Paul left for school at the regular time, but Angie hung in, going downstairs to put the finishing touches to a photography assignment. I noticed a hot smell as I walked past her bedroom. She’d left her curling iron on, which was resting atop her dresser, the cord still plugged into the wall. So I unplugged it. Made no mental note to rent a smoke machine to send dark billowing clouds out of her bedroom window, or arrange to have a fire truck parked at the curb for when she came home.

“Let it go,” I said aloud as I emerged from her bedroom on my way downstairs to the study to get to work.

From the basement, she called to me. Her voice, coming from behind a door, was muffled. “Dad! Come down for a sec!”

In the brochure, Valley Forest Estates had called it a “wine cellar” or “cold room,” a place to keep fresh vegetables or store fine bottles of white and red. The room was no more than five by seven feet in size, and we had turned it into a darkroom.

“Hang on,” she said, making sure her film was safe from any invading light, then opened the door to admit me into the blackness. My eyes adjusted to the soft red light, the smell of developing fluid swirling up my nostrils. I was brought in occasionally as a technical adviser, having spent a lot of time in a darkroom when I worked in newspapers, but this time Angie just wanted me to see what she was doing.

“What’s the assignment?” I asked.

“Just wait,” she said, moving the white paper back and forth in the solution. Gradually, images began to take shape. “I love this part,” Angie said. “It’s like watching something being born. A lot of the kids, they’ve got these digital cameras, they do everything on the screen. It’s kind of cool, but there’s no suspense, you know? This way, half the fun is in the anticipation.”

A street sign came into view. “Chancery Park.” Then houses.

“It’s our neighborhood,” I said. “You took some pictures of the street. Isn’t that nice.”

But as each shot materialized, it became clear that Angie was up to much more than that. The pictures, all black-and-white, had a starkness about them.

“There are no people,” I said. “The streets are empty.”

“Yeah,” said Angie. “I captured them just the way they are. And see how the trees look like twigs, and in this shot, I’ve lined up the houses so you can see how they’re all exactly the same.”

“Very effective,” I said.

“I’m calling it ‘Dying in Suburbia: A Study in Redundancy.’”

“It’s good,” I said quietly. “It’s very good.”

Angie was still on the same theme as I drove her to school later, since she’d missed the bus. She said, “How much longer are we going to live out here?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much longer? We’ve been out here, like, almost two years and when are we going to move back into the city? Would we be able to buy back the house on Crandall? It wouldn’t have to be that house, although it would be nice, unless the new owners are, like, a bunch of psycho goths who’ve ripped out the walls and painted the ceilings black or something.”

“Where did you get the idea we were moving back into the city?”

“I just figured, sooner or later, you’d see what a terrible mistake it was to move out here and we’d go back.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, glancing over at Angie as I pulled away from a stop sign. “Who said this was a terrible mistake?”

“Well, first of all, the house is falling apart and-”

“The house is not falling apart.”

“Mom said last night the ceiling fell right into the pasta.”

“The ceiling did not fall. A small chunk of it fell because it was wet because there’s a leak in the upstairs shower, which can be fixed, which does not mean the house is falling apart. And the builder has some two-year warranty or something, so don’t worry about it.”

Angie looked out her window and said nothing.

“I go to school with a bunch of losers,” she said, finally.

I let that one hang out there for a while. “What do you mean, losers?”

She shrugged, a kind of like-this-needs-an-explanation? shrug. “I know you and Mom thought moving out here would mean you’d never have to worry again about schools, about drugs and all that shit. But you have no idea. We’ve got the Crips, and crackheads, and-I mean, look at Columbine. That was, like, the middle of nowhere. That wasn’t some inner-city school or something. And look what happened there.”

“What are you saying? That there are guys in long black coats waiting to shoot up the school?” I had shifted into parental overdrive.

“No, no, jeez, no, God, don’t go all hyper on me. All I’m saying is just because we moved out of the city doesn’t mean that there aren’t still weird people in my school. There’s weird people wherever you go. Just ’cause we’ve moved doesn’t mean we’re never going to run into crazy people again. It’s really no different out here than anyplace else, at least from that point of view. But you don’t have people willing to be eccentric.”

“Okay, you’ve lost me. We’ve got weird, but we don’t have eccentric.”

“I mean, like, remember my friend Jan? The one with the boots, and the tears in her stockings, and the orange skirts?”

“And the thing in her tongue?”

“Yeah. Like, she barely rated a second glance at my old school, but if you moved her out here, where everyone’s wearing their Abercrombie & Fitch, they’d think she was totally strange.”

“She was totally strange.”

“Yeah, but that’s the point. She kind of was, but no one noticed? You could do that downtown, and no one really thought about it. Out here, there’s this suburban thing, where you have to be borderline normal all the time.”

In some inexplicable way, I knew what she was talking about.

“That’s why, for example, Paul wants to get a tattoo,” Angie said. “So he can be just a little edgy out here.”

“Paul wants a tattoo?”

Angie glanced at me, realizing she’d broken a confidence. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You didn’t hear it from me, but he’s thinking about it. There’s a place, in the plaza, that’ll do them.”

“He can’t get a tattoo. He’s not even sixteen yet. They wouldn’t do it.”

Angie rolled her eyes. We were almost to the school. “Is there more?” I asked.

Angie was quiet.

“Haven’t you made any friends here?”

Angie shifted her chin around, a nod in disguise. “Not really. I had friends at Bannerman, like Krista, and Molly, and Denny, but I had to leave them because it wasn’t safe there, we had to move to a neighborhood where everything would be okay.” There was a mocking tone. “Well, so what if there was a flasher and a few hookers or some needles on the sidewalk? At least it was interesting.”

“You know you’re welcome to have your friends out here any time you want,” I offered. “Invite them on Friday or Saturday, do a sleepover thing in the basement.”

Angie looked at me as though I’d just stepped out of an episode of Ozzie and Harriet. “God, Dad, I’m not five. And, like, they just can’t wait to come out here.”

I stopped the car out front of the school. “I hate this place,” Angie said, slipping out the door and closing it behind her.

I SWUNG BY KENNY’S HOBBY shop to see whether a model I’d ordered, of the dropship the Marines use to fly from the mother ship to the planet’s surface in the movie Aliens, had come in. I could have phoned, but going in person to check gave me an excuse to wander the shop and see whether any other new things had arrived. Kenny catered to a variety of hobbyists-model railroaders, slot car fans, fliers of radio-control airplanes-but his selection of SF-related kits was fairly extensive for a full-range hobby store.

My model hadn’t shown up. “Maybe next week,” said Kenny, who was leaning over the counter, mini-screwdriver in hand, trying to reattach a wheel to a metal reproduction of an old Ford Thunderbird. “You ever wonder,” Kenny asked, not taking his eyes from his work, “why men have nipples?”