electric inside-just directed, negatively, at someone weak.

When he didn’t answer, Josie forged ahead. “I don’t get why you have to pick on Peter Houghton.”

“The homo was the one who started it,” Matt argued. “You heard what he said.”

“Well, yeah,” Josie said. “After you pushed him down the steps.”

Matt stopped walking. “Since when did you become his guardian angel?”

He was staring in a way that cut her to the quick. Josie shivered. “I’m not,” she said quickly, and she took a deep breath. “I just…I don’t like the way you treat kids who aren’t like us, all right? Just because you don’t want to hang out with losers doesn’t mean you have to torture them, does it?”

“Yeah, it does,” Matt said. “Because if there isn’t a them, there can’t be an us.” His eyes narrowed. “You should know that better than anyone.”

Josie felt herself go numb. She didn’t know whether Matt was bringing up Peter’s little math chart, or worse, her history as Peter’s friend in earlier grades-but she didn’t want to find out, either. This was her biggest fear, after all: that the in crowd would realize she’d been out all the time.

She wouldn’t tell Mr. Cargrew what Peter had said. She wouldn’t even acknowledge him again, if he came up to her. And she wouldn’t lie to herself, either, and pretend she was any less awful than Matt when he mocked Peter or beat him up. You did what you had to, to cement your place in the pecking order. And the best way to stay on top was to step on someone else to get there.

“So,” Matt said, “are you coming with me?”

She wondered if Peter was still crying. If his nose was broken. If that was the worst of it.

“Yes,” Josie said, and she followed Matt without looking back.

Lincoln, Massachusetts, was a suburb of Boston that had once been farmland and that now was a hodgepodge of massive homes with ridiculously high real estate values. Josie stared out the window at the scenery that might have been hers to grow up with, under different circumstances: the stone walls that snaked around properties, the “historic property” badges worn by houses that were nearly two hundred years old, the small ice cream stand that smelled like fresh milk. She wondered whether Logan Rourke would suggest that they take a ride down to the Dairy Joy and share a sundae. Maybe he would walk right up to the counter and order butter pecan without even having to ask her what her favorite flavor was; maybe that’s what a father could spin out of instinct.

Matt was driving lazily, his wrist canted over the steering wheel. Just sixteen, he had his driver’s license and was ready and willing to go anywhere-to get a quart of milk for his mother, to drop off the dry cleaning, to squire Josie home after school. For him, it wasn’t the destination that was important, it was the journey-which was why Josie had asked him to take her to see her father.

Besides, it wasn’t as if she had an alternative. She couldn’t very well ask her mother to do it, given that her mother didn’t even know Josie had been looking for Logan Rourke. She could have probably figured out how to take a bus to Boston, but reaching a home in the suburbs was more complicated than that. So in the end, she decided to tell Matt the whole truth-that she had never known her father, and that she’d found him in a newspaper, because he was running for public office.

Logan Rourke’s driveway was not as grandiose as some of the others they’d passed, but it was immaculate. The lawn had been trimmed to a half inch; a spray of wildflowers craned their necks around the iron base of the mailbox. Hanging from a tree branch overhead was the house number: 59.

Josie felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. When she’d been on the field hockey team last year, that had been her jersey number.

It was a sign.

Matt pulled into the driveway. There were two cars-a Lexus and a Jeep-and also a toddler’s ride-on fire truck. Josie could not take her eyes off it. Somehow, she hadn’t imagined that Logan Rourke might have other children. “You want me to come in with you?” Matt asked.

Josie shook her head. “I’m okay.”

As she walked up to the front door, she began to wonder what on earth she’d been thinking. You couldn’t just drop in on some guy who was a public figure, could you? Surely there would be a Secret Service agent or something; an attack dog.

As if she’d cued it, a bark rang out. Josie turned in the direction of the sound to find a tiny little Yorkie with a pink bow on its head making a beeline for her feet.

The front door opened. “Titania, leave the postman al-” Logan Rourke broke off when he noticed Josie standing in front of him. “You’re not the postman.”

He was taller than she’d imagined, and he looked just like he did in the Globe-white hair, Roman nose, rangy build. But his eyes were the same color as hers, so electric that Josie couldn’t look away. She wondered if this had been her mother’s downfall, too.

“You’re Alex’s daughter,” he said.

“Well,” Josie replied. “And yours.”

Through the open doorway, Josie heard the shriek of a child still dizzy and delighted from being chased. A woman’s voice: “Logan, who is it?”

He reached back and closed the door so that Josie couldn’t see into his life any more. He looked incredibly uncomfortable, although in all fairness Josie imagined it was a little off-putting to be confronted by the daughter you’d abandoned before birth. “What are you doing here?”

