t’s all over the papers, now that he’s running for office. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist.”

“Did you call him?”

Josie looked her in the eye. “No.”

There was a part of Alex that wished Josie had talked to him-to see whether he’d followed Alex’s career, if he’d even asked about her. The act of leaving Logan, which had seemed so righteous on behalf of her unborn baby, now seemed selfish. Why hadn’t she talked to Josie about this before?

Because she’d been protecting Logan. Josie may have grown up without knowing her father, but wasn’t that better than learning he’d wanted you to be aborted? One more lie, Alex thought, just a little one. Just to keep Josie from being hurt. “He wouldn’t leave his wife.” Alex glanced sideways at Josie. “I couldn’t make myself small enough to fit into the space he wanted me to fit into, in order to be part of his life. Does that make sense?”

“I guess.”

Beneath the covers, Alex reached for Josie’s hand. It was the kind of action that would have seemed forced, had it been in visible sight-something too openly emotional for either of them to lay claim to-but here, in the dark, with the world tunneling in around them, it seemed perfectly natural. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For not giving you the choice of having him around when you were growing up.”

Josie shrugged and pulled her hand away. “You did the right thing.”

“I don’t know,” Alex sighed. “The right thing sets you up to be incredibly lonely, sometimes.” Suddenly she turned to Josie, stretching a bright smile on her face. “Why are we even talking about this? Unlike me, you’re lucky in love, right?”

Just then, the power came back on. Downstairs, the microwave beeped to be reset; the light in the bathroom spilled yellow down the hallway. “I guess I’ll go back to my own bed,” Josie said.

“Oh. All right,” Alex answered, when what she meant to say was that Josie was welcome to stay right where she was.

As Josie padded down the hallway, Alex reached over to reset her alarm clock. It blinked 12:00 12:00 12:00 in panicked LED, like Cinderella’s red-flag reminder that fairy-tale endings are hard to come by.

To Peter’s surprise, the bouncer at the Front Runner didn’t even glance at his fake ID, so before he had time to think twice about the fact that he was actually, finally here, he was pushed inside.

He was hit in the face with a blast of smoke, and it took him a minute to adjust to the dim light. Music filled in all the spaces between people, techno-dance stuff that was so loud it made Peter’s eardrums pulse. Two tall women were flanking the front door, checking out the new entrants. It took Peter a second glance to realize that one had the shadow of a beard on her face. His face. The other one looked more like a girl than most girls he’d ever seen, but then again, Peter had never seen a transvestite up close. Maybe they were perfectionists.

Men were standing in groups of two or three, except for the ones that perched like hawks on a balcony overlooking the dance floor. There were men in leather chaps, men kissing other men in the corners, men passing joints. Mirrors on every wall made the club look huge, its rooms endless.

It hadn’t been hard to find out about the Front Runner, thanks to Internet chat rooms. Since Peter was still taking driver’s ed, he had to take a bus to Manchester and then a taxi to the club’s front door. He still wasn’t sure why he was there-it was like an anthropology experiment, in his mind. See if he fit in with this society, instead of his own.

It wasn’t that he wanted to fool around with a guy-not yet, anyway. He just wanted to know what it was like to be among guys who were gay, and totally okay with it. He wanted to know if they could look at him and know, instantly, that Peter belonged.

He stopped in front of a couple that was going at it in a dark corner. Seeing a guy kiss a guy was strange in real life. Sure, there were gay kisses on television shows-Big Moments that usually were controversial enough to get press, so that Peter knew when they were airing-and he’d sometimes watch them to see if he felt anything, watching them. But they were acted, just like regular hookups on TV shows…unlike the display in front of his eyes right now. He waited to see if his heart started pounding a little harder, if it made sense to him.

He didn’t feel particularly excited, though. Curious, sure-did a beard scratch you when you were making out?-and not repulsed, but Peter couldn’t say he felt with any great conviction that that was something he wanted to try, too.

The men broke away from each other, and one of them narrowed his eyes. “This ain’t no peep show,” he said, and he shoved Peter away.

Peter stumbled, falling against someone sitting at the bar. “Whoa,” the man said, and then his eyes lit up. “What have we here?”

“Sorry…”

“Don’t be.” He was in his early twenties, with white-blond crew-cut hair and nicotine stains on his fingertips. “First time here?”

Peter turned to him. “How can you tell?”

“You’ve got that deer-in-the-headlights look.” He stubbed out his cigarette and summoned the bartender, who, Peter noticed, looked like he’d walked out of the pages of a magazine. “Rico, get my young friend here a drink. What would you like?”

Peter swallowed. “Pepsi?”

The man’s teeth flashed. “Yeah, right.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Ah,” he said. “Here, then.”

He handed a pair of small tubes to Peter, and then took two for himself out of his pocket. There was no powder in them-just air. Peter watched him open the top, inhale deeply, then do the same with the second vial in his other nostril. Mimicking this, Peter felt his head spin, like the one time he’d drunk a six-pack when his parents had gone off to watch Joey play football. But unlike then, when he’d only wanted to fall asleep afterward, Peter now felt every cell of his body buzzing, wide awake.

“My name’s Kurt,” the man said, holding out his hand.

“Peter.”

“Bottom or top?”

Peter shrugged, trying to look like he knew what the guy was talking about, when in fact he had no clue.

“My God,” Kurt said, his jaw dropping. “New blood.”

The bartender set a Pepsi down in front of Peter. “Leave him alone, Kurt. He’s just a kid.”

“Then maybe we should play a game,” Kurt said. “You like pool?”

A game of pool Peter could totally handle. “That would be great.”

He watched Kurt peel a twenty out of his wallet and leave it behind for Rico. “Keep the change,” he said.

The poolroom was adjacent to the main part of the club, four tables that were already engaged in various stages of play. Peter sat down on a bench along the wall, studying people. Some were touching each other-an arm on the shoulder, a pat on the rear-but most were just acting like a bunch of guys. Like friends would.

Kurt took a handful of quarters out of his pocket and put them down on the lip of the table. Thinking that this was the pot they would be playing for, Peter pulled two crumpled dollars out of his jacket. “It’s not a bet,” Kurt laughed. “It’s what you pay to play.” He stood up as the group in front of them sank the last ball, and started feeding the quarters to the table, until it released a colorful torrent of stripes and solids.

Peter picked a cue off the wall and rubbed chalk over the tip. He wasn’t great at pool, but he’d played a couple of times before, and he hadn’t done anything totally stupid, like scratch and make the ball jump off the edge of the table. “So you’re a betting man,” Kurt said. “That could make this interesting.”

“I’ll put down five bucks,” Peter said, hoping that made him sound older.

“I don’t bet for money. How about if I win, I get to take you home. And if you win, you get to take me home.”

Peter didn’t really see how he could win either way, since he didn’t want to go home with Kurt and he sure as hell wasn’t bringing Kurt home with him. He put the cue down on the edge of the table. “I guess I don’t really feel like playing after all.”

Kurt grabbed Peter’s arm. His eyes were too bright in his face, like small, hot stars. “My quarters are already in there. It’s all racked up. You wanted to play the game…that means you’ve got to finish it.”

“Let me go,” Peter said, his voice climbing higher on a ladder of panic.

Kurt smiled. “But we’re just getting started.”

Behind Peter, another man spoke. “I think you heard the boy.” Peter turned around, still bound by Kurt, and saw Mr. McCabe, his math teacher.

It was one of those strange moments, like when you’re at a movie theater and you see the lady who works at the post office, and you know you know her from somewhere, but without the PO boxes and scales and stamp machines around her, you cannot quite figure out who she is. Mr. McCabe was holding a beer and wearing a shirt made out of something silky. He put down the bottle and folded his arms. “Don’t fuck with him, Kurt, or I’ll call the cops and get you bounced out of here.”

Kurt shrugged. “Whatever,” he said, and he walked back into the smoky bar.

Peter looked down at the ground, waiting for Mr. McCabe to speak. He was sure that the teacher would call his parents, or rip up his ID in front of him, or ask him why he thought coming to a gay bar in downtown Manchester was a good idea.

Suddenly Peter realized he could have asked Mr. McCabe the same thing. As he lifted his gaze, he considered a mathematical principle that surely his teacher already knew: If two people have the same secret, it’s not a secret anymore.

“You probably need a ride home,” Mr. McCabe said.

Josie held her hand up to Matt’s, a giant’s paw.

“Look at how tiny you are, compared to me,” Matt said. “It’s amazing I don’t kill you.”

He shifted then, still hard inside her, so that she felt the bulk of his weight. Then he put his hand up to her throat.

“Because,” he said, “I could.”

He pressed just the slightest bit, pressure on her windpipe. Not enough to rob her of air, but certainly to scatter speech.

“Don’t,” Josie managed.

Matt stared down at her, puzzled. “Don’t what?” he said, and when he started to move in her again, Josie was sure she had heard it all wrong.

For most of the hour-long ride from Manchester, the conversation between Peter and Mr. McCabe was as superficial as a dragonfly on the surface of a lake, darting around topics neither of them particularly cared about: hockey standings for the Bruins, the upcoming winter formal dance, what good colleges were looking for these days from applicants.

It was after they pulled off Route 89 at the exit for Sterling, and they were driving down dark back roads toward Peter’s house, that Mr. McCabe even mentioned the reason they were both in the car. “About tonight,” he began. “Not many people know about me in school. I haven’t come out yet.” The small rectangle of reflected light from the rearview mirror banded his eyes like a raccoon’s.

“Why not?” Peter heard himself ask.

“It’s not that I don’t think the faculty would be supportive…it’s that I don’t think it’s any of their business. Right?”

Peter didn’t know how to answer, and then realized that Mr. McCabe was not asking him for his opinion-just for directions. “Yeah,” Peter said. “Turn here, and then it’s the third house on the left.”

Mr. McCabe pulled up in front of Peter’s driveway, but didn’t turn in. “I’m telling you this because I trust you, Peter. And because if you need someone to talk to, I want you to feel free to come to me.”

Peter unbuckled his seat belt. “I’m not gay.”

“All right,” Mr. McCabe replied, but something in his eyes went soft at the edges.

“I’m not gay,” Peter repeated more firmly, and he opened the car door and ran as fast as he could toward his house.

Josie shook up the bottle of OPI nail polish and looked at the sticker on the bottom. I’m Not Really a Waitress Red. “Who do you think comes up with these? Do you think it’s a bunch of women who sit around a conference table?”

