Josie had once been so proud to have a mother as a judge. Alex could remember Josie broadcasting her career to the tellers at the bank, the baggers in the grocery store, the flight attendants on planes. She’d ask Alex about her cases and her decisions. That had all changed three years ago, when Josie entered high school, and the tunnel of communication between them slowly bricked shut. Alex didn’t necessarily think that Josie was hiding anything more than any other teenager, but it was different: a normal parent might metaphorically judge her child’s friends, whereas Alex could do it legally.

“What’s on the docket today?” Alex said.

“Unit test. What about you?”

“Arraignments,” Alex replied. She squinted across the table, trying to read Josie’s textbook upside down. “Chemistry?”

“Catalysts.” Josie rubbed her temples. “Substances that speed up a reaction, but stay unchanged by it. Like if you’ve got carbon monoxide gas and hydrogen gas and you toss in zinc and chromium oxide, and…what’s the matter?”

“Just having a little flashback of why I got a C in Orgo. Have you had breakfast?”

“Coffee,” Josie said.

“Coffee doesn’t count.”

“It does when you’re in a rush,” Josie pointed out.

Alex weighed the costs of being even five minutes later, or getting another black mark against her in the cosmic good-parenting tally. Shouldn’t a seventeen-year-old be able to take care of herself in the morning? Alex started pulling items out of the refrigerator: eggs, milk, bacon. “I once presided over an involuntary emergency admission at the state mental hospital for a woman who thought she was Emeril. Her husband had her committed when she put a pound of bacon in the blender and chased him around the kitchen with a knife, yelling Bam!”

Josie glanced up from her textbook. “For real?”

“Oh, believe me, I can’t make these things up.” Alex cracked an egg into a skillet. “When I asked her why she’d put a pound of bacon in the blender, she looked at me and said that she and I must just cook differently.”

Josie stood up and leaned against the counter, watching her mother cook. Domesticity wasn’t Alex’s strong point-she didn’t know how to make a pot roast but was proud to have memorized the phone numbers of every pizza place and Chinese restaurant in Sterling that offered free delivery. “Relax,” Alex said dryly. “I think I can do this without setting the house on fire.”

But Josie took the skillet out of her hands and laid the strips of bacon in it, like sailors bunking tightly together. “How come you dress like that?” she asked.

Alex glanced down at her skirt, blouse, and heels and frowned. “Why? Is it too Margaret Thatcher?”

“No, I mean…why do you bother? No one knows what you have on under your robe. You could wear, like, pajama pants. Or that sweater you have from college that’s got holes in the elbows.”

“Whether or not people see it, I’m still expected to dress…well, judiciously.”

A cloud passed over Josie’s face, and she busied herself over the stove, as if Alex had somehow given the wrong answer. Alex stared at her daughter-the bitten half-moon fingernails, the freckle behind her ear, the zigzag part in her hair-and saw instead the toddler who’d wait at the babysitter’s window at sundown, because she knew that was when Alex came to get her. “I’ve never worn pajamas to work,” Alex admitted, “but I do sometimes close the door to chambers and take a nap on the floor.”

A slow, surprised smile played over Josie’s face. She held her mother’s admission as if it were a butterfly lighting on her hand by accident: an event so startling you could not call attention to it without risking its loss. But there were miles to drive and defendants to arraign and chemical equations to interpret, and by the time Josie had set the bacon to drain on a pad of paper toweling, the moment had winged away.

“I still don’t get why I have to eat breakfast if you don’t,” Josie muttered.

“Because you have to be a certain age to earn the right to ruin your own life.” Alex pointed at the scrambled eggs Josie was mixing in the skillet. “Promise me you’ll finish that?”

Josie met her gaze. “Promise.”

“Then I’m headed out.”

Alex grabbed her travel mug of coffee. By the time she backed her car out of the garage, her head was already focused on the decision she had to write that afternoon; the number of arraignments the clerk would have stuffed onto her docket; the motions that would have fallen like shadows across her desk between Friday afternoon and this morning. She was caught up in a world far away from home, where at that very moment her daughter scraped the scrambled eggs from the skillet into the trash can without ever taking a single bite.

Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure-a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter-but it was also a room from which there really wasn’t an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn’t want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.

She lifted her face to the spray of the shower-water she’d made so hot it raised red welts, stole breath, steamed windows. She counted to ten, and then finally ducked away from the stream to stand naked and dripping in front of the mirror. Her face was swollen and scarlet; her hair stuck to her shoulders in thick ropes. She turned sideways, scrutinized her flat belly, and sucked it in a little. She knew what Matt saw when he looked at her, what Courtney and Maddie and Brady and Haley and Drew all saw-she just wished that she could see it, too. The problem was, when Josie looked in the mirror, she noticed what was underneath that raw skin, instead of what had been painted upon it.

She understood how she was supposed to look and supposed to act. She wore her dark hair long and straight; she dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch; she listened to Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab for Cutie. She liked feeling the eyes of other girls in the school when she sat in the cafeteria borrowing Courtney’s makeup. She liked the way teachers already knew her name on the first day of class. She liked having guys stare at her when she walked down the hall with Matt’s arm around her.

But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secret-that some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else’s smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real…and who, when you got right down to it, didn’t want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.

There wasn’t anyone to talk to. If you even doubted your right to be one of the privileged, popular set, then you didn’t belong there. And Matt-well, he’d fallen for the Josie on the surface, like everyone else. In fairy tales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what-and that alone would turn her into a princess. But high school didn’t work that way. What made her a princess was hooking up with Matt. And in some weird circular logic, what made Matt hook up with her was the very fact that she was one of Sterling High’s princesses.

She couldn’t confide in her mother, either. You don’t stop being a judge just because you step out of the courthouse, her mother used to say. It was why Alex Cormier never drank more than one glass of wine in public; it was why she never yelled or cried. A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period. Many of the accomplishments that Josie’s mother was most proud of-Josie’s grades, her looks, her acceptance into the “right” crowd-had not been achieved because Josie wanted them so badly herself, but mostly because she was afraid of falling short of perfect.