“Just make sure you paint the back with clear fingernail polish,” Val had advised. “Otherwise it’ll turn your skin green.”

It was funny how Val knew such things, because she didn’t give a damn about style or fashion for her own self. But that was the great thing about Val: She didn’t insist that everyone be like her. She just wanted the people around her to be honest, without affectations. It was okay by Val if you got caught up with wanting trendy stuff. Val wasn’t completely immune to such desires herself; she was, like, in love with her iPod. But somehow she kept it in perspective. Lila could be a little bitchy and, if she liked a guy, crazy competitive. Val was always mellow, always accepting. The only thing she despised was hypocrites. Hypocrites and liars.

The problem was, not lying was harder than it sounded, especially for someone like Eve, who felt as if she had been set up to deceive people. When she had started liking boys-and Eve had started liking boys young, back in fifth grade-it had been inconceivable that she could speak of this fact to her parents. They were so old, for one thing, and so stiff. Not only could she not tell them how much she liked boys or how often she thought about them, she found herself taking it to the extreme, insisting she had no interest in them whatsoever. If she told her parents that she liked boys, she might then have to admit they didn’t like her back.

It seemed to Eve that she told big lies only when she was trying to keep some part of herself hidden. She would start out with nothing more than a desire to conceal, to protect, and it somehow ended up being a lie. That’s why she had to continue dodging Ms. Cunningham. She’d end up telling some enormous lie to protect her secret, and it would be just like last spring all over again. Of course, the weird part about last spring was that she had tried to tell the truth about the car accident, but everyone thought it was a lie, so it had the same effect. Even Val had cautioned her not to spread stories, told her she would not put up with a friend who was a gossip.

That was when Eve had first realized that the dead lived by different rules. Well, not lived-the dead being dead-but the reputations they left behind were definitely changed for the better. Eve wondered what kind of rep she would have if she should die.

Kat’s crowd-mostly preps, although there were cheerleaders and jocks sprinkled among them, and even some drama geeks-were grouped at the front of those standing. Sniffling, holding each other, the girls presented a pretty tableau of grief. But Alexa couldn’t help thinking they knew this, which undercut the effect in her mind. It was as if they were enacting a scene from a music video. Pose, pose, pose. This is what grief looks like. Hair flip, clutch, hair flip.

It worried Alexa, these unguarded waves of hostility toward the girls she was committed to helping. But ten years out of high school, she still had mixed feelings about the popular kids. Because Alexa was pretty and slender, the girls at Glendale had projected on her the mantle of a once popular girl, and after a few token protests, she had allowed that false impression to stand. She should have been popular in high school. She was pretty enough. She did well in her studies without being a competitive grind. But she simply did not have the money to keep up with the upper-middle-class kids who dominated her school. Part-time jobs at the Gap and Banana Republic had helped Alexa hold her own in terms of clothes, but some things-a car, for instance-could not be faked in a single-parent household where the child-support checks seldom arrived. While her brother was home, they had kept up appearances, just barely. Once he left, the house had rotted quietly around them. Today location alone meant that the ugly old Cape Cod was worth almost four hundred thousand dollars, and Alexa had encouraged her mother to sell it, buy a little condo, and sock away the equity. But her mother refused to budge. It was as if she still expected Alexa’s father to show up for the scolding she had never been able to give him. Alexa wasn’t even sure if her father was alive, although she sometimes studied those lists of unclaimed property. It would be so like him to die without a will, failing to care for his children in his death as he’d failed to care for them in life.

Do you realize Kat is dead? she wanted to scream at the girls. (The boys, sullen and uncommunicative, were less appalling to her.) Dead because of you, because of the inadequacies bred in girls like Perri, who are driven insane by the no-win games you play. You killed Kat.

But she was being ridiculous, venting her anger toward Barbara on these innocent girls. Just an hour before she was to leave for the funeral, Barbara had convened yet another meeting, one for Perri’s teachers. They had been told, in no uncertain terms, to sit on Perri’s grades. The logic, if one could call Barbara’s twisted thinking logic, was that Perri’s diploma couldn’t be awarded if her records were incomplete. And it turned out that the Kahns were keen for their daughter’s name to be called from the stage Thursday night, arguing that she was not under indictment, so how could her diploma be withheld? Meanwhile Dale Hartigan was just as intent for Perri’s name to go unspoken, and Barbara had tended to do things Dale Hartigan’s way even before he had the moral advantage of a dead child.

“You know how it is when parents take notions about graduation into their heads,” Barbara had told Perri’s teachers. “We’ve already had to forgo the traditional valedictorian address because-well, you know how insane it got. So the easiest thing to do is just say she had incompletes in a subject or two. Surely she must have owed some of you work.”

Only it turned out she hadn’t-except to Alexa and the trig teacher, Maureen Downey, who had given seniors a take-home. Maureen couldn’t remember if Perri had turned it in or not, but she was happy to obey Barbara’s orders even if she did find the test among her papers. Alexa, however, wanted no part of it.

“It’s a cover-up,” she began, only to be shushed by Barbara. Literally shushed, a finger held to her lips, as if Alexa were some troublesome child.

“Think of it this way,” the principal said. “Perri violated school policy by bringing a firearm onto school property. That’s automatic expulsion. So even if she did submit those final papers to you both, she would be barred from the ceremony.”

“But it still hasn’t been established that Perri brought the gun to school,” Alexa had said, feeling dangerously close to tears. The other teachers seemed embarrassed for her, except for Ted Gifford, who appeared just as upset.

“Did she turn in her work to you?”

“I’m not sure.” Alexa still had not gone through all her final papers, given that the teachers had until the end of the day Wednesday to submit seniors’ grades.

“Then it’s moot anyway. She’s shy two credits. Even under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have walked.”

She had seen Perri’s final paper, Alexa decided now. Hadn’t it been in her box that Friday morning? She tried to re-create the scene in her mind, but those moments of normalcy could not be brought back. She had been sorting papers, reading Barbara’s memo-and then Anita had started to scream.

Anita, who was here at the funeral, despite being out of work on a doctor’s note. The gall, as Alexa’s mother would say. The un-mitigated gall.

Peter pulled at his collar. He hadn’t worn a tie, off-stage, for a long, long time, and the day was vicious hot. He was such a bonehead, lurching at Kat’s uncle that way, but the resemblance was pretty strong and he hadn’t seen Mr. Hartigan for almost three years. Peter had spent far more time with Mrs. Hartigan, who honestly liked him, and the feeling was pretty mutual. A hot mom, a total MILF. Oh, shit, that was probably the kind of thought that got you struck by lightning, standing at your exgirlfriend’s grave and thinking about how sexy her mom was. I didn’t mean it, he assured God. It was just an observation. Besides, anyone could see that Kat’s mom was appealing. Mr. Hartigan’s girlfriend was nice, too, but Peter preferred Mrs. Hartigan. Her eyes had that little downward droop, so sad and sexy, and her hair was always slipping out of this semi-topknot she wore. There was something about Mrs. Hartigan that made it very easy to imagine her naked, as if her clothes would give way as easily as her hair, sliding to the floor, and there she would be. No, wait, this was really wrong. He had to stop thinking like this. Listen to the minister. Focus on the words. “We”… “Kat”… “special”… “extraordinary”… “before her time.”