“No,” Maddie said. “They’re probably just old friends who get drunk once a year and write down all the flavors.”

“It’s not a flavor if you don’t eat it,” Emma pointed out.

Courtney rolled over, so that her hair tumbled over the side of the bed like a waterfall. “This is bogus,” she announced, although it was her house and her slumber party. “There’s got to be something exciting to do.”

“Let’s call someone,” Emma suggested.

Courtney considered this. “Like a prank?”

“We could order pizza and have it delivered to someone,” Maddie said.

“We did that last time with Drew,” Courtney sighed, and then she grinned and reached for the phone. “I’ve got something better.”

She put on the speakerphone and dialed-a musical jingle that sounded awfully familiar to Josie. “Hello,” a voice said gruffly on the other end.

“Matt,” Courtney said, holding up a finger to her lips to keep everyone else quiet. “Hey.”

“It’s fucking three in the morning, Court.”

“I know. I just…I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a really long time, and I don’t know how to do it, because Josie’s my friend and everything-”

Josie started to speak, to let Matt know he was being led into a trap, but Emma clapped her hand over Josie’s mouth and pushed her back on the bed.

“I like you,” Courtney said.

“I like you, too.”

“No, I mean…I like you.”

“Geez, Courtney. If I’d known that, I guess I would be having wild sex with you, except for the fact that I love Josie, and she’s probably less than three feet away from you right now.”

The silence shattered, laughter breaking it apart like glass. “God! How’d you know?” Courtney said.

“Because Josie tells me everything, including when she’s sleeping over at your house. Now take me off speakerphone and let me say good night to her.”

Courtney handed the receiver over. “Good answer,” Josie said.

Matt’s voice was smoky with sleep. “Did you doubt it?”

“No,” Josie replied, smiling.

“Well, have fun. Just not as much fun as you’d be having with me.”

She listened to Matt yawn. “Go to bed.”

“Wish you were next to me,” he said.

Josie turned her back on the other girls. “Me, too.”

“Love you, Jo.”

“I love you, too.”

“And I,” Courtney announced, “am going to throw up.” She reached over and punched the disconnect button of the phone.

Josie tossed the receiver on the bed. “It was your idea to call him.”

“You’re just jealous,” Emma said. “I wish I had someone who couldn’t live without me.”

“You’re so lucky, Josie,” Maddie agreed.

Josie opened the bottle of nail polish again, and a drop spilled off the brush to land on her thigh like a bead of blood. Any of her friends-well, maybe not Courtney, but most of them-would have killed to be in her position.

But would they die for it, a voice inside her whispered.

She looked up at Maddie and Emma and forced a smile. “Tell me about it,” Josie said.

In December, Peter got a job in the school library. He was in charge of the audiovisual equipment, which meant that for an hour after school each day, he’d rewind microfilm and organize DVDs alphabetically. He’d bring the overhead projectors and TV/VCRs to classrooms, so that they were in place when the teachers who needed them arrived at school in the morning. He especially liked how nobody bothered him in the library. The cool kids wouldn’t have been caught dead there after school; Peter was more likely to find the special-needs students, with their aides, working on assignments.

He’d gotten the job after helping Mrs. Wahl, the librarian, fix her ancient computer so that it stopped blue-screening on her. Now Peter was her favorite student at Sterling High. She let him lock up after she left for the day, and she made him his own key to the custodial elevator, so that he could transport equipment from one floor of the high school to another.

Peter’s last job that day was moving a projector from a bio lab on the second floor back down to the AV room. He had stepped into the elevator and turned a key to close the door when someone called out, asking him to hold the door.

A moment later, Josie Cormier hobbled inside.

She was on crutches, sporting an AirCast. She glanced at Peter as the doors of the elevator closed, and then quickly down at the linoleum floor.

Although it had been months since she’d gotten him fired, Peter still felt a flash of anger when he saw Josie. He could practically hear Josie ticking off the seconds in her head until the elevator doors opened again. Well, I’m not thrilled being stuck in here with you either, he thought to himself, and just about then the elevator bobbled and screeched to a halt.

“What’s wrong with it?” Josie punched at the first-floor button.

“That’s not going to do anything,” Peter said. He reached across her-noticing that she nearly lost her balance trying to lean back, as if he had a communicable disease-and pushed the red Emergency button.

Nothing happened.

“This sucks,” Peter said. He stared up at the roof of the elevator. In movies, action heroes were always climbing through the air ducts into the elevator shaft, but even if he stood on top of the projector, he didn’t see how he could get the hatch open without a screwdriver.

Josie punched at the button again. “Hello?!”

“No one’s going to hear you,” Peter said. “The teachers are all gone and the custodian watches Oprah from five until six in the basement.” He glanced at her. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“An independent study.”

“What’s that?”

She lifted a crutch. “It’s what you do for credit when you can’t play gym. What were you doing here?”

“I work here now,” Peter said, and they both fell silent.

Logistically, Peter thought, they’d be found sooner or later. The custodian would probably discover them when he was moving his floor buffer upstairs, but if not, the longest they’d have to wait was morning when everyone arrived again. He smiled a little, thinking about what he could truthfully tell Derek: Guess what, I slept with Josie Cormier.

He opened an iBook and pressed a button, starting a PowerPoint presentation on the screen. Amoebas, blastospheres. Cell division. An embryo. Amazing to think that we all started out like that-microscopic, indistinguishable.

“How long before they find us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Won’t the librarians notice if you don’t come back?”

“My own parents wouldn’t notice if I didn’t come back.”

“Oh, God…what if we run out of air?” Josie banged on the doors with a crutch. “Help!”

“We’re not going to run out of air,” Peter said.

“How do you know that?”

He didn’t, not really. But what else was he going to say?

“I get freaked out in small spaces,” Josie said. “I can’t do this.”

“You’re claustrophobic?” He wondered how he hadn’t known that about Josie. But then again, why should he? It wasn’t as though he’d been such an active part of her life for the past six years.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Josie moaned.

“Oh, shit,” Peter said. “Don’t. Just close your eyes, then you won’t even realize you’re in an elevator.”

Josie closed her eyes, but when she did, she swayed on her crutches.

“Hang on.” Peter took her crutches away, so that she was balancing on one foot. Then he held on to her hands while she sank to the floor, extending her bad leg.

“How’d you get hurt?” he asked, nodding at the cast.

“I fell on some ice.” She started to cry, and gasp-hyperventilate, Peter guessed, although he’d only seen the word written, not live. You were supposed to breathe into a paper bag, right? Peter searched the elevator for something that would suffice. There was a plastic bag with some documents in it on the AV trolley, but somehow putting that on your head didn’t seem particularly brilliant. “Okay,” he said, brainstorming, “let’s do something to get your mind off where you are.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe we should play a game,” Peter suggested, and he heard the same words repeated in his head, Kurt’s voice from the Front Runner. He shook his head to clear it. “Twenty Questions?”

Josie hesitated. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

After six rounds of Twenty Questions, and an hour of geography, Peter was getting thirsty. He also had to pee, and that was really troubling him, because he didn’t think he could last until morning and there was absolutely no way he was going to take a whiz with Josie watching. Josie had gotten quiet, but at least she’d stopped shaking. He thought she might be asleep.

Then she spoke. “Truth or dare,” Josie said.

Peter turned toward her. “Truth.”

“Do you hate me?”

He ducked his head. “Sometimes.”

“You should,” Josie said.

“Truth or dare?”

“Truth,” Josie said.

“Do you hate me?”

“No.”

“Then why,” Peter asked, “do you act like you do?”

She shook her head. “I have to act the way people expect me to act. It’s part of the whole…thing. If I don’t…” She picked at the rubber brace of her crutch. “It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Truth or dare,” Peter said.

Josie grinned. “Dare.”

“Lick the bottom of your own foot.”

She started to laugh. “I can’t even walk on the bottom of my own foot,” she said, but she bent down and slipped off her loafer, stuck out her tongue. “Truth or dare?”

“Truth.”

“Chicken,” Josie said. “Have you ever been in love?”

Peter looked at Josie, and thought of how they had once tied a note with their addresses to a helium balloon and let it go in her backyard, certain it would reach Mars. Instead, they had received a letter from a widow who lived two blocks away. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so.”

Her eyes widened. “With who?”

“That wasn’t the question. Truth or dare?”

“Truth,” Josie said.

“What’s the last lie you told?”

The smile faded from Josie’s face. “When I told you I slipped on the ice. Matt and I were having a fight and he hit me.”

“He hit you?”

“It wasn’t like that…. I said something I shouldn’t have, and when he-well, I lost my balance, anyway, and hurt my ankle.”

“Josie-”

She ducked her head. “No one knows. You won’t tell, will you?”

“No.” Peter hesitated. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“That wasn’t the question,” Josie said, parroting him.

“I’m asking it now.”

“Then I’ll take a dare.”

Peter curled his hands into fists at his sides. “Kiss me,” he said.

She leaned toward him slowly, until her face was too close to be in focus. Her hair fell over Peter’s shoulder like a curtain and her eyes closed. She smelled like autumn-like apple cider and slanting sun and the snap of the coming cold. He felt his heart scrambling, caught inside the confines of his own body.

Josie’s lips landed just on the edge of his, almost his cheek and not quite his mouth. “I’m glad I wasn’t stuck in here alone,” she said shyly, and he tasted the words, sweet as mint on her breath.

Peter glanced down at his lap and prayed that Josie wouldn’t notice that he was hard as a rock. He started to smile so wide that it hurt. It wasn’t that he didn’t like girls; it was that there was only one right one.

Just then there was a knock on the metal door. “Anyone in here?”

“Yes!” Josie cried, struggling to stand with her crutches. “Help!”

There was a bang and a hammering, the sound of a crowbar breaching a seam. The doors flew open, and Josie hurried out of the elevator. Matt Royston was waiting next to the janitor. “I got worried when you weren’t home,” he said, and pulled Josie into his embrace.

But you hit her, Peter thought, and then he remembered that he had made a promise to Josie. He listened to her whoop with surprise as Matt swept her into his arms, carrying her so that she wouldn’t have to use her crutches.

Peter wheeled the iBook and projector back to the library and locked the AV room. It was late now, and he had to walk home, but he almost didn’t mind. He decided that the first thing he’d do was erase the circle around Josie’s portrait in his yearbook, take her characteristics off the roster of villains in his video game.

