Annie’s laugh was a wave of nervous high-pitched giggles and her cheeks reddened to a lovely deep pink. Years ago, Lena, who had been quite social （mind-bogglingly social! flitting around, hosting parties, fiddling, fiddling, fiddling while Rome burned） would have identified this warm magnet pull toward Annie Perley and thought: new friend.
She would have invited Annie to her next party, deposited her in a conversation with someone fun and lively, offered a gougère just out of the oven, fragrant and steaming.
Everyone had always gone crazy for Lena’s gougères and she had become increasingly nutty about getting them perfect. You’re missing the party, Tim would accuse.
And what had Gary Neary joked that night? The gorgeous gougères. Lena had giggled like it was high comedy, just like Annie Perley was doing now.
This was the problem with meeting new people: they dredged up old recollections, even when they didn’t mean to. Lena had never been able to conclusively destroy the unwelcome memories, but her occasional therapist Dr. Friendly had taught her a visualization process—flatten the memory like a trash compactor would, note its diminishment, move on.
She thought desperately of five minutes in the future when Annie would be gone and Lena could curl up on her couch with Odile.
But Annie, flushed and still hopelessly giggling at the wordplay, didn’t appear to be going anywhere. She clutched Lena’s arm and wiped her eyes and bent over and her sunglasses clattered down from the front of her shirt to the lawn, which only intensified Annie’s laughter.
Lena regarded the penis’s goofy face. It was funny. And so was Annie, doubled over with laughter, grasping helplessly onto the grass for her sunglasses. If Annie’s chortles were fizzy champagne, Lena’s were a vintage car engine sputtering a bit before roaring to life.
A voice floated up from somewhere deep within Lena. “Would you like to come in for coffee, Annie?”
Annie wiped her eyes with the back of her wrists. The invitation hovered between them like a balloon that Lena wished she could pop.
She’d been too forward, hadn’t she? Lena was so out of practice, but the way Annie gravely studied Lena’s house behind them—as if Lena had proposed becoming roommates instead of a warm beverage—wasn’t right either.
“I’m due at the school by ten thirty,” Annie said. “But for a little while, why not?”
Lena thought that Annie sounded disappointed in her own response, as if she had at her fingertips a million reasons why not, but had for some reason been powerless to use them.
CHAPTER THREE
“This is total crap,” Paul said.
Jen’s mouth had been open in formation of an apology to Principal Dutton, to Harper, to the entire school community for what Abe had done.
She shut it. Apparently, they were taking a different approach.
Paul sat next to her at the small conference table in Dutton’s office. A craggy blue vein pulsed at his temple. Across from them, Dutton blinked his watery gray eyes. White flakes covered the shoulders of his navy sport coat and Jen felt an automatic stab of embarrassment for him.
No! Dutton was the enemy. A curse on him: dandruff in perpetuity.
“Without any real witnesses, how do we even know that Abe stabbed this kid,” Paul said. “You just said the teacher—”
“Mr. Marley,” Jen said quietly.
“Mr. Marley.” Paul spat out the name, which Mr. Marley deserved. Another enemy, he was lazy and tired and, according to Abe, completely oblivious of the cruel middle school shenanigans occurring on the daily under his watch. Art period was like Lord of the Flies at peak pig-killing hour. “Mr. Marley admitted he didn’t see any of it, so we’re relying on the word of that girl, who is essentially Harper French’s henchman—”
“Veronica,” Jen added.
She always got a jealous thrill when Paul went on the attack in these Abe meetings. Jen either dissolved in tears, which was of no help to Abe, or slipped into Girl Friday mode, like now, helpfully supplying the details.
At two in the morning, however, Jen would jolt awake with righteous anger and imagine doing a series of roundhouse kicks straight to Dutton’s solar plexus until he begged for mercy.
（No wonder Abe had stabbed someone. So much repressed anger in his DNA.）
“Veronica and Harper have been taunting Abe for months,” Paul said, “so don’t give me this bullshit about your zero-tolerance policy.”
Jen folded her arms over her chest. Yeah: what he said.
There was a reason Paul had climbed so high up the corporate ladder: the man knew how to brawl, facts be damned.