Wasn’t that obvious? “I wanted to meet you. I thought you might want to meet me.”

He drew a deep breath. “This really isn’t a good time.”

Josie glanced back at the driveway, where Matt was still parked. “I can wait.”

“Look…it’s just that…I’m running for political office. Right now, this is a complication I can’t afford-”

Josie tripped over that one word. She was a complication?

She watched Logan Rourke take out his wallet and peel three hundred-dollar bills away from the rest. “Here,” he said, pushing it into her hand. “Will this do it?”

Josie tried to breathe, but someone had driven a stake through her chest. She realized that this was blood money; that her own father thought she’d come here to blackmail him.

“After the election,” he said, “maybe we could have lunch.”

The bills were crisp in her palm, the kind that had just come into circulation. Josie had a sudden memory of being little and accompanying her mother to the bank: how her mother would let her count the twenties to make sure the teller had gotten the withdrawal amount right; how fresh money always smelled of ink and good fortune.

Logan Rourke wasn’t her father, not any more than the guy who’d taken their coins at the toll booth or any other stranger. You could share DNA with someone and still have nothing in common with them.

Josie realized, fleetingly, that she had already learned that lesson from her mother.

“Well,” Logan Rourke said, and he started toward the door again. He hesitated with his hand on the knob. “I…I don’t know your name.”

Josie swallowed. “Margaret,” she said, so that she would be just as much of a lie to him as he was to her.

“Margaret, then,” he answered, and he slipped back inside.

On the way to the car, Josie opened her fingers like a flower. She watched the bills fall to the ground near a plant that looked, like everything else here, as if it was thriving.

Honestly, the whole idea for the game came to Peter when he was asleep.

He’d created computer games before-Pong replicates, racing courses, and even one sci-fiscenario that let you play online with someone in another country if they logged onto the site-but this was the biggest idea he’d conceived of yet. It came about because, after one of Joey’s football games, they’d stopped off at a pizza place where Peter had eaten way too much meatball and sausage pizza, and had been staring at an arcade game called DEER HUNT. You put in your quarter and shot your fake rifle at the bucks that poked their heads out from behind trees; if you hit a doe, you lost.

That night Peter dreamed about hunting with his father, but instead of going after deer, they were looking for real people.

He had awakened in a sweat, his hand cramped as if he’d been holding a gun.

It wouldn’t be all that hard to create avatars-computerized personas. He’d done some experimenting, and even if the skin tone wasn’t right and the graphics weren’t perfect, he knew how to differentiate between races and hair color and build through programming language. It might be kind of cool to do a game where the prey was human.

But war games were old hat, and even gangs had been totally overdone, thanks to Grand Theft Auto. What he needed, Peter realized, was a new villain, one that other people would want to gun down, too. That was the joy of a video game: watching someone who deserved it getting his comeuppance.

He tried to think of other microcosms of the universe that might be battlegrounds: alien invasions, Wild West shootouts, spy missions. Then Peter thought about the front line he braved every day.

What if you took the prey…and made them the hunters?

Peter got out of bed and sat down at his desk, pulling his eighth-grade yearbook from the drawer where he’d banished it months ago. He’d create a computer game that was Revenge of the Nerds, but updated for the twenty-first century. A fantasy world where the balance of power was turned on its head, where the underdog finally got a chance to beat the bullies.

He took a marker and started to look through the yearbook, circling portraits.

Drew Girard.

Matt Royston.

John Eberhard.

Peter turned the page and stopped for a moment. Then he circled Josie Cormier’s face, too.

“Can you stop here?” Josie said, when she really didn’t think she was going to be able to spend another minute riding in the car and pretending that her meeting with her father had gone well. Matt had barely pulled over when she opened the door, flew through the high grass into the woods at the edge of the road.

She sank down on the carpet of pine needles and started to cry. What she’d been expecting, she really couldn’t say-except that this wasn’t it. Unconditional acceptance, maybe. Curiosity, at the very least.

“Josie?” Matt said, coming up behind her. “You okay?”

She tried to say yes, but she was so sick of lying. She felt Matt’s hand stroke her hair, and that only made her cry harder; tenderness cut as sharp as any knife. “He didn’t give a shit about me.”

“Then you shouldn’t give a shit about him,” Matt answered.

Josie glanced up at him. “It’s not that simple.”

He pulled her into his arms. “Aw, Jo.”

Matt was the only one who’d ever given her a nickname. She couldn’t remember her mother calling her anything silly, like Pumpkin or Ladybug, the way other parents did. When Matt called her Jo, it reminded her of Little Women, and although she was pretty sure Matt had never read the Alcott novel, secretly she was pleased to be associated with a character so strong and sure of herself.