He was mentally reviewing the logistics of that, in terms of programming, when he finally reached home. It took Peter a moment to realize something wasn’t right-the lights weren’t on in the house, but the cars were there. “Hello?” he called out, wandering from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen. “Anyone here?”

He found his parents sitting in the dark at the kitchen table. His mother looked up, dazed. It was clear that she’d been crying.

Peter felt something warm break free in his chest. He’d told Josie his parents wouldn’t notice his absence, but that wasn’t true at all. Clearly, his parents had been frantic. “I’m fine,” Peter told them. “Really.”

His father stood up, blinking back tears, and hauled Peter into his arms. Peter couldn’t remember the last time he’d been hugged like this. In spite of the fact that he wanted to seem cool, that he was sixteen years old, he melted against his father’s frame and held on tightly. First Josie, and now this? It was turning out to be the best day of Peter’s life.

“It’s Joey,” his father sobbed. “He’s dead.”

Ask a random kid today if she wants to be popular and she’ll tell you no, even if the truth is that if she was in a desert dying of thirst and had the choice between a glass of water and instant popularity, she’d probably choose the latter. See, you can’t admit to wanting it, because that makes you less cool. To be truly popular, it has to look like it’s something you are, when in reality, it’s what you make yourself.

I wonder if anyone works any harder at anything than kids do at being popular. I mean, even air-traffic controllers and the president of the United States take vacations, but look at your average high school student, and you’ll see someone who’s putting in time twenty-four hours a day, for the entire length of the school year.

So how do you crack that inner sanctum? Well, here’s the catch: it’s not up to you. What’s important is what everyone else thinks of how you dress, what you eat for lunch, what shows you TiVo, what music is on your iPod.

I’ve always sort of wondered, though: If everyone else’s opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

One Month After

Although the investigative report from Patrick Ducharme had been sitting on Diana’s desk since ten days post-shooting, the prosecutor hadn’t given it a glance. First she’d had a probable cause hearing to pull together, then, she’d been in front of the grand jury, getting them to hand down an indictment. Only now was she beginning to sift through the analyses of fingerprints, ballistics, and bloodstains, as well as all the original police reports.

She’d spent the morning poring over the logistics of the shooting and mentally organizing her opening statement along the same path of destruction Peter Houghton had followed, tracking his movements from victim to victim. The first to be shot was Zoe Patterson, on the school steps. Alyssa Carr, Angela Phlug, Maddie Shaw. Courtney Ignatio. Haley Weaver and Brady Pryce. Lucia Ritolli, Grace Murtaugh.

Drew Girard.

Matt Royston.

More.

Diana took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. A book of the dead, a map of the wounded. And those were only the ones whose injuries had been serious enough to involve a hospital stay-there were scores of kids who had been treated and released, hundreds whose scars were buried too deep to see.

Diana did not have children-hell, in her position, the men she met were either felons, which was awful, or defense attorneys, which was worse. She did, however, have a three-year-old nephew, who’d been reprimanded in his nursery school for pointing his finger at a classmate and saying, “Bang, you’re dead.” When her sister called up indignant and spouting about the Bill of Rights, had Diana thought that her nephew was going to grow up to become a psychopath? Not for a moment. He was just a kid, playing around.

Had the Houghtons thought that, too?

Diana looked down at the list of names in front of her. Her job was to connect these dots, but what truly needed to be done was to draw a line long before this: the tipping point where Peter Houghton’s mind had shifted, subtly, from what if to when.

Her eye fell on another list-one from the hospital. Cormier, Josie. According to the medical records, the girl-seventeen-had been admitted overnight for observation after a fainting spell, and had a laceration on the scalp. Her mother’s signature was at the bottom of the consent form for blood tests-Alex Cormier.

It couldn’t be.

Diana sat back in her chair. You’d never want to be the one to ask a judge to recuse herself. You might as well announce that you doubted her ability to be impartial, and since Diana would be in her court numerous times in the future, it just wasn’t a smart career move. But Judge Cormier surely knew that she couldn’t address this case fairly, not with a daughter who was a witness. Granted, Josie hadn’t been shot, but she’d been hurt during the shooting. Judge Cormier would recuse herself, certainly. Which meant there was nothing to worry about.

Diana turned her attention back to the discovery spread across her desk, reading until the letters blurred on the page, until Josie Cormier was just another name.

On her way home from the courthouse, Alex passed the makeshift memorial that had been erected for the victims of Sterling High. There were ten white wooden crosses, even though one of the dead children-Justin Friedman-had been Jewish. The crosses were nowhere near the school, but instead on a stretch of Route 10 where there was only floodplain for the Connecticut River. In the days after the shooting, there might be any number of mourners standing by the crosses, adding to the individual piles of photos and Beanie Babies and bouquets.

Alex felt herself pulling her car off the road, onto the shoulder. She didn’t know why she was stopping now, why she hadn’t stopped before. Her heels sank into the spongy grass. She crossed her arms and stepped up to the markers.

They were in no particular order, and the name of each dead student was carved into the crosspiece of the wood. Most of the students Alex did not know, but Courtney Ignatio and Maddie Shaw had crosses beside each other. The flowers that had been left behind at the markers had wilted, their green tissue wrappers rotting into the ground. Alex knelt down, fingering a faded poem that was tacked to Courtney’s memorial.

Courtney and Maddie had come for a sleepover several times. Alex remembered finding the girls in the kitchen, eating raw cookie dough instead of baking it, their bodies fluid as waves as they moved around each other. She could remember being jealous of them-to be so young, to know you hadn’t yet made a mistake that would change your life. Now Alex flushed with chagrin: at least she had a life to be changed.

It was at Matt Royston’s cross, however, that Alex started to cry. Propped against the white wooden base was a framed photograph, one that had been enclosed in a plastic bag to keep the elements from ruining it. There was Matt, his eyes bright, his arm hooked around Josie’s neck.

Josie wasn’t looking at the camera. She was staring at Matt, as if she couldn’t see anything else.

Somehow, it seemed safer to fall apart here in front of a makeshift memorial than at home, where Josie might hear her crying. No matter how cool and collected she had been-for Josie’s sake-the one person she could not fool was herself. She might pick up her daily routine like a missed stitch, she might tell herself that Josie was one of the lucky ones, but when she was alone in the shower, or caught in the interstitial space between waking and sleep, Alex would find herself shaking uncontrollably, the way you do when you’ve swerved to avoid an accident and have to pull to the side of the road to make sure you are really, truly all in one piece.

Life was what happened when all the what-if ’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or-in this case-feared might come to pass passed by instead. Alex had spent enough nights thinking of good fortune, of how it was thin as a veil, how seamlessly you might stream from one side to the other. This could easily have been Josie’s cross she was kneeling before, Josie’s memorial that hosted this photo. A twitch of the shooter’s hand, a fallen footstep, a bullet’s ricochet-and everything might have been different.

Alex got to her feet and took a fortifying breath. As she headed back to her car, she saw the narrow hole where an eleventh cross had been. After the ten had been erected, someone had added one with Peter Houghton’s name on it. Night after night that extra cross had been taken down or vandalized. There had been editorials in the paper over it: Did Peter Houghton deserve a cross, when he was still very much alive? Was putting up a memorial for him a tragedy or a travesty? Eventually, whoever had carved Peter’s cross decided to leave well enough alone and stopped replacing it every day.

As Alex slipped inside her car again, she wondered how-until she’d come here for herself-she had managed to forget that someone, at some point, considered Peter Houghton to be a victim, too.

Since That Day, as Lacy had taken to calling it, she’d delivered three babies. Each time, although the birth was uneventful and the delivery easy, something had gone wrong. Not for the mother, but for the midwife. When Lacy stepped into a delivery room, she felt poisonous, too negative to be the one to welcome another human being to this world. She had smiled her way through the births and had offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the moment she’d sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacy knew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when they want to eat and You can’t hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: This child you’ve been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You’re strangers now; you’ll be strangers years from now.

Years ago, she used to lie in bed and imagine what her life would have been like had she not been a mother. She’d picture Joey bringing her a bouquet of dandelion weeds and clover; Peter falling asleep against her chest with the tail of her braid still clutched in his hand. She relived the clenching fist of labor pains, and the mantra she’d used to get through them: When this is done, imagine what you’ll have. Motherhood had painted the colors of Lacy’s world a bit brighter; had swelled her to the seams with the belief that her life could not possibly be more complete. What she hadn’t realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you’d felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.

She had not told her patients-God, she hadn’t even told Lewis-but these days, when she lay in bed and imagined what her life would have been like had she not been a mother, she found herself sucking on one bitter word: easier.

Today Lacy was doing office visits; she’d gone through five patients and was about to move on to her sixth. Janet Isinghoff, she read, scanning the folder. Although she was another midwife’s patient, the policy of the group was to have each woman see all of the midwives, since you never knew who’d be on call when you delivered.

Janet Isinghoff was thirty-three years old, primigravid, with a family history of diabetes. She had been hospitalized once before for appendicitis, had mild asthma, and was generally healthy. She was also standing in the door of the examination room, clutching her hospital johnny shut as she argued heatedly with Priscilla, the OB nurse.

“I don’t care,” Janet was saying. “If it comes down to that, I’ll just go to a different hospital.”

“But that’s not the way our practice works,” Priscilla explained.

Lacy smiled. “Anything I can do here?”

Priscilla turned, putting herself between Lacy and the patient. “It’s nothing.”

“Didn’t sound like nothing,” Lacy replied.

“I don’t want my baby delivered by a woman whose son is a murderer,” Janet burst out.

Lacy felt her feet root on the floor, her breath go so shallow that she might as well have fielded a blow. And hadn’t she?

Priscilla turned crimson. “Mrs. Isinghoff, I think I can speak for the whole of the midwifery team when I say that Lacy is-”

“It’s all right,” Lacy murmured. “I understand.”

By now the other nurses and midwives were staring; Lacy knew that they would rally to her defense-tell Janet Isinghoff to find herself another practice, explain that Lacy was one of the best and most seasoned midwives in New Hampshire. But that hardly mattered, really-it wasn’t about Janet Isinghoff demanding to have another midwife deliver her child; it was that even after Janet had left, there would be another woman here tomorrow or the next day with the same uneasy request. Who would want the first hands touching her newborn to be the same hands that had held a murderer’s when he crossed the street; that had brushed his hair off his forehead when he was sick; that had rocked him to sleep?

