Except, of course, Kat, who was dead. He hadn’t thought of her consciously for some time, but he realized now he had been looking forward to her hearing about SusquehannaFalls , maybe feeling a little wistful toward him. Suffer, as Conrad Birdie snarled to his adoring, panting fans in Bye Bye Birdie, twitching his hips all over Sweet Apple, Ohio. Peter had played that part, too, back in middle school. His first big role, when he was a total runt, and no one knew that he could sing and dance and act, least of all Peter himself.

Of course he had seen Kat, in passing, over the last three years. She was always polite, always sweet. Given the way they behaved, people who didn’t know the story might have assumed she dumped him, instead of the other way around. That was Kat, the ultimate good sport. Besides, what was the big deal? They had gone together less than two months, just a summer fling. He was going to be a sophomore in college. She was going to be a sophomore in high school. It wasn’t fair to her, he had said more than once, and she had nodded, as if she believed that Peter was the kind of guy who worried about what was fair for others. But that was how summer romances were supposed to go. It was one thing to run around with a fifteen-year-old girl the summer you were nineteen, to regress to dry-humping in the backseats of cars, fighting for every inch of skin. Freshman year at NYU had been one long drought, his classmates going with older boys. But it wouldn’t always be that way, Peter knew. And, sure enough, he had met a girl his first week of sophomore year, a girl who came to his room just to fuck, like it was a study break or something. And then Simone, with her Jules and Jim fantasy. Who needed a fifteen-year-old virgin, no matter how beautiful, no matter how sweet?

The problem was, he had fallen in love with Kat, just a little. And Kat, for her part, seemed to be the first girl, the only girl, who had loved Peter, as opposed to some stage version of him. She didn’t want Tony or Biff or Conrad. She liked Peter, the lifeguard at the Glendale pool. There were moments, wrestling with her in the backseat of his mother’s car or in her family’s empty house, that he had been torn between wanting to force her to do something, anything, that might give him some release and wondering if they should get engaged. Which was crazy but might have at least persuaded her to sleep with him. That’s how insane she had made him.

Instead he broke up with her, and Kat had accepted it with an almost disturbing ease, turning to the stars of the high-school crowd for her dates. Peter couldn’t help wondering, in the end, if she had used him, if she had figured out that getting Peter Lasko on the string for a summer would give her a big social boost at Glendale. Because while Peter in high school had been a kind of B-plus guy-drama guys seldom being the A guys-he was an A-plus once he graduated, while Kat was a wallflower before she took up with him. Kat, who’d never even had a boyfriend before Peter, suddenly started dating athletes and rich boys. It was hard, in retrospect, not to wonder if it was all a plan, if he had been the one in love and she had been the cool, calculating one. Like her old man, although Kat would bristle if anyone suggested that her father was less than perfect.

And now she was dead, and Peter would never have the chance to make things right with her. He had been counting on that opportunity, he realized, banking on it. In the back of his head, he had always hoped to have a chance to make amends with Kat Hartigan.

On the way home from the Dairy Queen, Peter detoured by the school, but there was nothing to see out front, not even yellow crime-scene tape. They wouldn’t seal off the whole school, obviously. The tape was probably in back, where it had happened. He had managed to learn that much in the last forty-eight hours. Kat, shot to death in the girls’ room, Josie Patel wounded, Perri Kahn the suspect, although she was said to be pretty fucked up. In the Associated Press article that Peter had read in one of the New York tabloids, these names were rendered meaningless-for they were meaningless to whoever had written the account. But each one carried a world of significance for him. Perri, the drama queen. Josie, the little hanger-on. Kat-but he couldn’t sum up Kat in a word or two. Homecoming queen, A student, granddaughter of Glendale ’s founder-you could pile up as many words as you liked, but they didn’t get to the heart of Kat.

He still wasn’t ready to go back to his parents’ empty, quiet house. He decided to cruise past the community center, still ablaze with lights from some sort of show or recital inside. Peter parked his car and got out, leaning against it, enjoying the air. New York was great, but you couldn’t walk a block without smelling something foul, especially this time of the year, when garbage seemed to bake in the alleys. Here muted notes drifted on the summer breeze, but he couldn’t identify the tune. Was it the summer show? No, way too early. Those were always staged in July and August.

The community-theater program in Glendale was quite good, better than those NYU snobs would ever know, the final show as tight and professional as anything Peter had seen in college. Peter had done Godspell here, the summer he was eighteen, when he was college bound. He had worked as a lifeguard all day, then sung and danced every night, so he was tanned and cut, yet very thin, which suited the role of God’s only son. He had fans, honest-to-God groupies who had hung around this parking lot waiting for him to come out. Perri and Josie had been among them, even some of the redneck crowd. But not Kat, never Kat. He knew because he had asked her, after they started dating.

“I’m not the kind of girl who goes around falling in love with Jesus,” she had said. Kat could be droll that way. No one seemed to notice, because she was pretty and Perri was so famously mouthy, but Kat got some good lines off, in private. I’m not the kind of girl who goes around falling in love with Jesus.

Almost without thinking, Peter broke into the old soft shoe, the one from “All for the Best,” right there in the parking lot. This was the Act 1 number with Judas, the one that always killed. Yes, it’s all for the best. He still remembered all the moves, even the time step that the choreographer, a high-strung type, had almost despaired of Peter’s mastering.

Judas got all the best lines in that duet. But Jesus got the girls. Oh, yes, Kat Hartigan notwithstanding, Jesus got all the girls.

Thirty years ago, back when Thornton Hartigan was still wondering if he would ever find developers and investors for the acreage he had acquired so stealthily, a New York couple bought a large, run-down farm in the nearby Monkton area. Harvey Bliss and Sylvia Archer-Bliss were the kind of people described by their new neighbors as artsy, which is to say they wore a lot of black and kept their sunglasses on while shopping at the Giant. They also had an asexual quality, the comfortable air of a couple more like friends than husband and wife. But they were split on what to do with their new property. Harvey dreamed of a restaurant, while Sylvia wanted a dance studio.

“A real one,” she said, “for serious students, not potbellied little girls tiptoeing around in leotards.” Sylvia had been a dancer, her career stunted by her uncompromisingly plain face. She hinted to her students that the song in A Chorus Line, the one about the dancer who transformed herself through plastic surgery, had been inspired by her own career. The claim was dubious, but Sylvia’s talent was genuine, and the dinner theater that she and Harvey eventually opened was so good on all counts that it was possible to forget, as a Beacon-Light critic wrote, that one was at a dinner theater.