She typed: “The buck has been passed to a new generation-ours!”

She stared at it on the screen, fiddled with the font color and point size. It occurred to her that as most of her readers were in their twenties and thirties, they would have no idea it was a steal from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, “The torch has been passed to a new generation.” Even fewer would know that she’d grafted it onto Harry Truman’s famous slogan “The buck stops here.” Whatever. Cassandra was starting to get hits from older readers. And the mainstream media were also starting to take notice. The Washington Post had called CASSANDRA “the bulletin board for angry, intelligent Gen-W’s.” Gen-W being short for “generation whatever.” Even one or two advertisers were starting to come in, feigning interest.

In a moment of weakness, she’d posted a photograph of herself on the home page, thinking it might bring in a few male viewers. It did. A third of the 573 messages were from men who wanted to have sex with her. She was, as Terry had put it, an attractive girl or, to use the word of her generation, “hot”-naturally blond, with liquid, playful eyes and lips that seemed always poised to bestow a kiss, giving her a look of intelligence in contention with sensuality. She had a figure that, when displayed in a bikini or thong at the resort in the Bahamas, would draw sighs from any passing male. All in all, it was not the package you’d expect to find sitting in front of a computer screen at three a.m., wired on over-the-counter speed and railing at the government for-fiscal irresponsibility? Girl, she thought, get a life.

Chapter 2

Twelve Years Before…

“I got in! I got in!”

Cassandra Cohane, age seventeen, was exuberant, and why not? The thick envelope she was waving over her head like a winning lottery ticket bore the dark blue “Lux Et Veritas” stamp of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. All that work, SAT preparation, studying until her eyeballs burned, signing up for AP courses, all those summers spent tutoring inner-city kids, one working on the archaeological site from hell: helping to excavate a 1980s-era mass grave in Guatemala (“It will look very strong on your application,” her guidance counselor had said). The endless rewriting of the college essay, gearing up for the sweaty interview. The waiting. And now she was in. She said it one more time. “I got in!” She hardly believed it herself.

Her father wouldn’t be home until late. She waited for him in the kitchen. He arrived after ten. She sprang up to show him the letter.

“Honey, I’m so proud of you I could bust.” Frank Cohane had gone to an engineering college in California, one that needed to make no apology, but it was-he’d be the first to admit-no Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

“Yale!” he said. “Damn. Yale. How about that.”

Two days later via FedEx, a box arrived. It was full of Yale car decals, coffee mugs, T-shirts, sweatpants, cap, a bulldog-theme pencil sharpener, pens, pads, paperweights, a mouse pad, and a sweatshirt that read, YALE DAD. The card read, “So proud. Love, Dad.” He put so many YALE decals on the car windows, her mother complained she couldn’t see out the back. Neighbors stopped and congratulated her.

A few months later, she came home from school and saw an envelope with the familiar blue emblem lying open on the dining room table. It was from the registrar’s office, addressed to her parents:

“We still have not received the first installment for Cassandra’s tuition. Please contact us at your earliest convenience.”

Her mother wasn’t home yet. She called her father. He greeted her with his normal paternal exuberance, which, once she introduced the subject, changed to an awkward silence.

“Sug” (pronounced “Shug”), he said-an ominous start: It was a word he generally used, perhaps without realizing it, when sugarcoating was called for-“I really want to talk to you about that. But I can’t right now, sweetheart. I’ve got four people in my office. We’ll talk when I get home. Love you.”

She confronted her mother when she got home. Her mother read the letter with a puzzled look. “Dad said he’d take care of it.” She called him at the office. Cass listened in the doorway, mind racing.

They weren’t poor, the Cohanes. They lived in a comfortable subdivision in a respectable but hardly fancy neighborhood. Her mother taught economics at the public high school Cass attended. There were four children in the family. Her father was reasonably prosperous, as far as Cass knew. He’d been a systems engineer at Electric Boat, the company that built America ’s fleet of cold war-era submarines. He never talked much about his job, since much of it was technically classified and all of it, he assured them, was boring and dry. One day, Cass’s younger brother picked the lock on their father’s briefcase and examined the contents. He revealed to his siblings that as far as he could figure out, it had something to do with the launch and guidance systems for the subs’ ballistic missiles. Not boring, but definitely dry.

Frank and several of his colleagues had presciently quit Electric Boat the year before, assuming correctly that the end of the cold war would sooner or later reduce the demand for submarines that could simultaneously annihilate fifty cities, despite the Connecticut congressional delegation’s best efforts to perpetuate a felt need for them. They had a brainstorm for an Internet/software program. In the 1990s, Wall Street was dispensing money faster than an ATM to any start-up ending in “.com.” Frank’s idea had to do with tracking-not ballistic missiles, but shipping packages. If everything went according to plan, they’d take their company public within the year. They were already trying to figure out what kind of corporate jet to buy. He and his partners were working brutal hours, sometimes sleeping on cots at the old mill they’d rented for their office. He would arrive home looking wiped out, but with sparkly eyes. Once they did the IPO, he predicted, “we’ll be richer than King Tut.”

Cass listened to her mother on the phone.

“You what? You said you put that in her 529! Oh, Frank-how could you?”

Cass did not know what a “ 529” was, but the other words issuing from her mother were acquiring an unpleasant critical mass: “can’t believe”…“disgusted”…“unforgivable”…ending with, “No, you can tell her. You get in your forty-thousand-dollar Beemer right now-I don’t care how many people you have in your office-and come home and tell her yourself.” She hung up.

Cass waited for him in the kitchen, as she had the night she got the acceptance letter. When he finally got home, he wore a smile of the kind generally described as “brave.”

“What’s a 529?” Cass asked.

“Did Mom…explain?”

“No. She said you would. She just burst out crying and closed the door to her bedroom.”

“Oh. Uh, well, it’s an instrument, a college savings plan. You put money in it, and, uh, it’s tax-exempt.”

“So I have one?”

“Sug, I…had to put it into the company. These start-ups take seed capital, honey. But when we do the IPO, I’m telling you…Do you know what IPO is?”

“‘I’m pissed off’”

“Clever girl. Initial public offering. We’re going to be rolling in it. Rolling.”

“So, basically, Dad, what you’re trying to say is that you spent my college tuition money on your dot.com.”

“Our dot.com. Don’t worry, Sug, we’ll come up with the money. If I have to…I’ll come up with the dough. You’ll see.”

Her father spent most of the following nights at his office. Meanwhile, Cass’s mother drove to New Haven to try to sort things out. She returned looking defeated, with the news that the Cohanes did not qualify for tuition assistance, as they called it. They were above the thin red line dividing the truly needy from the truly well-enough-off. There was, her mother said, face darkening, her father’s BMW. It might not be a particularly recent model, but you would not find it being used in a remake of The Grapes of Wrath, driven by Tom Joad. Then there was-her face now vermilion-his part ownership in the twin-engine Cessna.