Lacy walked down the hall to the fire door and ran up four flights of stairs. Sometimes, when she’d had a particularly difficult day, Lacy would take refuge on the roof of the hospital. She’d lie on her back and stare up at the sky and pretend, with that view, she could be anywhere on earth.

A trial was just a formality-Peter would be found guilty. It didn’t matter how she tried to convince herself-or Peter-otherwise; the fact was there between them at those horrible jail visits, immense and unmentionable. It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn’t seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn’t, because it was easier that way for both of you.

What Lacy would have liked to say, if anyone had given her the podium on which to do it, was that Peter’s actions were just as surprising to her-as devastating to her-as they were to anyone else. She’d lost her son, too, that day. Not just physically, to the correctional facility, but personally, because the boy she’d known had disappeared, swallowed by this beast she didn’t recognize, capable of acts she could not conceive.

But what if Janet Isinghoff was right? What if it was something Lacy had said or done…or not said or done…that had brought Peter to that point? Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been?

The door opened, and Lacy spun around. No one ever came up here, but, then again, she rarely left the floor this upset. It wasn’t Priscilla, though, or one of her colleagues: Jordan McAfee stood on the threshold, a sheaf of papers in his hand. Lacy closed her eyes. “Perfect.”

“Yes, that’s what my wife tells me,” he said, coming toward her with a wide smile on his face. “Or maybe it’s just what I wish she’d tell me…. Your secretary told me you were probably up here, and-Lacy, are you all right?”

Lacy nodded, and then she shook her head. Jordan took her arm and led her to a folding chair that someone had carted all the way up to the roof. “Bad day?”

“You could say that,” Lacy answered. She tried to keep Jordan from seeing her tears. It was stupid, she knew, but she didn’t want Peter’s attorney to think she was the kind of person who had to be treated with kid gloves. Then he might not tell her every blunt truth about Peter, and she wanted to hear that, no matter what.

“I needed you to sign some paperwork…but I can come back later…”

“No,” Lacy said. “This is…fine.” It was better than fine, she realized. It was sort of nice to be sitting next to someone who believed in Peter, even if she was paying him to do that. “Can I ask you a professional question?”

“Sure.”

“Why is it so easy for people to point a finger at someone else?”

Jordan sank down across from her, on the ledge of the roof, which made Lacy nervous, but, again, she couldn’t show it, because she didn’t want Jordan to think she was fragile. “People need a scapegoat,” he said. “It’s human nature. That’s the biggest hurdle we have to overcome as defense attorneys, because in spite of being innocent until proven guilty, the very act of an arrest makes people assume guilt. Do you know how many cops have unarrested someone? I know, it’s crazy-I mean, do you think they apologize profusely and make sure that person’s family and friends and co-workers all know it was a big mistake, or do they just sort of say, ‘My bad,’ and take off?” He met her gaze. “I’m sure it’s hard, reading the editorials that have already convicted Peter before the trial’s even started, but-”

“It’s not Peter,” Lacy said quietly. “They’re blaming me.”

Jordan nodded, as if he’d expected this.

“He didn’t do this because of how we raised him. He did it in spite of that,” Lacy said. “You have a baby, don’t you?”

“Yes. Sam.”

“What if he turns out to be someone you never thought he’d be?”

“Lacy-”

“Like, what if Sam tells you he’s gay?”

Jordan shrugged. “So what?”

“And if he decided to convert to Islam?”

“That’s his choice.”

“What if he became a suicide bomber?”

Jordan paused. “I really don’t want to think about something like that, Lacy.”

“No,” she said, facing him. “Neither did I.”

Philip O’Shea and Ed McCabe had been together for almost two years. Patrick stared at the photos on the fireplace mantel-the two men with their arms slung around each other, with a backdrop of the Canadian Rockies; a corn palace; the Eiffel Tower. “We liked to get away,” Philip said as he brought out a glass of iced tea and handed it to Patrick. “Sometimes, for Ed, it was easier to get away than it was to stay here.”

“Why was that?”

Philip shrugged. He was a tall, thin man with freckles that appeared when his face flushed with emotion. “Ed hadn’t told everyone about…his lifestyle. And to be perfectly honest, keeping secrets in a small town is a bitch.”

“Mr. O’Shea-”

“Philip. Please.”

Patrick nodded. “I wonder if Ed ever mentioned Peter Houghton’s name to you.”

“He taught him, you know.”

“Yeah. I meant…well, beyond that.”

Philip led him to a screened porch, a set of wicker chairs. Every room he’d seen in the house looked like it had just been host to a magazine photo shoot: the pillows on the couches were tilted at a forty-five-degree angle; there were vases with glass beads in them; the plants were all lush and green. Patrick thought back to his own living room, where today he’d found a piece of toast stuffed between his sofa cushions that had what could really only be called penicillin growing on top of it by now. It might have been a ridiculous stereotype, but this home had Martha Stewart written all over it, whereas Patrick’s looked more like a crack house.

“Ed talked to Peter,” Philip said. “Or at least, he tried to.”

“About what?”

“Being a bit of a lost soul, I think. Teens are always trying to fit in. If you don’t fit into the popular crowd, you try the athletic crowd. If that doesn’t work, you go to the drama crowd…or to the druggies,” he said. “Ed thought that Peter might be trying out the gay and lesbian crowd.”

“So Peter came to talk to Ed about being gay?”

“Oh, no. Ed sought Peter out. We all remember what it was like to be figuring out what was different about us, when we were his age. Worried to death that some other kid who was gay was going to come on to you and blow your cover.”

“Do you think Peter might have been worried about Ed blowing his cover?”

“I sincerely doubt it, especially in Peter’s case.”

“Why?”

Philip smiled at Patrick. “You’ve heard of gaydar?”

Patrick felt himself coloring. It was like being in the presence of an African-American who made a racist joke, simply because he could. “I guess.”

“Gay people don’t come clearly marked-it’s not like having a different color skin or a physical disability. You learn to pick up on mannerisms, or looks that last just a little too long. You get pretty good at figuring out if someone’s gay, or just staring at you because you are.”

Before he realized what he was doing, Patrick had leaned a little farther away from Philip, who started to laugh. “You can relax. Your vibe clearly says you bat for the other team.” He looked up at Patrick. “And so does Peter Houghton.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Peter may have been confused about his sexuality, but it was crystal clear to Ed,” Philip said. “That boy is straight.”

Peter burst through the door of the conference room, bristling. “How come you haven’t come to see me?”

Jordan looked up from the notes he was making on a pad. He noticed, absently, that Peter had put on some weight-and apparently some muscle. “I’ve been busy.”

“Well, I’m stuck here all by myself.”

“Yeah, and I’m busting my ass to make sure that isn’t a permanent condition,” Jordan replied. “Sit down.”

Peter slumped into a chair, scowling. “What if I don’t feel like talking to you today? Clearly, you don’t always feel like talking to me.”

“Peter, how about we drop the bullshit so I can do my job?”

“Like I care if you can do your job.”

“Well, you should,” Jordan said. “Seeing as you’re the beneficiary.” At the end of this, Jordan thought, I will be either reviled or canonized. “I want to talk about the explosives,” he said. “Where would a person get something like that?”

“At www.boom.com,” Peter answered.

Jordan just stared at him.

“Well, it’s not all that far from the truth,” Peter said. “I mean, The Anarchist Cookbook is online. So are about ten thousand recipes for Molotov cocktails.”

“They didn’t find a Molotov cocktail at the school. They found plastic explosives with a blasting cap and a timing device.”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Well.”

“Say I wanted to make a bomb with stuff I had lying around the house. What would I use?”

Peter shrugged. “Newspaper. Fertilizer-like Green Thumb, the chemical stuff. Cotton. And some diesel fuel, but you’d probably have to get that at a gas station, so it wouldn’t technically be in your house.”

Jordan watched him count off the ingredients. There was a matter-offactness to Peter’s voice that was chilling, but even more unsettling was the tone threaded through his words: this was something Peter had been proud of.

“You’ve done this kind of thing before.”

“The first time I built one, I just did it to see if I could.” Peter’s voice grew more animated. “I did some more after that. The kind you throw and run like hell.”

“What made this one different?”

“The ingredients, for one. You have to get the potassium chlorate from bleach, which isn’t easy, but it’s kind of like doing a chemistry lab. My dad came into the kitchen when I was filtering out the crystals,” Peter said. “That’s what I told him I was doing-extra credit.”

“Jesus.”

“Anyway, after you’ve got that, all you need is Vaseline, which we keep under the bathroom sink, and the gas you’d find in a camp stove, and the kind of wax you use to can pickles. I was kind of freaked out about using a blasting cap,” Peter said. “I mean, I’d never really done anything that big before. But you know, when I started to come up with the whole plan-”

“Stop,” Jordan interrupted. “Just stop right there.”

“You’re the one who asked in the first place,” Peter said, stung.

“But that’s an answer I can’t hear. My job is to get you acquitted, and I can’t lie in front of the jury. On the other hand, I can’t lie about the things I don’t know. And right now, I can honestly say that you did not plan in advance what happened that day. I’d like to keep it that way, and if you have any sense of self-preservation, you should, too.”

Peter walked to the window. The glass was fuzzy, scratched after all these years. From what? Jordan wondered. Inmates clawing to get out? Peter wouldn’t be able to see that the snow had all melted by now; that the first crocuses had choked their way out of the soil. Maybe it was better that way.

“I’ve been going to church,” Peter announced.

Jordan wasn’t much for organized religion, but he didn’t begrudge others their chosen comforts. “That’s great.”

“I’m doing it because they let me leave my cell to go to services,” Peter said. “Not because I’ve found Jesus or anything.”

“Okay.” He wondered what this had to do with explosives or, for that matter, anything else regarding Peter’s defense. Frankly, Jordan didn’t have time to have a philosophical discussion with Peter about the nature of God-he had to meet Selena in two hours to go over potential defense witnesses-but something kept him from cutting Peter off.

Peter turned. “Do you believe in hell?”

“Yeah. It’s full of defense attorneys. Just ask any prosecutor.”

“No, seriously,” Peter said. “I bet I’m headed there.”

Jordan forced a smile. “I don’t lay odds on bets I can’t collect on.”

