The truth was, Alexa had gotten very little house for her money, a tiny bungalow, Craftsman era but definitely not a Craftsman, on an unusually large lot in Beverly Hills, a neighborhood ripe for a yuppie influx that would send prices soaring. If she just sat on her investment for a year or two, doing nothing, the house’s value would probably triple from the land alone. But Alexa could not live that way. She needed a home, for emotional reasons so psychologically naked that they made Alexa, with her double degrees in rhetoric and psychology, a little sheepish.

She had done well by the house, but she was ill suited to harnessing its greatest asset, the wild and overgrown lawn. A neighborhood man had helped her with the basics-clearing out the weeds, cutting back on the overly rambunctious border plants-but the yard would have to wait for someone with a greener thumb to realize its true potential. Alexa’s primary grudge against gardening was that it was never done. A room might take three months to renovate, especially if one were doing it in piecemeal fashion, but once finished, it was finished for years. A kitchen might take three hours to clean after a particularly ambitious day of cooking, but it would still be tidy the next morning. One could work in a garden every day, from first to last light, and a half-dozen tasks would remain, while another dozen would spring up overnight. Gardens were just so ceaselessly needy.

Teenage girls were, too, of course, but Alexa did not find them as exasperating-quite the opposite. When she stood in front of a group of girls, she felt an almost spiritual thrill. Not holy per se, but as if she were the holder of simple but essential truths that could free them. They needed only to understand the power of words and stop using them to harm and harass. That was Alexa’s gospel, and she had been making progress at Glendale, in the same way she was making progress on her house-one room at a time, one project at a time, and, right now, on her hands and knees in the living room, one strip of Pergo at a time. It was much harder than the guy at Home Depot had suggested, however, and Alexa was trying not to cry at the seeming impossibility of fitting the floor into her slightly off-kilter living room.

Secretly, selfishly, she wondered how her pilot program would be affected by Perri Kahn’s-But Alexa did not know how to describe the actions of her star pupil. “Act”? Far too weak. “Crime”? Not if she were mentally ill, which she must be. But how could Alexa have missed the warning signs of such a profound psychosis? She had approved of Perri’s break with Kat, seeing it as an important stage in the girl’s development. True, Perri had been gloomy this year, emotional and secretive, and her papers had been increasingly fixated on violence, but in a cool, analytical way. She had written a particularly smart piece on the role of minorities as sacrificial totems in horror films, showing how even those movies that seemed to subvert this trope ended up serving it. For proof she had offered some B-movie about a snake, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube emerge heroic, yet all their efforts center on helping the injured blond hero, just as Sigourney Weaver had battled aliens to save a similarly comatose white male. Perri had been an absolute delight to teach, but Alexa knew that this was not information anyone wanted just now.

If Perri Kahn had shot, say, Thalia Cooper, then Alexa might have understood. Thalia was the stereotype, the mean girl who hid her cruelty beneath her bland, blond good looks, sending the pinch-faced Beverly Wilson to do her handiwork. If a boy was heard to remark approvingly on any facet of a girl that Thalia did not deem respectable, then Thalia tried to destroy that girl. That had been the whole motive behind her attempt to humiliate Eve Muhly. Eve had been getting too much attention for her ridiculously lovely body, a scale model of voluptuousness, not that Eve had a clue what to do with it. Of course, now that Eve hung with the skeezer girls, she dressed in such baggy clothes that one could say Thalia had won, after a fashion. No, if someone had shot Thalia, it would have made perfect sense.

But Kat Hartigan was almost as nice as everyone said she was. As a new arrival to Glendale, Alexa wasn’t quite so inclined to be gaga over Kat. And as a guidance counselor with unrestricted access to student records, she knew that Kat’s admission to Stanford had rested heavily on the status of her father’s girlfriend, an alum who’d gone to bat for her big-time, recruiting other area alums to write her letters of reference. Her grades were impressive, straight A’s across the board, but her SATs were average by Glendale standards. Kat simply could not crack 1400 despite the money her father lavished on coaches and tutoring programs, making Stanford a reach for her. Strangely, reading comprehension was her downfall. She soared through the vocabulary on verbal only to hit a mental block when asked to interpret words in context. But Kat-well, Kat’s father-was nothing if not sly about the process. By the time the girl applied for early admission, she had found multiple ways to sweeten her application and compensate for her board scores.

For all this-the money, the connections, the doting father, the grandfather who had helped to build the town where all her friends lived-Kat was genuinely sweet-tempered. A little dull, perhaps, because of the very earnestness that made her so nice, a perfectionist who panicked at the smallest error. Sometimes she was almost too solicitous of others’ feelings, as if her parents’ divorce had left her with a profound fear of even mildly disagreeable discussions. She was a nodder par excellence, someone who gave her wholehearted approval to the tiniest projects and pronouncements, to the point where she risked being patronizing. Yet Kat was nothing if not achingly sincere. While Thalia and Beverly stalked the halls of Glendale, looking for new victims to terrorize, Kat had reigned from a base of niceness.

At a standoff with the Pergo, Alexa decided to take a break, pour herself some iced tea-homemade, with mint leaves, which still grew wild in a corner of her barely cultivated yard-and carried the glass to her back steps, along with her cordless phone.

She eyed the phone, trying to think of someone to call. She had checked in with her mother Friday night, of course, and the conversation had been almost as gratifying as it should be, her mother properly awed and frightened by her daughter’s brush with danger. Alexa had hung up with a rare feeling of satisfaction. Stories that one looked forward to telling so often fell flat. Yet this one became better with each telling, even as she called her best friend from graduate school, then took a call from an old high-school classmate who had heard the news all the way in San Diego.

But she had not called her older brother, assuming he would call her. Given their age difference, he had always been protective of her, especially after their father “decamped.” That was her mother’s preferred term, for it was at once literal and cruel, a reference to the fact that Mitchell Cunningham’s last act had been to pack the family’s camping gear in the trunk of his station wagon. He had been trying to find a place to fit the grill when his wife and daughter returned from church. Oona Cunningham told this story on herself to this day, as if being blunt about her own fate could keep anyone else from hurting her. But she had been better when Evan was home, before he went away to college. The ensuing eight years that Alexa spent with her mother felt forlorn and temporary-too much takeout, too many meals eaten in front of the television. It was as if a woman and a girl, living alone in a house where a father and a son used to be, did not count for anything.

She dialed her brother’s cell, knowing better than to expect him to stay home on such a beautiful day. While Alexa sought relief in domesticity, Evan needed endless distractions. But then, his New York apartment was small and depressing. No one would elect to spend time there. Alexa had offered to give it a perk-up-make curtains, show him how a few pieces from Target and Pier 1 could tie it all together-but Evan hadn’t been interested.