There was no deal. There was no car parked on the other side of the road. There would be no trip back into town.

I know who you are. I know who you are. I know who you are.

"I know who you are." She said it aloud.

Beside her, the steady pace of his footfalls faltered. "How's that?"

"You're him. You're the one who amp; who kills high school girls."

He said nothing. They came to the road, a strip of blacktop bordered by yucca plants and spiny cactus. There was no traffic anywhere. No billboards, lampposts, buildings. She hadn't known that any part of California could be so empty.

"That's who you are," she pressed. "Right?"

"Right," he said.

So it was confirmed. No doubt anymore.

She lowered her head, afraid to speak.

"You're smart," he said. "Smarter than the others."

She cleared her throat. "The other five?"

"Four. There've been four."

"I couldn't remember. I'll make five, then." She heard her voice from far away.

"You'll make five," he agreed.

She wondered if she could talk him out of it. Probably not. The others must have tried, but maybe they'd gotten all hysterical. She knew he wouldn't respond to tears and screams. Logic might reach him. It was possible.

"You don't really want to do this," she said as they crossed the road. "If you did, you wouldn't have to get drunk to go through with it."

"Is that so?"

"You got drunk because part of you wants to let me go."

He coughed up a dull chuckle. "Yeah, right."

"I'm serious."

"You're dead." He said it without emotion, as a statement of fact. "You were dead the minute I grabbed you. You're dead now. That's not gonna change. Get used to it."

They arrived at the other side of the road. She knew that nothing she said could touch him.

He led her into the brush. A few yards from the road, he stopped walking. The flat desert extended in all directions under the moonless sky.

She looked down and saw a gun in his hand. He must have had it tucked in the waistband of his pants. Some kind of handgun, small and shiny.

He saw her staring at the gun, and he smiled. "You scared, Jessie?"

She had been afraid for so many hours that she had almost stopped noticing.

"Yes."

He lifted the gun. "Close your eyes."

She tried one more time. "You don't have to do this."

"Close your eyes."

"Can't we talk about it?"

"Close your eyes."

"I can do things for you." It was her last gambit, one that she knew was hopeless even before it was tried. "I'm not a virgin. I can make you feel good."

"Close your eyes."

"Please."

"Close your eyes."

Because there was nothing left for her to say or do, Jessica closed her eyes. And waited.

She didn't have to wait long.

"Granola bars," Meg said without enthusiasm when she entered the kitchen, her blond hair freshly washed and pulled back with a purple scrunchie. "I hope they're not peanut butter again."

Robin Cameron had sworn over and over that she would start serving her daughter nutritious breakfasts, but in the usual frantic effort to get Meg ready for school and get herself ready for work, she hadn't seemed to find the time.

"We used up the peanut butter ones on Friday." Robin tried to sound upbeat. "These are cookies 'n' cream."

"Dessert for breakfast. Does this still count as the most important meal of the day?"

"Never complain about getting your daily sugar fix. When you're older, you'll learn that the regular intake of highly sweetened snack foods is the key to happiness."

"That's the slogan of the American Dental Association, isn't it?"

"If they know what's good for business, it is. Look, granola bars aren't any worse for you than those honey-frosted cocoa puffs, or whatever they were, that your dad used to buy for you in Santa Barbara. You practically lived on those."

Meg looked up from smoothing the wrinkles out of her gray-and-white uniform. "Mom, that was, like, a million years ago."

"That's a bit of an exaggeration. I don't think your father and I were actually married during the Ice Age."

"I don't know. Things got pretty chilly."

Robin couldn't argue with that. The marriage had been failing for years before it was finally put out of its misery.

"Anyway," Meg added, "sugar makes me break out."

"That's a myth."

"It is?"

"For the purposes of this conversation, yes." Robin placed two unwrapped granola bars on Meg's plate. "As a medical practitioner licensed in the state of California, I can assure you that millions of commuters subsist on this healthful and satisfying breakfast fare every day. They survive. So will you."

"I wish I could believe that," Meg said, but she ate the bars. "How about you?" she asked through a mouthful of oats. "Aren't you going to savor the joys of your own cooking? By the way, mentally, I put 'cooking' in quotes."

"Thanks for sharing that. I'll eat mine at the office."

"You'll probably stop at some gourmet restaurant after you drop me at school. You'll have eggs Benedict and croissants. This whole granola bar runaround is just a scam."

"My secret's out." Robin sat down at the table. "Get all your homework done?"

"Yeah, it was easy. Just had to write a report on Catcher in the Rye."

"Thumbs-up or -down?"

"The book was okay. I couldn't relate to Holden Caulfield as much as I was supposed to."

Robin took this as a good sign. "As I recall, he was a pretty mixed-up young man."

"He's alienated, I guess. That's a popular theme, isn't it?"

Robin made a quick literary survey, from The Odyssey to Hamlet to every modern book, movie, and TV series about suburban angst and disaffected youth. "Always."

"Hey, didn't they used to call people in your line of work alienists?"

"Way back when. The term referred to Freudian psychoanalysts more than to us cognitive-behavioral types."

Meg seemed uninterested in the distinction. "Alienation," she said a little too casually. "That's a bad thing, isn't it? To be cut off from society?"

Robin eyed her with suspicion. "I have a feeling you're going somewhere with this."

"Not really. It's just that, well, people who go to an exclusive private school are kind of alienated, wouldn't you say?"

"Nice try."

Meg wouldn't be deterred so easily. "The uniform alone is enough to make you feel alienated." She plucked at the white blouse. "No normal person dresses like this."

"You're a perfectly normal person. And Gainesburg is a perfectly normal high school. Not to mention one of the best schools in the city."

"There are plenty of good public schools. Magnet schools. They take the best and the brightest. Namely me."

"The Gainesburg School also takes the best and the brightest."

"They take anyone who can afford the tuition. Speaking of which, how do we afford it, anyway?"

"I sneak out at night and sell my body on Hollywood Boulevard."

"LA psychiatrist by day, Hollywood hooker by night. See, if I went to public school, you could give up your sordid double life."

"Is wearing a uniform really that onerous?"

"It's not just the uniform. It's the whole Gainesburg atmosphere. It's, like, a whole different world. Not part of the city at all."

"That's the idea."

"It feels isolated."

"It's supposed to feel isolated. The whole point of going there is to be isolated."

"So alienation is bad, but isolation is good?"

Robin sighed. Teenage sophistry was a powerful thing. "It depends on what you're being isolated from. In this case, yes, it's good."

"Why? What's so scary out there?"

"Do you ever read the newspaper?"

"Do you?"

"I would if I had more time. And if I did, I would read about gang shootings, drug overdoses, teenage pregnancies"