“Father Moreno, he’s the priest who leads the church services here? He says that if you accept Jesus and repent, you get excused…like religion is just some giant freebie hall pass that gets you out of anything and everything. But see, that can’t be right…because Father Moreno also says that every life is worth something…and what about the ten kids who died?”

Jordan knew better, but he still heard himself asking Peter a question. “Why did you phrase it that way?”

“What way?”

“The ten kids who died. As if it was a natural progression.”

Peter’s brow wrinkled. “Because it was.”

“How?”

“It’s like those explosives, I guess. Once you light the fuse, either you destroy the bomb before it goes off…or the bomb destroys everything else.”

Jordan stood up and took a step toward his client. “Who struck the match, Peter?”

Peter lifted his face. “Who didn’t?”

Josie now thought of her friends as the ones who had been left behind. Haley Weaver had been sent to Boston for plastic surgery; John Eberhard was in some rehab place reading Hop on Pop and learning how to drink from a straw; Matt and Courtney and Maddie were gone forever. That left Josie and Drew and Emma and Brady: a posse that had dwindled to such a degree that you could barely call them a posse at all anymore.

They were in Emma’s basement, watching a DVD. That was about the extent of their social life these days, because Drew and Brady were still in bandages and casts and besides, even if none of them wanted to say it out loud, going anywhere they used to go reminded them of who was missing.

Brady had brought the movie-Josie couldn’t even remember the name, but it was one of those movies that had come out after American Pie, hoping to make the same killing at the box office by taking naked girls and daredevil guys and what Hollywood imagined teenage life to be like, and tossing them together like some sort of cosmic salad. Right now, a car chase filled the screen. The main character was screaming across a drawbridge that was slowly opening.

Josie knew he was going to make it across. First off, this was a comedy. Second, nobody had the guts to kill off the main character before the story was over. Third, her physics teacher had used this very movie to prove, scientifically, that given the speed of the car and the trajectory of the vectors, the actor could indeed jump the bridge-but only if the wind wasn’t blowing.

Josie also knew that the person in the car wasn’t real, wasn’t even the actor playing the role, but a stuntman who had done this a thousand times. And yet, even as she watched the action unrolling on the television screen, she saw something entirely different: the car’s fender, striking the far side of the open bridge. The twist of metal turning in midair, slapping against the water, sinking.

Grown-ups were always saying that teenagers drove too fast or got high or didn’t use condoms because they thought they were invincible. But the truth was that at any moment, you could die. Brady could have a stroke on the football field, like those young college athletes who suddenly dropped dead. Emma could be hit by lightning. Drew might walk into an ordinary high school on an extraordinary day.

Josie stood up. “I need some air,” she murmured, and she hurried up the basement stairs and out the front door of Emma’s house. She sat down on the porch and looked at the sky, at two stars that were hitched at the elbows. You weren’t invincible when you were a teenager. You were just stupid.

She heard the door open and close with a gasp. “Hey,” Drew said, coming to sit beside her. “You okay?”

“I’m great.” Josie pasted on a smile. It felt gummy, like wallpaper that hadn’t been smoothed right. But she had gotten so good at this-faking it-that it was second nature. Who would have thought that she’d inherited something from her mother after all?

Drew reached down for a blade of grass and began splitting it into hairs with his thumb. “I say the same thing when that bonehead school shrink calls me down to ask me how I’m doing.”

“I didn’t know he calls you down, too.”

“I think he calls all of us who were, you know, close…”

He didn’t finish his sentence: Close to the ones who didn’t make it? Close to dying that day? Close to finishing ourselves off?

“Do you think anyone ever tells the shrink anything worthwhile?” Josie asked.

“Doubt it. He wasn’t there that day. It’s not like he really gets it.”

“Does anyone?”

“You. Me. Those guys upstairs,” Drew said. “Welcome to the club no one wants to join. You’re a member for life.”

Josie didn’t mean to, but Drew’s words and the stupid guy in the movie trying to jump the bridge and the way the stars were pricking at her skin, like inoculations for a terminal disease, suddenly made her start to cry. Drew reached around her, wrapping his one good arm around her, and she leaned into him. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into the flannel of his shirt. It felt so familiar, as if she’d come home to her own bed after years of circumnavigating the globe, to find that the mattress still somehow melted around the curve and weight of her. And yet-the fabric of the shirt didn’t smell like it used to. The boy holding her wasn’t quite the same size, the same shape, the same boy.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Josie whispered.

Immediately, Drew pulled away from her. His face was flushed, and he could not look Josie in the eye. “I didn’t mean it like that. You and Matt…” His voice went flat. “Well, I know you’re still his.”

Josie looked up at the sky. She nodded at him, as if that was what she had meant in the first place.

It all began when the service station left a message on the answering machine. Peter had missed his car inspection appointment. Did he want to reschedule?

Lewis had been alone in the house, retrieving that message. He had dialed the number before he even realized what he was doing, and thus it was no surprise to find himself actually keeping the rescheduled appointment. He got out of the car, handed his keys to the gas station attendant. “You can wait right inside,” the man said. “There’s coffee.”

Lewis poured himself a cup, putting in three sugars and lots of milk, the way Peter would have fixed it. He sat down and instead of picking up a worn copy of Newsweek, he thumbed through PC Gamer.

One, he thought. Two, three.

On cue, the gas station attendant came into the waiting room. “Mr. Houghton,” he said, “the car out there-it’s not due for a state inspection until July.”

“I know.”

“But you…you made this appointment.”

Lewis nodded. “I don’t have that particular car with me right now.”

It was impounded somewhere. Along with Peter’s books and computer and journals and God only knew what else.

The attendant stared at him, the way you do when you realize the conversation you’re having has veered from the rational. “Sir,” he said, “we can’t inspect a car that’s not here.”

“No,” Lewis said. “Of course not.” He put the magazine back down on the coffee table, smoothed its wrinkled cover. Then he rubbed a hand over his forehead. “It’s just…my son made this appointment,” he said. “I wanted to keep it on his behalf.”

The attendant nodded, slowly backing away. “Right…so, how about I just leave the car parked outside?”

“Just so you know,” Lewis said softly, “he would have passed inspection.”

Once, when Peter was young, Lacy had sent him to the same sleepaway camp that Joey had gone to and adored. It was somewhere across the river in Vermont, and campers water-skied on Lake Fairlee and took sailing lessons and did overnight canoe trips. Peter had called the first night, begging to be brought home. Although Lacy had been ready to start the car and drive to get him, Lewis had talked her out of it. If he doesn’t stick this out, Lewis had said, how will he ever know if he can?

At the end of two weeks, when Lacy saw Peter again, there were changes in him. He was taller, and he’d put on weight. But there was also something different about his eyes-a light that had been burned to ash, somehow. When Peter looked at her, he seemed guarded, as if he understood that she was no longer an ally.

Now he was looking at her the same way even as she smiled at him, pretending that there was no glare from the fluorescent light over his head; that she could reach out and touch him instead of staring at him from the other side of the red line that had been drawn on the jail floor. “Do you know what I found in the attic yesterday? That dinosaur you used to love, the one that roared when you pulled its tail. I used to think you’d be carrying it down the aisle at your wedding…” Lacy broke off, realizing that there might never be a wedding for Peter, or any aisle outside of a prison walkway, for that matter. “Well,” she said, turning up the wattage on her smile. “I put it on your bed.”

Peter stared at her. “Okay.”

“I think my favorite birthday party of yours was the dinosaur one, when we buried those plastic bones in the sandbox and you had to dig for them,” Lacy said. “Remember?”

“I remember nobody showed up.”

“Of course they did-”

“Five kids, maybe, whose moms had forced them to be there,” Peter said. “God. I was six years old. Why are we even talking about this?”

Because I don’t know what else to say, Lacy thought. She looked around the visitation room-there were only a handful of inmates, and the devoted few who still believed in them, caught on opposite sides of that red stripe. In reality, Lacy realized, this dividing line between her and Peter had been there for years. If you kept your chin up, you might even be able to convince yourself there was nothing separating you. It was only when you tried to cross it, like now, that you understood how real a barrier it could be. “Peter,” Lacy blurted out, “I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up at sleepaway camp, that time.”

He looked at her as if she was crazy. “Um, thanks for that, but I got over it about a hundred years ago.”

“I know. But I can still be sorry.” She was sorry about a thousand things, suddenly: that she didn’t pay more attention when Peter showed her some new programming skill; that she hadn’t bought him another dog after Dozer died; that they did not go back to the Caribbean last winter vacation, because Lacy had wrongly assumed they had all the time in the world.

“Sorry doesn’t change anything.”

“It does for the person who’s apologizing.”

Peter groaned. “What the fuck is this? Chicken Soup for the Kid Without a Soul?”

Lacy flinched. “You don’t have to swear in order to-”

“Fuck,” Peter sang. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“I’m not going to sit here and take this-”

“Yes you are,” Peter said. “You know why? Because if you walk out on me, it’s just one more thing you’ve got to be sorry about.”

Lacy was halfway out of her chair, but the truth in Peter’s words weighted her back down into the seat. He knew her, it seemed, far better than she had ever known him.

“Ma,” he said softly, his voice edging over that red line. “I didn’t mean that.”

She looked up at him, her throat thickening with tears. “I know, Peter.”

“I’m glad you come here.” He swallowed. “I mean, you’re the only one.”

“Your father-”

Peter snorted. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but I haven’t seen him since that first time he came.”

Lewis wasn’t coming to see Peter? That was news to Lacy. Where did he go when he left the house, telling her that he was headed to the jail?

She imagined Peter, sitting in his cell every other week, waiting for a visit that did not come. Lacy forced a smile-she would get upset on her own time, not Peter’s-and immediately changed the topic. “For the arraignment…I brought you a nice jacket to wear.”

“Jordan says I don’t need it. For the arraignment I just wear these clothes. I won’t need the jacket until the trial.” Peter smiled a little. “I hope you didn’t cut the tags off yet.”

“I didn’t buy it. It’s Joey’s interview blazer.”

Their eyes met. “Oh,” Peter murmured. “So that’s what you were doing in the attic.”

There was silence as they both remembered Joey coming downstairs in the Brooks Brothers blazer Lacy had gotten him at Filene’s Basement in Boston at deep discount. It had been purchased for college interviews; Joey had been setting them up at the time of the accident.

“Do you ever wish it was me who died,” Peter asked, “instead of Joey?”

Lacy’s heart fell like a stone. “Of course not.”

