“Alexa!” He was breathless. He was always breathless, always in a rush.

“Hey, Evan. Is this a bad time?”

“Heading uptown to a softball game. What’s up?”

“Oh, I’ve been running around a lot and just wanted to make sure you hadn’t tried to call me this weekend.”

“No. Should I? Was there something with Mom?”

“Nothing important. But I thought you might get a little unnerved, my school being all over the news.”

“Your school? Christ, was that your school? Oh, my God, Alexa, I didn’t put it together. I mean, yes, Maryland, but when it wasn’t Bethesda-Chevy Chase and when it wasn’t Baltimore…I always think of you as being in Baltimore.”

“I am in Baltimore,” she said lightly, letting him off the hook. “It’s the school that’s in the suburbs.”

“Did you see anything? Were you there?”

“I was in the office when the call came in, saying there were shots. And I’m going to coordinate the grief-counseling effort.”

Evan started to laugh, then caught himself. “I’m sorry, Alexa, it’s just that-I don’t know, I’ve never understood the need to qualify counseling with the information that it’s about grief, you know? It’s not like there’s a lot of joy counseling.”

She could have reprimanded him for his insensitivity or pointed out that there were, in fact, other types of counseling. Job counseling for one, as Evan should know, having changed careers three times so far. He currently worked as a graphic designer in downtown Manhattan, a job he had managed to hold for a personal best of four years, even after his firm cut back positions in the wake of 9/11. The day the towers fell, Alexa and her mother had tried frantically to call him, encountering overloaded cellular systems and no answer on his landline. Turned out he had slept through it all. Stranger still, he had not really known anyone among the dead, not intimately. “I haven’t lived in the city that long,” he said, unconcerned about his lack of connection, but that detail had bothered Alexa. She worried that Evan was more like their father than he knew, simply skipping the wife-and-family part and going straight to a selfish, solitary existence.

“I’ll let you go,” she said, keen to say it first. “I’m laying a new floor.”

“Is that all you’re laying these days? What’s wrong with Baltimore men?”

“Evan!”

“I’m serious. I’ve been to Baltimore. You raise the city’s aesthetic standards by several percentage points.”

“Bye!”

She dawdled on her back steps, less than eager to go in and confront her crossways pieces of Pergo. When she did return, she found that something-the tea, her brother’s heartening belief that her solitary state said more about her surroundings than it did about her-had soothed her, and the task fell into place. By day’s end her living room had a maple-hued floor. And only the most eagle-eyed spoilsport could identify it as anything other than the wood it pretended to be, much less find the spot where she had to cheat it, just a bit.

Fuck Evan, she thought as she began to prepare that night’s dinner, a Thai recipe modified from the New York Times’ Mini-malist column. Grief counseling mattered. She was going to help the students of Glendale get through this tragedy, making up for the way the school had botched a more ordinary situation a year ago, when three star athletes had been killed in a car crash. Then, still shy about asserting herself, Alexa had hung back and watched as Barbara Paulson did everything wrong, encouraging an atmosphere of hysteria and gossip that only summer’s arrival had stemmed. This time they would get it right, allow students to express their feelings without encouraging their paranoia.

And, when the opportunity arose, she would find a quiet moment to talk to Eve Muhly, see if the girl really did know more than she was telling. It was hard to see how she could-a middling junior such as Eve would have had little contact with outstanding seniors such as Kat and Perri, or even Josie. But there was no doubt in Alexa’s mind that Eve had wanted to confide in her and could feel that way again, given the opportunity.

Out-of-towners have been known to compare the train’seye view of Baltimore to Dresden, circa 1946, but Peter had always loved Amtrak’s approach into the city. For Peter the butt-ugly scenery was charming-the old Goetze’s caramel factory flashing past, then the backyard views of dilapidated rowhouses, the occasional church spire. He began to gather his things when he saw Johns Hopkins Hospital high on its hill, prim as Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie.

He had been astonished, upon entering NYU four years ago, to find out that Baltimore had a kind of retro cachet. Who needed to know that he was really from the suburbs, and a distant one at that? True, New Yorkers could be a bit patronizing, even when professing admiration for a place; when they cooed about Baltimore ’s charms, they sounded as if they wanted to bend over and pat the city on its collective head. But Baltimore had a disproportionate amount of work for actors, with a movie or television show almost always in production there, and solid Equity theaters. The guy who had won the Tony this year had done Peter Pan at Center Stage less than a year ago. You couldn’t build a career here, not yet, but maybe that would change. His mother would like that. But, for now, he had to go to Toronto, where the dollar was strong and the scenery versatile.

He was actually a little nervous about telling his parents about the job-and about the money he needed, short term, before the paychecks started. That was part of the reason he had decided to do it in a grand way, show up for Sunday dinner with…well, with just himself, as it turned out. Penn Station no longer had a florist, go figure, and there was nothing in the newsstand that would make a suitable gift for his mom. Hey, Mom, here’s a Goldenberg Peanut Chew. No, not even his self-indulgent mother would be impressed by such a lame gesture.

A cab to Glendale was at least forty dollars, which wouldn’t seem like a lot of ducats in a few weeks, but try explaining your prospects to an ATM. Peter decided to take Light Rail to the end of the line, where he could summon a cab for the rest of the journey. Best of both worlds-he could arrive in style and still have some money in his pocket.

The ghost-white train, near empty as usual, wended its way north. Things were so green here, so lush, and the wooded hills buzzed with the roar of seventeen-year cicadas, a phenomenon that hadn’t reached as far north as New York. Peter was never conscious of missing the countryside while in New York, but he was always glad to see it when he returned home. Other kids at NYU seemed to get a kick out of knocking the places they were from, disavowing them, as if that were part of the New York ritual. To be truly cool, you had to reject your hometown. Unless, of course, your hometown was New York, in which case you just spent the first semester sneering at people who had never ridden the subway or eaten soup dumplings in Chinatown.

Short, eager, and a quick study, Peter had seen immediately that he shouldn’t talk about his high-school glory days, that reminiscing about your past accomplishments merely indicated that you didn’t think you had any future ones. Everyone at Tisch had been a star back home. Some already had done professional gigs, usually commercial work. Simone had a line in Good Will Hunting, when she wasn’t even in high school yet. No one needed to hear about Peter’s Tony in West Side Story, his Billy Bigelow in Carousel, or his Biff in the community-playhouse production of Salesman. They were all former Billys, they were all former Biffs-and Romeos and Don Quixotes and Lieutenant Cables.