“It’s stupid. I don’t even know why I’m crying. I just…I wanted him to like me.”

“I’m crazy about you,” Matt said. “Does that count?” He leaned forward and kissed her, right on the trail of her tears.

“It counts a lot.”

She felt Matt’s lips move from her cheek to her neck to the spot behind her ear that always made her feel like she was dissolving. She was a novice at fooling around, but Matt had coaxed her further and further each time they were alone. It’s your fault, he’d say, and give her that smile. If you weren’t this hot, I’d be able to keep my hands off you. That alone was an aphrodisiac to Josie. Her? Hot? And-just as Matt had promised every time-it did feel good to let him touch her everywhere, to let him taste her. Every incremental intimacy with Matt felt as if she were falling off a cliff-that loss of breath, those butterflies in her stomach. One step, and she’d be flying. It didn’t occur to Josie, when she leaped, that she was just as likely to fall.

Now she felt his hands moving under her T-shirt, slipping beneath the lace of her bra. Her legs tangled with his; he rubbed up against her. When Matt tugged up her shirt, so that the cool air feathered over her skin, she snapped back to reality. “We can’t do this,” she whispered.

Matt’s teeth scraped over her shoulder.

“We’re parked on the side of the road.”

He looked up at her, drugged, feverish. “But I want you,” Matt said, like he had a dozen times.

This time, though, she glanced up.

I want you.

Josie could have stopped him, but she realized she did not intend to. He wanted her, and right now, that was what she most needed to hear.

There was a moment when Matt went still, wondering if the fact that she hadn’t shoved his hands away meant what he thought it meant. She heard the rip of a foil condom packet-How long had he been carrying that around? Then he tore at his jeans and hiked up her skirt, as if he still expected her to change her mind. Josie felt Matt pulling aside the elastic of her underwear, the burn of his finger pushing inside her. This was nothing like the times before, when his touch had left a track like a comet over her skin; when she found herself aching after she told him she wanted to stop. Matt shifted his weight and came down on top of her again, only this time there was more burning, more pressure. “Ow,” she whimpered, and Matt hesitated.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

She turned her head away. “Just do it,” Josie said, and Matt pushed his hips flush against hers. It was the kind of pain that-even though she was expecting it-made her cry out.

Matt mistook that for passion. “I know, baby,” he groaned. She could feel his heartbeat, but from the inside, and then he started to move faster, bucking against her like a fish released from a hook onto a dock.

Josie wanted to ask Matt whether it had hurt the first time he had done it, too. She wondered if it always would hurt. Maybe pain was the price everyone paid for love. She turned her face into Matt’s shoulder and tried to understand why, even with him still inside of her, she felt empty.

“Peter,” Mrs. Sandringham said at the end of English class. “Could I see you for a moment?”

At the sound of his teacher’s summons, Peter sank down in his chair. He began to think of excuses he could give his parents when he came home with another failing grade.

He actually liked Mrs. Sandringham. She was only in her late twenties-you could actually look at her while she was prattling on about grammar and Shakespeare and imagine not so long ago, when she might have been slouched in a seat like any ordinary kid and wondering why the clock never seemed to move.

Peter waited until the rest of the class had cleared out before he approached the teacher’s desk. “I just wanted to talk to you about your essay,” Mrs. Sandringham said. “I haven’t graded everyone’s yet, but I did have a chance to look over yours and-”

“I can redo it,” Peter blurted out.

Mrs. Sandringham raised her brows. “But Peter…I wanted to tell you that you’re getting an A.” She handed it to him; Peter stared at the bright red grade in the margin.

The assignment had been to write about a significant event that had changed your life. Although it had happened only a week ago, Peter had written about getting fired for setting the fire in the Dumpster at work. In it, he didn’t mention Josie Cormier at all.

Mrs. Sandringham had circled one sentence in his conclusion: I’ve learned you will get caught, so you have to think things through before you act.

The teacher reached out and put her hand on Peter’s wrist. “You really have learned something from this incident,” she said, and she smiled at him. “I’d trust you in a heartbeat.”

Peter nodded and took the paper from the desk. He swam into the stream of students in the hallway, still holding it. He imagined what his mother would say if he came home with a paper that had a big fat A on it-if, for just once in his life, he did something everyone expected of Joey, and not Peter.

But that would have necessitated telling his mother about the Dumpster incident in the first place. Or admitting that he’d been fired at all, and now spent his after-school hours at the library instead of at the copy center.

Peter crumpled up the essay and threw it into the first trash can that he passed.