But then you’d still have Joey,” Peter said. “And none of this would have happened.”

She thought of Janet Isinghoff, the woman who had not wanted her as a midwife. Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest-learning when it was better to lie, rather than hurt someone with the truth. It was why Lacy came to these visits with a smile stretched like a Halloween mask over her face, when in reality, she wanted to break down sobbing every time she saw Peter being led into the visitation room by a correctional officer. It was why she was talking about camp and stuffed animals-the hallmarks of the son she remembered-instead of discovering who he had become. But Peter had never learned how to say one thing when he meant another. It was one of the reasons he’d been hurt so many times.

“It would be a happy ending,” Peter said.

Lacy drew in a breath. “Not if you weren’t here.”

Peter looked at her for a long moment. “You’re lying,” he said-not angry, not accusing. Just as if he was stating the facts, in a way that she wasn’t.

“I am not-”

“You can say it a million times, but that doesn’t make it any more true.” Peter smiled then, so guileless that Lacy felt it smart like a stripe from a whip. “You might be able to fool Dad, and the cops, and anyone else who’ll listen,” he said. “You just can’t fool another liar.”

By the time Diana reached the docket board to check which judge was sitting on the Houghton arraignment, Jordan McAfee was already standing there. Diana hated him on principle, because he hadn’t ripped two pairs of stockings trying to get them on, because he wasn’t having a bad hair day, because he didn’t seem to be the least bit ruffled about the fact that half the town of Sterling was on the front steps of the courthouse, demanding blood. “Morning,” he said, not even glancing at her.

Diana didn’t answer. Instead, her mouth dropped open as she read the name of the judge sitting on the case. “I think there’s a mistake,” she said to the clerk.

The clerk glanced over her shoulder at the docket board. “Judge Cormier’s sitting this morning.”

“On the Houghton case? Are you kidding me?”

The clerk shook her head. “Nope.”

“But her daughter-” Diana snapped her mouth shut, her thoughts reeling. “We need to have a chambers conference with the judge before the arraignment.”

The moment the clerk was gone, Diana faced Jordan. “What the hell is Cormier thinking?”

It wasn’t often that Jordan got to see Diana Leven sweat, and frankly, it was entertaining. To be honest, Jordan had been just as shocked to see Cormier’s name on the docket board as the prosecutor had been, but he wasn’t about to tell Diana. Not tipping his hand was the only advantage he had right now, because frankly, his case wasn’t worth anything.

Diana frowned. “Didn’t you expect her to-”

The clerk reappeared. Jordan got a kick out of Eleanor; she cut him slack in the superior courthouse and even laughed at the dumb-blonde jokes he saved for her, whereas most clerks had a terminal case of self-importance. “Her Honor will see you now,” Eleanor said.

As Jordan followed the clerk into chambers, he leaned down and whispered the punch line he’d been getting at, before Leven so rudely interrupted his joke with her arrival. “So her husband looks at the box and says, ‘Honey, it’s not a puzzle…it’s some Frosted Flakes!’”

Eleanor snickered, and Diana scowled. “What’s that, some kind of code?”

“Yeah, Diana. It’s secret defense attorney language for: Whatever you do, don’t tell the prosecutor what I’m saying.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Diana murmured, and then they were in chambers.

Judge Cormier was already in her robe, ready to start the arraignment. Her arms were folded; she was leaning against her desk. “All right, Counselors, we have a lot of people in the courtroom waiting. What’s the problem?”

Diana glanced at Jordan, but he just raised his eyebrows. If she wanted to poke at the hornet’s nest, that was just fine, but he’d be standing far away when it happened. Let Cormier hold a grudge against the prosecution, not the defense.

“Judge,” Diana said hesitantly, “it’s my understanding that your daughter was in the school at the time of the shooting. In fact, we’ve interviewed her.”

Jordan had to give Cormier credit-she somehow managed to stare Diana down as if the prosecutor hadn’t just presented a valid and disturbing fact, but had said something absolutely ludicrous instead. Like the punch line of a dumb-blonde joke, for example. “I’m quite aware of that,” the judge said. “There were a thousand children in the school at the time of the shooting.”

“Of course, Your Honor. I just…I wanted to ask before we got out there in front of everyone whether the court was planning to just handle the arraignment, or if you’re planning to sit during the whole case?”

Jordan looked at Diana, wondering why she was so dead sure that Cormier shouldn’t be sitting on this case. What did she know about Josie Cormier that he didn’t?

“As I said, there were thousands of kids in that school. Some of their parents are police officers, some work here at the superior court. One even works in your office, Ms. Leven.”

“Yes, Your Honor…but that particular attorney isn’t handling this case.”

The judge stared at her, calm. “Are you calling my daughter as a witness, Ms. Leven?”

Diana hesitated. “No, Your Honor.”

“Well, I’ve read my daughter’s statement, Counselor, and I don’t see any reason that we can’t proceed.”

Jordan ran through what he knew so far:

Peter had asked about Josie’s welfare.

Josie was present during the shooting.

Josie’s yearbook photo, in the discovery, was the only one that had been marked with the words LET LIVE.

But according to her mother, whatever she told the police wouldn’t affect the case. According to Diana, nothing Josie knew was important enough to make her a witness for the prosecution.

He dropped his gaze, his mind replaying these facts over and over like a loop of videotape.

One that just didn’t make sense.

The former elementary school that was serving as the physical location for Sterling High did not have a cafeteria-little kids ate in their classrooms, at their desks. But somehow this was considered unhealthy for teenagers, so the library had been turned into a makeshift cafeteria. There were no books or shelves there anymore, but the carpet still had ABC’s sprinkled into its weave, and a poster of the Cat in the Hat still hung beside the double doors.

Josie no longer sat with her friends in the cafeteria. It just didn’t feel right-as if some critical mass were missing, and they were likely to be split apart like an atom under pressure. Instead, she sequestered herself in a corner of the library where there were carpeted risers, where she liked to imagine a teacher reading aloud to her kindergartners.

Today, when they’d arrived at school, the television cameras were already waiting. You had to walk right through them to get to the front door. They’d dribbled away over the past week-no doubt there was some tragedy somewhere else for these reporters to cover-but returned in full force to report on the arraignment. Josie had wondered how they were going to hightail it from the school all the way north to the courthouse in time. She wondered how many times in the course of her high school career they would come back. On the last day of school? At the anniversary of the shooting? At graduation? She imagined the People magazine article that would be written in a decade about the survivors of the Sterling High massacre-“Where Are They Now?” Would John Eberhard be playing hockey again, or even walking? Would Courtney’s parents have moved out of Sterling? Where would Josie be?

And Peter?

Her mother was the judge at his trial. Even if she didn’t talk about it with Josie-legally, she couldn’t-it wasn’t as if Josie didn’t know. Josie was caught somewhere between utter relief, knowing her mom would be sitting on the case, and absolute terror. On the one hand, she knew her mother would start piecing together the events of that day, and that meant Josie wouldn’t have to talk about it herself. On the other hand, once her mother did start piecing together the events of that day, what else would she figure out?

Drew walked into the library, tossing an orange up in the air and catching it repeatedly in his fist. He glanced around at the pods of students, settled in small groups on the carpet with their hot lunch trays balanced on their knees like the bows of crickets, and then spotted Josie. “What’s up?” he asked, sitting down beside her.

“Not much.”

“Did the jackals get you?”

He was talking about the television reporters. “I sort of ran past them.”

“I wish they’d all just go fuck themselves,” Drew said.

Josie leaned her head against the wall. “I wish it would all just go back to normal.”

“Maybe after the trial.” Drew turned to her. “Is it weird, you know, with your mom and all?”

“We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about anything, really.” She picked up her bottled water and took a sip, so that Drew wouldn’t realize that her hand was shaking.

“He’s not crazy.”

“Who?”

“Peter Houghton. I saw his eyes that day. He knew exactly what the hell he was doing.”

“Drew, shut up,” Josie sighed.

“Well, it’s true. Doesn’t matter what some hotshot fucking lawyer says to try to get him off the hook.”

“I think that’s something the jury gets to decide, not you.”

“Jesus Christ, Josie,” he said. “Of all people, I wouldn’t think you’d want to defend him.”

“I’m not defending him. I’m just telling you how the legal system works.”

“Well, thanks, Marcia Clark. But somehow you give less of a damn about that when you’re the one with a slug being pulled out of your shoulder. Or when your best friend-or your boyfriend-is bleeding to death in front of-” He broke off abruptly as Josie fumbled her bottle of water, soaking herself and Drew.

“Sorry,” she said, mopping up the mess with a napkin.

Drew sighed. “Me, too. I guess I’m a little freaked out, with the cameras and everything.” He tore off a piece of the damp napkin and stuck it in his mouth, then tossed the spitball at the back of an overweight boy who carried the tuba in the school marching band.

Oh my God, Josie thought. Nothing’s changed at all. Drew tore off another piece of napkin and rolled it in his palm. “Stop it,” Josie said.

“What?” Drew shrugged. “You’re the one who wanted to go back to normal.”

There were four television cameras in the courtroom: ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN; plus reporters from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Associated Press. The media had met with Alex last week in chambers, so that she could decide who would be represented in the courtroom while the others waited outside on the steps of the courthouse. She was aware of the tiny red lights on the cameras that indicated they were recording; of the scratch of pens on paper as the reporters wrote down her words verbatim. Peter Houghton had become infamous, and as a result of that, Alex would now have her fifteen minutes of fame. Maybe sixty, Alex thought. It would take her that long to simply read through all the charges.

“Mr. Houghton,” Alex said, “you are charged with, on March 6, 2007, a count of first-degree murder, contrary to 631:1-A, in that you purposely caused the death of another, to wit, Courtney Ignatio. You are charged with, on March 6, 2007, a count of first-degree murder, contrary to 631:1-A, in that you purposely caused the death of another, to wit…” She glanced down at the name. “Matthew Royston.”

The words were routine, something Alex could do in her sleep. But she focused on them, on keeping her voice measured and even, on giving weight to the name of each dead child. The gallery was packed full, and Alex could recognize the parents of these students, and some students themselves. One mother, a woman Alex did not know by sight or name, sat in the front row behind the defense table, clutching an 8 x 10 photo of a smiling girl.

Jordan McAfee sat beside his client, who was wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and shackles, and was doing everything he could to avoid looking at Alex as she read the charges.

