Now everyone in the room was silent, everyone and everything, except the younger detective’s pen, hurrying across his pad.

“Does my daughter have to talk to you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is she required to talk to you? Do citizens have to talk to the police when they’re not charged with anything? Because I am a citizen, Officer, a second-generation American, for your information, so don’t think I can be bullied.”

“Well, it could be argued, Mr. Patel”-he still didn’t have their name quite right, Josie noticed-“that a witness to a murder who doesn’t cooperate is obstructing justice, which is a felony in its own right.”

“In that case-since you’re throwing charges around-I think I’d like my daughter to have a lawyer before she talks to you again.”

“That’s your legal right, Mr. Patel, but it’s not really necessary. Just gunks up the works, makes your neighbors think things are different than they are. No one’s accusing your daughter of anything. We’re simply trying to make sure we’re clear on the details of what happened.”

“I’m very clear. My daughter’s been through the most traumatic experience of her life. She’s seen her best friend killed and suffered a painful injury. If you’d like to talk to her further, I’ll bring her to your offices next week. With a lawyer.”

The sergeant and the detective shuffled out, heads down. Josie almost felt sorry for them-until she caught the look on the older man’s face. He wasn’t the least bit ashamed or cowed by her father’s lecture. He was just pretending.

“Daddy?” she said as soon as the detectives left. “Could I have a snowball? Raspberry? Or fireball, with marsh-a-mallow?”

“Marsh-a-mallow” was an old family joke, Josie’s childhood mangling of the word.

“The hospital might have smoothies or frozen yogurt, but I don’t think-” her mother began.

“Of course you can have a snowball,” her father said. “I’ll ask where the nearest stand is, so it won’t be all juice.”

Josie settled back on her pillows, exhausted. Exhausted, and just a little exhilarated, too.

“Do you want anything from downstairs? Zip’s going to the food court.”

“Did I see a Mama Ilardo’s down there? I love the sausage and pepperoni thick crust.”

Eloise Kahn paused, and Dannon Estes wondered if she was going to suggest a healthier alternative, as she often did when Dannon dined with the Kahns. He couldn’t blame her. Eloise, as she insisted on being called by Perri’s friends, knew that Dannon was troubled by his weight and acne, not to mention his height. There’s nothing you can do about your height, Eloise would tell him in her gentle way, but the first two conditions actually respond to diet and behavior changes, even medication. If he wanted to be thin, if he wanted clear skin, he could have them. He just had to make different choices. It was one of Mrs. Kahn’s favorite words-choices.

But perhaps Eloise Kahn was less wedded to this view of self-control. For all her good choices, she was now hunkered down in the corridors of Shock Trauma, one of the most despised people in the Baltimore metro area this weekend. The other being her husband, of course. And Perri, too, although Dannon had a hunch that Perri didn’t make a very satisfactory villain, being comatose. So her parents had to shoulder all the blame for now.

“Sure,” she said. “Sausage and pepperoni, thick crust. What do you want to drink with that?”

“Mountain Dew.”

“One slice?”

He held up two fingers, embarrassed by his greed, but he had been here since 10:00 A.M., when his mother had finally agreed to drive him down rather than continue to listen to his insistent wheedling.

Eloise nodded. “You got it. I’ll go tell Zip before he gets on the elevator.” She walked down the hall, her feet dragging along the linoleum, in marked contrast to her usual gait, which was bouncy, more girlish than Perri’s. At the end of the corridor, she turned and called back to him.

“Are you sure that’s all you want?”

“Yeah,” he said, although it was far from all he wanted. But what Dannon really craved was not available at the food court, or anywhere else. He wanted to be liked. He wanted to be taller. First and foremost, he wanted to be someone else-not merely a taller, cooler, clear-skinned Dannon Estes but someone altogether different. An outlaw type, the kind of silent guy who glided through life letting others project their dreams and desires on him, like Keith Carradine in that old movie. Not Nashville, but the other one where all the women were crazy in love with him. Except that Dannon would want other Keith Carradines to love him. That was his exact type. Tall, lanky, hetero, but maybe not wedded to it.

For now his only claim to outlaw status was that he was willing to be here, keeping a vigil with Baltimore ’s newest pariahs, part of a tiny minority who wanted to see Perri live. Oh, other people probably wanted Perri to survive, too, but only to see her punished. Dannon and the Kahns clung to the idea that Perri could somehow explain it all if she would only regain consciousness. It had to be a mistake, some freakish accident. This was not Perri.

The Kahns, for once needing Dannon almost as much as he needed them, had lied and told hospital personnel that he was Perri’s brother and eighteen, neither of which was true. Both lies would be exposed once Dwight made it home from Japan, where he had just started a new job in some bank. Dannon felt noble, and then he felt stupid: What did Dannon Estes, wardrobe master for the drama club, really have to lose by being here? Until Perri came along, he hadn’t had a real friend in all of Glendale. He was the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, a movie-besotted geek whose only friends were AMC and TCM and the Sundance Channel.

Then, last fall, Perri Kahn had taken him under her wing suddenly, excitingly, needing a coconspirator in her scheme to get the drama department to mount Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. They hadn’t won in the end, but they should have, and Dannon was flattered to discover that Perri still desired his company when she no longer needed him as a political ally. A year older than Dannon, one of the acknowledged stars of Glendale ’s drama department, she had barely spoken to him during previous productions-Carousel, The Lark. Perri had been a big wheel in the drama department since scoring the title role in Mame in the summer production, back when she was all of sixteen. Dannon had loved helping to create the illusion of glamour the role required. Watching from the wings as Perri descended the mock staircase in a gold dress that Dannon had found in a consignment shop, he had been as smitten as Mame’s nephew in the play. Life really was a banquet, and most poor sons of bitches were starving.

Perri wasn’t supposed to say “sons of bitches,” of course. She was expressly forbidden, told to say sons of guns instead. So on opening night she substituted “bastards.” That word, she blithely told a furious Barbara Paulson after the performance, had not been prohibited. Eloise and Zip had defended her, as they usually did. Eloise and Zip were big on integrity and principle.

Of course, Dannon, watching from the wings, didn’t know that then. He hadn’t gotten to know the Kahns until this fall, when it turned out that hanging out with Perri also meant spending time with her folks, a kind of accelerated intimacy that almost left him breathless. Eloise and Zip Kahn had treated Dannon as if he had been part of Perri’s life since grade school, automatically including him in all sorts of outings and celebrations. Overwhelmed by their kindness at first, he had begun to understand there was an element of relief in it for them, too: Dannon was filling Kat and Josie’s spot in the Kahn family. Tight as the Kahns were, they liked to have outsiders around to validate their closeness, their specialness.