Later, when we would go to my mother’s house in Connecticut for Thanksgiving, she fell in love with little Graham too. That’s the way it was. He wasn’t shy then. He was my little protégé, learning everything there was about how film worked and the visual world. And he was his father’s son—learning everything about battles and strategies and looking at the world from a scientific distance. David worked for BAE Systems as a military aerospace strategist, based just outside of Washington in Virginia. But he was a simple man at heart, with good taste. He still loved to set up the telescope in the yard, and we would all lie out there together looking at the stars. Graham loved that most of all. He would ask millions of questions about how far away the planets were, was there life out there, how did light travel. It was only natural that he became who he was. Mechanically inclined, an artist, a boy who looked at the stars. Someone who thought about war and life and death.

I wish he’d never had to think so deeply about these things. We thought he was in good hands with Dr. Adams and on the new prescription. We thought the art helped his healing. The work he made . . . beautiful stuff, I have to say—even though I’m biased. The lawyer for the other family wanted to have his camera taken away permanently as part of the conditions of his probation, but of course, that was absurd. There was no way that was going to happen, I mean, I really put my foot down on that, and we had the lawyers to make sure he got out of there without some humiliating damaging sentence. He was a child! Sixteen is still a child! People don’t know what they’re doing at sixteen. If anything, the fact that he was trying to make art from a bad situation—I mean, that his initial response was to turn something terrible into something he could understand—was the most human thing that came from all of it.

Anyway, this new work had a maturity to it I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a young artist. Especially the work he did in Rockland. Scenes from bridges, long camera shots with the telephoto lens. Things you can barely make out but that seem intimately familiar. Interviews with people intercut with digital feedback. It’s all very exciting.

I think Graham had been a lonely kid this past year and he needed to process and understand what he went through. I think that was true the last year in Virginia too. I won’t have people saying it was the art—that it was the art that caused all our sorrow. The truth is some of his art is the only consolation. It’s the only thing that still remains.

I saw her waiting as usual in her black jeans, that alert, funny, “I’m about to be in trouble” look on her face. “Tate!” I called to her, and she looked up and grinned sheepishly, walked in, and sat down as I shut the door. This was becoming a pretty common ritual with Ms. Tate.

I try to be a good example, but my office is pretty cluttered. They keep us busy at RHS and I had stacks of folders nearly dwarfing my desk. I always kept a jar of black licorice candy out for students, which for some reason was still three-quarters full.

“Tate, how’s things?” I asked, and then went on without waiting for her usual smart-aleck answer. “I got this report here from your social studies teacher that says you’ve already missed six classes this quarter. What’s up, girl?”

“Six classes? Sure you’re not talking about my sister?”

“Ha! C’mon, don’t give me that line again. I mean it, what’s up? You’re a straight-A student at risk of failing because of absences, detentions, and mouthing off. Doesn’t quite make sense somehow. What can we do to fix it?”

She shrugged. “It’s sixth period. Sometimes I take a long lunch.”

I laughed. “Oh, I hear you, sometimes I want to take a long lunch too, but you know what?”

“What?” Tate asked.

“I don’t.”

Tate didn’t know what to say for once. She smiled awkwardly and shrugged. I really liked this kid. She was one person who I thought about when the last bell rang. Wondered how she was doing and if she was going to make it out of Rockland High okay.

I leaned in close to her and whispered. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said. “Everyone kinda hates high school. Unless they are a little bent. But once you’re out, you’re out, and it’s a whole new world. You fail social studies, I mean, you do something stupid and just stop showing up, and you’re gonna miss getting to that new world fast. You’ll end up trapped somewhere you can’t stand for even longer. Does that make sense?”

She rolled her eyes. I’d been telling her similar things last year too, until she came in with a list of successful high-school dropouts and handed it to me. “I hung this over my desk at home,” she’d said. “Thought you might want a copy.” Still, I wasn’t about to give up trying. I got it about why she didn’t want to be in school. She wanted to live in the world instead of sit at a desk. And she didn’t know why she had to show up at all if she was getting good grades. And nobody had yet been able to make her see the logic in it. I also knew Tate got high, which, honestly, as long as she still did her work and didn’t become a slacker, I didn’t really care that much about. The thing I wanted her to do was show up. I wanted her to pass. I’d seen enough kids go through the system, and seen enough friends still working at Pizza Hut, to know that there were plenty of ways some seemingly innocuous drug could drag you down, but Tate’s problem was being there at all.

“Well, look,” I told her. “Whether it makes sense or not, promise me you’ll go to class tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She looked up and nodded at me. “All right.”

Tate left the office but lingered around outside. She really didn’t want to go back to class—there were only fifteen more minutes anyway, and she could just as easily study a little right now by herself. And besides, something about hanging around Richards’s office made her feel more relaxed. Syd liked Richards because she often saw her smoking on the way from the parking lot to the school, had a loud musical laugh that you could hear in the hallways, and wore black skinny jeans every day. Jeans and a pretty designer blouse. You could tell she didn’t want to dress up at all.

And Tate could easily picture her wearing black lipstick and a ball-chain necklace back when Richards was in high school herself. Now the woman wore a small string of pearls every day, but Syd considered it just a professional costume. She knew that Ally actually admired the pearls and blouse—tried to dress like that herself. Ally described her as “caring but professional,” and Syd had to admit it was a good description. There was something about Richards that both girls liked.

Syd sat on the floor across the hall, where she could still look through the door. She watched Richards pull a file out of her drawer and look at it.

Principal Fitzgerald peeked his head into her office. And Syd watched from the hallway—waiting for him to tell her to get back to class—but he didn’t seem to see her at all.

“Still pondering the fate of Tate?” he asked her.

Richards looked up. “She’s a good kid, Dan,” she said.

“That’s the attitude we hired you for, Mandy.”

“She is, though. I really think she could go on to a top ten. If something besides skateboarding could hold her interest for more than a week and she’d get herself to classes.” She played absently with her pearls as she looked back down at the file. “Her standardized-test scores are high. Her teachers say this kid could be half there or dominate the class, bringing in all kinds of information or doing special reading or extra-credit projects. She’s smart as hell. And she’s always got that joke, ‘You must be thinking of my sister,’ when she’s getting in trouble or getting particular praise. She’s an interesting kid. Mercurial.”