“You are charged with, on March 6, 2007, a count of first-degree murder, contrary to 631:1-A, in that you purposely caused the death of another, to wit, Justin Friedman….

“You are charged with, on March 6, 2007, a count of first-degree murder, contrary to 631:1-A, in that you purposely caused the death of another, to wit, Christopher McPhee….

“You are charged with, on March 6, 2007, a count of first-degree murder, contrary to 631:1-A, in that you purposely caused the death of another, to wit, Grace Murtaugh….”

The woman with the photo stood up as Alex was reciting the charges. She leaned over the bar, between Peter Houghton and his attorney, and smacked the photograph down so hard that the glass cracked. “Do you remember her?” the woman cried, her voice raw. “Do you remember Grace?”

McAfee whipped around. Peter ducked his head, keeping his eyes trained on the table in front of him.

Alex had had disruptive people in her courtroom before, but she could not remember them stealing her breath away. This mother’s pain seemed to take up all the empty space in the gallery; heat the emotions of the other spectators to a boiling point.

Her hands began to tremble; she slipped them underneath the bench so that nobody could see. “Ma’am,” Alex said. “I’m going to have to ask you to sit down…”

“Did you look her in the face when you shot her, you bastard?”

Did you? Alex thought.

“Your Honor,” McAfee called.

Alex’s ability to judge this case impartially had already been challenged by the prosecution. While she didn’t have to justify her decisions to anyone, she’d just told the attorneys that she could easily separate her personal and her professional involvement in this case. She’d thought it would be a matter of seeing Josie not as her daughter, specifically, but as one of hundreds present during the shooting. She had not realized that it would actually come down to seeing herself not as a judge, but as another mother.

You can do this, she told herself. Just remember why you’re here. “Bailiffs,” Alex murmured, and the two beefy courtroom attendants grabbed the woman by the arms to escort her out of the courtroom.

“You’ll burn in hell,” the woman shouted as the television cameras followed her progress down the aisle.

Alex didn’t. She kept her eyes on Peter Houghton, while his attorney’s attention was distracted. “Mr. McAfee,” she said.

“Yes, Your Honor?”

“Please ask your client to hold out his hand.”

“I’m sorry, Judge, but I think there’s already been enough prejudicial-”

“Do it, Counselor.”

McAfee nodded at Peter, who lifted his shackled wrists and opened his fists. Winking in Peter’s palm was a shard of broken glass from the picture frame. Blanching, the attorney reached for the glass. “Thank you, Your Honor,” he muttered.

“Any time.” Alex looked at the gallery and cleared her throat. “I trust there will be no more outbursts like that, or I’ll be forced to close these proceedings to the public.”

She continued reading the charges in a courtroom so quiet you could hear hearts break; you could hear hope fluttering to the rafters on the ceiling. “You are charged with, on March 6, 2007, a count of first-degree murder, contrary to 631:1-A, in that you purposely caused the death of another, to wit, Madeleine Shaw. You are charged with, on March 6, 2007, a count of first-degree murder, contrary to 631:1-A, in that you purposely caused the death of another, to wit, Edward McCabe.

“You are charged with attempted first-degree murder, contrary to 630:1-A and 629:1, in that you did commit an act in furtherance of the offense of first-degree murder, to wit, shooting at Emma Alexis.

“You are charged with possession of firearms on school grounds.

“Possession of explosive devices.

“Unlawful use of an explosive device.

“Receiving stolen goods, to wit, firearms.”

By the time Alex had finished, her voice was hoarse. “Mr. McAfee,” she said, “how does your client plead?”

“Not guilty to all counts, Your Honor.”

A murmur spread virally through the courtroom, something that always happened in the wake of hearing that not-guilty plea, and that always seemed ridiculous to Alex-what was the defendant supposed to do? Say he was guilty?

“Given the nature of the charges, you are not entitled to bail as a matter of law. You are remanded to the custody of the sheriff.”

Alex dismissed court and headed into chambers. Inside, with the door closed, she paced like an athlete coming off a brutal race. If there was anything she was sure of, it was her ability to judge fairly. But if it had been this hard at the arraignment, how would she function when the prosecution began to actually outline the events of that day?

“Eleanor,” Alex said, pressing the intercom button for her clerk, “clear my schedule for two hours.”

“But you-”

“Clear it,” she snapped. She could still see the faces of those parents in the gallery. What they’d lost was written across their faces, a collective scar.

Alex stripped off her robe and headed down the back stairs to the parking lot. Instead of stopping for a cigarette, though, she got into her car. She drove straight to the elementary school and parked in the fire lane. There was one news van still in the teachers’ parking lot, and Alex panicked, until she realized that the license plates were from New York; that the chance of someone recognizing her without her judicial robes on was unlikely.

The only person who had a right to ask Alex to recuse herself was Josie, but Alex knew that ultimately her daughter would understand. It was Alex’s first big case in superior court. It was modeling healthy behavior for Josie herself, to get on with her life again. Alex tried to ignore the last reason she was fighting to stay on this case-the one that pricked like a thorn, like a splinter, rubbing raw no matter which way she came at it: she had a better chance of learning from the prosecution and the defense what her daughter had endured than she ever would from Josie herself.

She walked into the main office. “I need to pick up my daughter,” Alex said, and the school secretary pushed a clipboard toward her, with information to be filled out. STUDENT, Alex read. TIME OUT. REASON. TIME IN.

Josie Cormier, she wrote. 10:45 a.m. Orthodontist.

She could feel the secretary’s eyes on her-clearly the woman wanted to know why Judge Cormier was standing in front of her desk instead of at the courthouse presiding over the arraignment that they were all waiting to hear about. “If you could just send Josie out to the car,” Alex said, and she walked out of the office.

Within five minutes, Josie opened the passenger door and slid into the seat. “I don’t have braces.”

“I needed to think of an excuse fast,” Alex answered. “It was the first one to pop into my head.”

“So why are you really here?”

Alex watched Josie turn up the volume of the vent. “Do I need a reason to have lunch with my daughter?”

“It’s, like, ten-thirty.”

“Then we’re playing hooky.”

“What ever,” Josie said.

Alex pulled away from the curb. Josie was two feet away from her, but they might as well have been on different continents. Her daughter stared firmly out the window, watching the world go by.

“Is it over?” Josie asked.

“The arraignment? Yes.”

“Is that why you came here?”

How could Alex describe what it had felt like, seeing all of those nameless mothers and fathers in the gallery, without a child between them? If you lost your child, could you still even call yourself a parent?

What if you’d just been stupid enough to let her slip away?

Alex drove to the end of a road that overlooked the river. It was racing, the way it always did in the spring. If you didn’t know better, if you were looking at a still photo, you might wish you could take a dip. You wouldn’t realize, just by glancing, that the water would rob you of your breath; that you might be swept away.

“I wanted to see you,” Alex confessed. “There were people in my courtroom today…people who probably wake up every day now wishing that they’d done this-left in the middle of the day to have lunch with their daughters, instead of telling themselves they could do it some other day.” She turned to Josie. “Those people, they didn’t get to have any other days.”

Josie picked at a loose white thread, silent long enough for Alex to start mentally kicking herself. So much for her spontaneous foray into primal motherhood. Alex had been rattled by her own emotions during the arraignment; instead of telling herself she was being ridiculous, she’d acted on them. But this was exactly what happened, wasn’t it, when you started to sift through the shifting sands of feelings, instead of just feeding facts hand over fist? The hell with putting your heart on your sleeve; it was likely to get ripped off.

“Hooky,” Josie said quietly. “Not lunch.”

Alex sat back, relieved. “What ever,” she joked. She waited until Josie met her gaze. “I want to talk to you about the case.”

“I thought you couldn’t.”

“That’s sort of what I wanted to talk about. Even if this was the biggest career opportunity in the world, I’d step down if I believed it was going to make things harder for you. You can still come to me anytime and ask me anything you want.”

They both pretended, for a moment, that Josie did this on a regular basis, when in fact it had been years since she’d shared anything in confidence with Alex.

Josie’s glance slanted toward her. “Even about the arraignment?”

“Even about the arraignment.”

“What did Peter say in court?” Josie asked.

“Nothing. The lawyer does all the talking.”

“What did he look like?”

Alex thought for a moment. She had, upon first seeing Peter in his jail jumpsuit, been amazed at how much he’d grown. Although she had seen him over the years-in the back of the classroom during school events, at the copy store where he and Josie had worked together briefly, even driving down Main Street-she still somehow had expected him to be the same little boy who’d played in kindergarten with Josie. Alex considered his orange scrubs, his rubber flip-flops, his shackles. “He looked like a defendant,” she said.

“If he’s convicted,” Josie asked, “he’ll never get out of prison, will he?”

Alex felt her heart squeeze. Josie was trying not to show it, but how could she not be afraid that something like this would happen again? Then again, how could Alex-as a judge-make a promise to convict Peter before he’d even been tried? Alex felt herself walking the high wire between personal responsibility and professional ethics, trying her damnedest not to fall. “You don’t have to worry about that…”

“That’s not an answer,” Josie said.

“He’ll most likely spend his life there, yes.”

“If he was in prison, would people be allowed to talk to him?”

Suddenly, Alex couldn’t follow Josie’s line of logic. “Why? Do you want to talk to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t imagine why you’d want to, after-”

“I used to be his friend,” Josie said.

“You haven’t been Peter’s friend in years,” Alex answered, but then the tumblers clicked, and she understood why her daughter, who was seemingly terrified about Peter’s potential release from prison, might still want to communicate with him after his conviction: remorse. Maybe Josie believed that something she’d done-or hadn’t-might have brought Peter to the point where he would have gone and shot his way through Sterling High.

If Alex didn’t understand the concept of a guilty conscience, who would?

“Honey, there are people looking out for Peter-people whose job it is to look out for him. You don’t have to be the one to do it.” Alex smiled a little. “You just have to look out for yourself, all right?”

Josie looked away. “I have a test next period,” she said. “Can we go back to school now?”

Alex drove in silence, because by that time it was too late to make the correction; to tell her daughter that there was someone looking out for her, too; that Josie was not in this alone.

At two in the morning, when Jordan had been bouncing a wailing, sick infant in his arms for five straight hours, he turned to Selena. “Remind me why we had a child?”

Selena was sitting at the kitchen table-well, no, actually she was sprawled across it, her head pillowed in her arms. “Because you wanted to pass along the finely tuned genetic blueprint of my bloodline.”

