No matter, Stacy was the patient. She had full cheeks but a long face that evoked her mother's college picture. Richard's high, broad brow, stippled by a few tiny pimples. Pixie features; another endowment from both parents.

She smiled nervously. I introduced myself and held out my hand. She took it readily, maintained eye contact, flashed a half-second smile that burned lots of calories. Making an effort.

Prettier than Joanne, with dark, almond eyes and the kind of small-boned good looks that would attract the boys. During my high-school days, she'd have been labeled a Gidget. In any generation, she'd be termed cute. Another paternal donation: her hair-thick, black, very curly. She wore it long and loose, glossed with some kind of product that relaxed the helixes to dancing corkscrews. Lighter complexion than Richard's-skin the color of clotted cream. Thin skin; traces of blue surfaced at jawline and temple. A cuticle picked raw on her left middle finger had turned red and swollen to a silky sheen.

She hugged the book tighter and followed me in. "That's a pretty pond I passed. Koi, right?

Right.

The Manitows have a koi pond, a big one."

"Really." I'd been in Judy Manitow's chambers several dozen times, never visited her home.

"Dr. Manitow put in an incredible waterfall. You could swim in there. Yours is actually more… accessible. You have a beautiful garden."

"Thanks."

We entered the office and she sat down with the green book across her lap. Yellow lettering shouted: Choosing the Right College for You!

"No problem finding the place?" I said, settling opposite her.

"Not at all. Thanks for seeing me, Dr. Delaware."

I wasn't used to being thanked by adolescents. "My pleasure, Stacy."

She blushed and turned away.

"Recreational reading?" I said.

Another strained smile. "Not exactly."

She began to look around the office.

"So," I said, "do you have any questions?"

"No, thanks." As if I'd offered her something.

I smiled. Waited.

She said, "I guess I should talk about my mother."

"If you want to."

"I don't know if I want to." Her right index finger curled and moved toward her left hand, located the inflamed cuticle. Stroking. Picking. A dot of blood stretched to a scarlet comma. She covered it with her right hand.

"Dad says he's worried about my future, but I suppose I should talk about Mom." She angled her face so that it was shielded by black curls. "I mean, it's probably the right thing for me. That's what my friend says-she wants to be a psychologist. Becky Manitow, Judge Manitow's daughter."

"Becky's been doing some amateur therapy?"

She shook her head as if thinking about that made her tired. Her eyes were the same dark brown as her father's, yet a whole different flavor. "Becky's been in counseling herself, thinks it's the cure for everything. She lost a lot of weight, even more than her mother wanted her to, so they shipped her off to some therapist and now she wants to be one."

"You two friends?"

"We used to be. Actually, Becky's not… I don't want to be cruel, let's just say she's not into school."

"Not an intellectual."

She let out a small, soft laugh. "Not exactly. My mom used to tutor her in math."

Judy had never mentioned her daughter's problem. No reason to. Still, I wondered why Judy hadn't referred Stacy to Becky's therapist. Maybe too close to home, keeping everything in neat little boxes.

"Well," I said, "no matter what Becky or anyone says, you know what's best for you."

"Think so?"

"I do."

"You don't even know me."

"Competent till proven otherwise, Stacy."

"Okay." Another weak smile. So much effort to smile. I wrote a mental note: poss. depress, as noted by J. Manitow.

Her hand lifted. The blood on her finger had dried and she rubbed the sore spot. "I don't think I really do. Want to talk about my mother^ that is. I mean, what can I say? When I think about it I get down for days, and I've already had enough of those. And it's not as if it was a shock-her… what happened. I mean it was, when it actually happened, but she'd been sick for so long."

Same thing her father had said. Her own little speech, or his?

"This," she said, smiling again, "is starting to sound like one of those gross movies of the week. Lindsay Wagner as everyone's mom… What I'm saying is that what happened to my mother took so long… It wasn't like another friend of mine, her mother died in a skiing accident. Crashed into a tree and she was gone, just like that." Snap of the inflamed finger. "The whole family watching it happen. That's traumatic. My mother… I knew it was going to happen. I spent a long time wondering when, but…" Her bosom rose and fell. One foot tapped. The right index finger sought the sore spot again, curled to strike, scratched, retracted.

"Maybe we should talk about my so-called future," she said, lifting the green book. "First could I use the bathroom, please?"

She was gone ten minutes. After seven I started to wonder, was ready to get up to check if she'd left the house, but she returned, hair tied back in a bushy ponytail, mouth shiny with freshly applied lip gloss.

"Okay," she said. "College. The process. My lack of direction."

"That sounds like something someone told you."

"Dad, my school counselor, my brother, everyone. I'm almost eighteen, nearly a senior, so I'm supposed to be into it-career aspirations, compiling lists of extracurricular activities, composing brag sheets. Ready to sell myself. It feels so… phony. I go to Pali Prep, freak-city when it comes to college. Everyone in my class is freaking out daily. I'm not, so I'm the space alien." Her free hand flipped the edges of the green book's pages.

"Can't get into it?" I said.

"Don't want to get into it. I honestly don't care, Dr. Delaware. I mean, I know I'm going to end up somewhere. Does it really make a difference where?"

"Does it?"

"Not to me."

"But everyone's telling you you should care."

"Either explicitly or, you know-it's in the air. The atmosphere. At school everything's been split down the middle-sociologically. Either you're a goof and you know you'll end up at a party school, or you're a grind and expected to obsess on Stanford or the Ivy League. I should be a grind, because my grades are okay. I should have my nose glued to the SAT prep book, be filling out practice applications."

"When do you take the SAT?"

"I already took it. In December. We all did, just for practice. But I did okay enough, don't see why I should go through it again."

"What'd you get?"

She blushed again. "Fifteen-twenty."

"That's a fantastic score," I said.

"You'd be surprised. At PP, kids who get fifteen-eighty take it again. One kid had his parents write that he was American Indian so he'd get some kind of minority edge. I don't see the point."

"Neither do I."

"I honestly think that if you offered most of the senior class a deal to murder someone in order to be guaranteed admission to Harvard, Stanford or Yale, they'd take it."

"Pretty brutal," I said, fascinated by her choice of example.

"It's a brutal world out there," she said. "At least that's what my father keeps telling me."

"Does he want you to take the SAT again?"

"He pretends he's not pressuring me, but he lets me know he'll pay for it if I want to."

"Which is a kind of pressure."

"I suppose. You met him… What was that like?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did you get along? He told me you were smart, but there was something in his voice-like he wasn't sure about you." She cracked up. "I've got a big mouth… Dad's super-active, always needs to keep moving, thinking, doing something. Mom's illness drove him crazy. Before she got sick, they were totally active together- jogging, dancing, tennis, traveling. When she stopped living, he was left on his own. It's made him cranky."