As soon as Josie started spending her free time almost exclusively with Matt, Maddie Shaw had seamlessly slipped into the position of being Courtney’s sidekick. In a way, she fit better than Josie ever had: if you were walking behind Courtney and Maddie, you wouldn’t be able to tell who was who; Maddie had so closely cultivated the style and movement of Courtney that she’d elevated it from imitation to art.

Tonight they’d gathered at Maddie’s house because her parents had gone to visit her older brother, a sophomore at Syracuse. They weren’t drinking-it was hockey season, and the players had to sign a contract with the coach-but Drew Girard had rented the uncut version of a teen sex comedy, and the guys were discussing who was hotter, Elisha Cuthbert or Shannon Elizabeth. “I wouldn’t throw either of them out of bed,” Drew said.

“What makes you think they’d get in in the first place?” John Eberhard laughed.

“My reputation reaches far and wide…”

Courtney smirked. “It’s the only part of you that does.”

“Aw, Court, you wish you knew that for sure.”

“Or not…”

Josie was sitting on the floor with Maddie, trying to make a Ouija board work. They’d found it in the basement closet, along with Chutes and Ladders and Trivial Pursuit. Josie’s fingertips rested lightly on the planchette. “Are you pushing it?”

“Swear to God, no,” Maddie said. “Are you?”

Josie shook her head. She wondered what kind of ghost would come to hang out at a teenage party. Someone who’d died tragically, of course, and too young-in a car crash, maybe. “What’s your name?” Josie said loudly.

The planchette swiveled to the letter A, and then B, and then stopped.

“Abe,” Maddie announced. “It must be.”

“Or Abby.”

“Are you male or female?” Maddie asked.

The planchette slipped off the edge of the board entirely. Drew started to laugh. “Maybe it’s gay.”

“Takes one to know one,” John said.

Matt yawned and stretched, his shirt riding up. Although Josie’s back was to him, she could practically sense this, so attuned were their bodies. “As thrillingly fun as this has been, we’re out of here. Jo, come on.”

Josie watched the planchette spell out a word: N-O. “I’m not leaving,” she said. “I’m having fun.”

“Meow,” Drew said. “Who’s pussy-whipped?”

Since they’d started dating, Matt spent more time with Josie than with his friends. And although Matt had told her he’d much rather fool around with her than be in the company of fools, Josie knew it was still important to him to have the respect of Drew and John. But that didn’t mean he had to treat her like a slave, did it?

“I said we’re leaving,” Matt repeated.

Josie glanced up at him. “And I said I’ll come when I want to come.”

Matt smiled at his friends, smug. “You never came in your life before you met me,” he said.

Drew and John burst out laughing, and Josie felt herself flush with embarrassment. She stood, averting her eyes, and ran up the basement stairs.

In the entryway of Maddie’s house she grabbed her jacket. When she heard footsteps behind her, Josie didn’t even turn around. “I was having fun. So-”

She broke off with a small cry as Matt grabbed her arm hard and spun her around, pinning her up against the wall by her shoulders. “You’re hurting me-”

“Don’t ever do that to me again.”

“You’re the one who-”

“You made me look like an idiot,” Matt said. “I told you it was time to go.”

Bruises bloomed on her skin where he held her fast, as if she were a canvas and he was determined to leave his mark. She went limp beneath his hands: instinct, a surrender. “I…I’m sorry,” she whispered.

The words were a key-Matt’s grip relaxed. “Jo,” he sighed, and he rested his forehead against hers. “I don’t like sharing you. You can’t blame me for that.”

Josie shook her head, but she still didn’t trust herself to speak.

“It’s just that I love you so much.”

She blinked. “You do?”

He hadn’t said those words yet, and she hadn’t said them either, even though she felt them, because if he didn’t say them back then Josie was sure she’d simply evaporate on the spot from sheer humiliation. But here was Matt, saying he loved her, first.

“Isn’t that obvious?” he said, and he took her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed the knuckles so gently that Josie almost forgot all that had happened to get them to that moment.

“Kentucky Fried People,” Peter said, mulling Derek’s idea while they sat on the sidelines in gym class, as the teams for basketball were being picked. “I don’t know…doesn’t it seem a little…”

“Graphic?” Derek said. “Since when were you aiming for politically correct? See, imagine if you could go to the art room, if you had enough points, and use the kiln as a weapon.”

Derek had been road testing Peter’s new computer game, pointing out room for improvement and flaws in the design. They knew they had plenty of time for conversation, since they were bound to be the last kids chosen for teams.