“Frankly, I think all we’re passing along is some viral crud.”

Suddenly, Selena sat up. “Hey,” she whispered. “He’s asleep.”

“Thank God. Get him off me.”

“Like hell I will-that’s the most comfortable he’s been all day.”

Jordan glowered at her and sank into the chair across from her, his hands still cupped around his sleeping son. “He’s not the only one.”

“Are we talking about your case again? Because to be honest, Jordan, I’m so damn tired that I need clues, here, if we’re going to shift topics…”

“I just can’t figure out why she hasn’t recused herself. When the prosecution brought up her daughter, Cormier dismissed it…and more importantly, so did Leven.”

Selena yawned and stood up. “You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth, baby. Cormier’s got to be a better judge for you than Wagner.”

“But something’s rubbing me the wrong way about this.”

Selena smiled at him indulgently. “Got a little diaper rash, huh?”

“Even if her kid doesn’t remember anything now, that doesn’t mean she’s not going to. And how is Cormier going to remain impartial, knowing that her daughter’s boyfriend was blown away by my client while she stood there watching?”

“Well, you could make a motion to get her off the case,” Selena said. “Or you could wait for Diana to do that instead.”

Jordan glanced up at her.

“If I were you, I’d keep my mouth shut.”

He reached out, snagging the sash of her robe so that it unraveled. “When do I ever keep my mouth shut?”

Selena laughed. “There’s always a first time,” she said.

Each tier in maximum security had four cells, six feet by eight feet. Inside the cell was a bunk bed and a toilet. It had taken Peter three days to be able to take a dump while the correctional officers were walking past, without his bowels seizing up, but-and this was how he knew he was getting used to being here-now he could probably crap on command.

At one end of the maximum-security catwalk was a small television. Because there was only room for one chair in front of the TV, the guy who’d been in the longest got to sit down. Everyone else stood behind him, like hoboes in a soup line, to watch. There were not a lot of programs the inmates could agree upon. Mostly it was MTV, although they always turned on Jerry Springer. Peter figured that was because no matter how much you’d screwed up in your life, you liked knowing that there were people out there even more stupid than you.

If anyone on the tier did something wrong-not even Peter, but for example an asshole like Satan Jones (Satan not being his real name; that was Gaylord, but if you mentioned it even in a whisper he’d go for your jugular), who had drawn a caricature of two of the COs doing the horizontal hora on the wall of his cell-everyone lost the television privilege for the week. Which left the other end of the catwalk to mosey on down toward: a shower with a plastic curtain, and the phone, where you could call collect for a dollar a minute, and every few seconds you’d hear This call has originated at the Grafton County Department of Corrections, just in case you had been lucky enough to forget.

Peter was doing sit-ups, which he hated. He hated all exercise, really. But the alternative was sitting around and getting soft enough for everyone to think they could pick on you, or going outside during his exercise hour. He went, a couple of times-not to shoot hoops or to jog or even make secret deals near the fence for the drugs or cigarettes that got smuggled into jail, but just to be outside and breathing in air that hadn’t already been breathed by the other inmates in this place. Unfortunately, from the exercise yard you could see the river. You’d think that was a bonus, but in fact, it was the most awful tease. Sometimes the wind blew so that Peter could even smell it-the soil along the edge, the frigid water-and it nearly broke him to know that he couldn’t just walk down there and take off his shoes and socks and wade in, swim, fucking drown himself if he wanted to. After that, he stopped going outdoors at all.

Peter finished his hundredth sit-up-the irony was that after a month, he was so much stronger that he could probably have kicked Matt Royston’s and Drew Girard’s asses simultaneously-and sat down on his bunk with the commissary form. Once a week, you got to go shopping for things like mouthwash and paper, with the prices jacked up ridiculously high. Peter remembered going to St. John one year with his family; in the grocery store, cornflakes cost, like, ten dollars, because they were such a rare commodity. It wasn’t like shampoo was a rare commodity, but in jail, you were at the mercy of the administration, which meant they could charge $3.25 for a bottle of Pert, or $16 for a box fan. Your other alternative was to hope that an inmate who left for the state prison would will you his belongings, but to Peter, that felt a little like being a vulture.

“Houghton,” a correctional officer said, his heavy boots ringing down the metal catwalk, “you’ve got mail.”

Two envelopes zoomed into the cell and slid underneath Peter’s bunk. He reached for them, scraping his fingernails against the cement floor. The first letter was from his mother, which he was almost expecting. Peter got mail from his mother at least three or four times a week. The letters were usually about stupid things like editorials in the local paper or how well her spider plants were doing. He’d thought, for a while, that she was writing in code-something he needed to know, something transcendent and inspirational-but then he started to realize that she was just writing to fill up space. That’s when he stopped opening mail from his mother. He didn’t feel bad about this, really. The reason his mother wrote to him, Peter knew, wasn’t so that he’d read the letters. It was so that she could tell herself she’d written them.

He didn’t really blame his parents for being clueless. First of all, he’d had plenty of practice with that particular condition. Second, the only people who understood him, really, were the ones who had been at the high school that day, and they weren’t exactly jamming his mailbox with missives.

Peter tossed his mother’s letter onto the floor again and stared at the address on the second envelope. He didn’t recognize it; it wasn’t from Sterling, or even New Hampshire, for that matter. Elena Battista, he read. Elena from Ridgewood, New Jersey.

He ripped open the envelope and scanned her note.

Peter,

I feel like I already know you, because I’ve been following what happened at the high school. I’m in college now, but I think I know what it was like for you…because it was like that for me. In fact, I’m writing my thesis now on the effects of being bullied at school. I know it’s presumptuous to think that you’d want to talk to someone like me…but I think if I’d known someone like you when I was in high school, my life would have been different, and maybe it’s never too late????

Sincerely,

Elena Battista

Peter tapped the ragged envelope against his thigh. Jordan had specifically told him he was to talk to nobody-that is, except his parents, and Jordan himself. But his parents were useless, and to be honest, it wasn’t like Jordan had been holding up his end of the bargain, which involved being physically present often enough for Peter to get whatever was bugging him off his chest.

Besides. She was a college girl. It was kind of cool to think that a college girl wanted to talk to him; and it wasn’t like he was going to tell her anything she didn’t already know.

Peter reached for his commissary form again and checked off the box for a generic greeting card.

A trial could be split into halves: what happened the day of the event, which was the prosecution’s baby; and everything that led up to it, which was what the defense had to present. To that end, Selena busied herself interviewing everyone who had come in contact with their client during the past seventeen years of his life. Two days after Peter’s arraignment in superior court, Selena sat down with the principal of Sterling High in his modified elementary school office. Arthur McAllister had a sandy beard and a round belly and teeth that he didn’t show when he smiled. He reminded Selena of one of those freaky talking bears that had come onto the market when she was a kid-Teddy Ruxpin-which made it all the more strange when he started answering her questions about anti-bullying policies at the high school. “It’s not tolerated,” McAllister said, although Selena had expected that party line. “We’re completely on top of it.”

“So, if a kid comes to you to complain about being picked on, what are the repercussions for the bully?”

“One of the things we’ve found, Selena-can I call you Selena?-is that if the administration intervenes, it makes it worse for the kid who’s being bullied.” He hesitated. “I know what people are saying about the shooting. How they’re comparing it to Columbine and Paducah and the ones that came before them. But I truly believe that it wasn’t bullying, per se, that led Peter to do what he did.”

“What he allegedly did,” Selena automatically corrected. “Do you keep records of bullying incidents?”

“If it escalates, and the kids are brought in to me, then yes.”

“Was anyone ever brought to you for bullying Peter Houghton?”

McAllister stood up and pulled a file out of a cabinet. He began to leaf through it, and then stopped at a page. “Actually, Peter was brought in to see me twice this year. He was put into detention for fighting in the halls.”

“Fighting?” Selena said. “Or fighting back?”

When Katie Riccobono had plunged a knife into her husband’s chest while he was fast asleep-forty-six times-Jordan had called upon Dr. King Wah, a forensic psychiatrist who specialized in battered woman syndrome. It was a specific tangent of post-traumatic stress disorder, one that suggested a woman who’d been repeatedly victimized both mentally and physically might so constantly fear for her life that the line between reality and fantasy blurred, to the point where she felt threatened even when the threat was dormant, or in Joe Riccobono’s case, as he lay sleeping off a three-day drinking spree.

King had won the case for them. In the years that had passed, he’d become one of the foremost experts on battered woman syndrome, and appeared routinely as a witness for the defense all over the country. His fees had skyrocketed; his time now came at a premium.

Jordan headed to King’s Boston office without an appointment, figuring his charm could get him past whatever secretarial gatekeeper the good doctor employed, but he hadn’t counted on a near-retirement-age dragon named Ruth. “The doctor’s booking six months out,” she said, not even bothering to look up at Jordan.

“But this is a personal call, not a professional one.”

“And I care,” Ruth said, in a tone that clearly suggested she didn’t.

Jordan figured it wouldn’t do any good to tell Ruth she was looking lovely today, or to grace her with a dumb-blonde joke, or even to play up his successful track record as a defense attorney. “It’s a family emergency,” he said.

“Your family is having a psychological emergency,” Ruth repeated flatly.

“Our family,” Jordan improvised. “I’m Dr. Wah’s brother.” When Ruth just stared at him, Jordan added, “Dr. Wah’s adopted brother.”

She raised one sharp eyebrow and pressed a button on her phone. A moment later, it rang. “Doctor,” she said. “A man who claims to be your brother is here to see you.” She hung up the receiver. “He says you can go right in.”

Jordan opened the heavy mahogany door to find King eating a sandwich, his feet crossed on top of his desk. “Jordan McAfee,” he said, smiling. “I should have known. So tell me…how’s Mom doing?”

“How the hell should I know, she always loved you best,” Jordan joked, and he came forward to shake King’s hand. “Thanks for seeing me.”

“I had to find out who had enough chutzpah to say he was my brother.”

“‘Chutzpah,’” Jordan repeated. “You learn that in Chinese school?”

“Yeah, Yiddish came right after Abacus 101.” He gestured for Jordan to take a seat. “So how’s it going?”

“Good,” Jordan said. “I mean, maybe not as good as it’s going for you. I can’t turn on Court TV without seeing your face on the screen.”

“It’s been busy, that’s for sure. I’ve only got ten minutes, in fact, before my next appointment.”