Coach Spears had chosen Drew Girard and Matt Royston to be team captains-a huge surprise, not-they were varsity athletes, even as sophomores. “Look alive, people,” Coach called out. “You want your captains to think you’re hungry to play. You want them to think you’re the next Michael Jordan.”

Drew pointed to a boy in the back. “Noah.”

Matt nodded to the kid who’d been sitting next to him. “Charlie.”

Peter turned to Derek. “I heard that even though Michael Jordan’s retired, he’s still getting forty million dollars in endorsements.”

“That means he makes $109,589 a day, for not working,” Derek figured.

“Ash,” Drew called out.

“Robbie,” Matt said.

Peter leaned closer to Derek. “If he goes to see a movie, it’ll cost him ten bucks, but he’ll make $9,132 while he’s there.”

Derek grinned. “If he hard-boils an egg for five minutes, he’ll make $380.”

“Stu.”

“Freddie.”

“O-boy.”

“Walt.”

By now there were only three kids left to be picked for teams: Derek, Peter, and Royce, who had aggression issues and came complete with his own aide.

“Royce,” Matt said.

“He makes $4,560.85 more than he would working at McDonald’s,” Derek added.

Drew scrutinized Peter and Derek. “He makes $2,283 watching a rerun of Friends,” Peter said.

“If he wanted to save up for a new Maserati, it would take him a whole twenty-one hours,” Derek said. “Damn, I wish I could play basketball.”

“Derek,” Drew picked.

Derek started to stand up. “Yeah,” Peter said, “but even if Michael Jordan saved a hundred percent of his income for the next four hundred and fifty years, he still wouldn’t have as much as Bill Gates has right this second.”

“All right,” Matt said, “I’ll take the homo.”

Peter shuffled toward the back of Matt’s team. “You ought to be good at this game, Peter,” Matt said, loud enough so that everyone else could hear. “Just keep your hands on the balls.”

Peter leaned against a floor mat that had been strung on the wall, like the inside of an insane asylum. A rubber room, where all hell could break loose.

He sort of wished he was as sure of who he was as everyone else seemed to be.

“All right,” Coach Spears said. “Let’s play.”

The first ice storm of the season arrived before Thanksgiving. It started after midnight, wind rattling the old bones of the house and pellets drumming the windows. The power went out, but Alex had been expecting that. She woke up with a start at the absolute silence that came with a loss of technology, and reached for the flashlight that she’d put next to her bed.

There were candles, too. Alex lit two candles and watched her shadow, larger than life, creep along the wall. She could remember nights like this when Josie was little, when they’d crawl into bed together and Josie would fall asleep crossing her fingers that there would not be school in the morning.

How come grown-ups never got that kind of holiday? Even if there wasn’t school tomorrow-which there wouldn’t be, if Alex was guessing correctly-even if the wind was still howling as if the earth were in pain and the ice was caked on her windshield wipers, Alex would be expected to show up in court. Yoga classes and basketball games and theater performances would be postponed, but no one ever canceled real life.

The door to the bedroom flew open. Josie stood there in a wifebeater tank and a pair of boy’s boxers-Alex had no idea where she’d gotten them, and prayed they didn’t belong to Matt Royston. For a moment, Alex could barely reconcile this young woman with her curves and long hair with the daughter she still expected, a little girl with an unraveling braid, wearing Wonder Woman pajamas. She tossed back the covers on one side of the bed, an invitation.

Josie dove underneath them, yanking the blankets up to her chin. “It’s freaky out there,” she said. “It’s like the sky’s falling down.”

“I’d be more worried about the roads.”

“Do you think we’ll have a snow day tomorrow?”

Alex smiled in the dark. Josie may have been older, but her priorities were still the same. “Most likely.”

With a contented sigh, Josie flopped down on her pillow. “I wonder if Matt and I could go skiing somewhere.”

“You’re not leaving this house if the roads are bad.”

“You will.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Alex said.

Josie turned to her, her eyes reflecting the candlelight. “Everyone has a choice,” she said. She came up on an elbow. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you marry Logan Rourke?”

Alex felt as if she’d been thrust out into the storm, naked; she was that unprepared for Josie’s question. “Where did this come from?”

“What was it about him that wasn’t good enough? You told me he was handsome and smart. And you had to love him, at least at one point…”

“Josie, this is ancient history-and it’s stuff you shouldn’t worry about, because it has nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me,” Josie said. “I’m half him.”

Alex stared up at the ceiling. Maybe the sky was falling down; maybe that’s what happened when you thought your smoke and mirrors would create a lasting illusion. “He was all of those things,” Alex said quietly. “It wasn’t him at all. It was me.”

“And then there was the whole married part.”

She sat up in bed. “How did you find out?”