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beast. And nobody had intended that to happen: not Mom or Dad, not the coaches or the teachers—not even Allie.
    What in most girls was adolescent rebellion settled into a protracted war: Allie against her folks, Allie against her teachers, Allie against the world, Allie against Allie. She had no real friends, just a series of temporary allies and co-conspirators. She did most of her talking to shrinks, then stopped talking to them altogether, unless to exercise her blossoming talent for sarcasm and disdain.
    Allie discovered early on that the pretty bottles in the household bars and liquor cabinets gave her a powerful weapon in her war against life as she knew it. Surreptitious sips from guests’ glasses soon became nighttime raids to snatch half-full bottles, bottles that gave her a breezy high to chase boredom away, smoothed the anxieties, and placed her parents at the far end of a telescope when looked in at the wrong end.
    She met the challenge when Mom and Dad took to locking the liquor cabinets, as willing cohorts at school taught her that credit cards opened doors in more than the symbolic sense, and that your basic manicure tools, when handled with panache in a manner never described in Seventeen, will open most of the locks installed to prevent the servants from pilfering.
    Later on, she discovered the potential hidden in Mom’s medicine cabinet. How when you drop a Valium in a glass of scotch, your afternoon is pretty much taken care of. She drifted through entire days and nights without a hassle in sight or a care in the world except how to restock the chemical larder. An unusually cooperative shrink bought her story about anxiety attacks and prescribed the stuff for her, in nifty five and ten mils, and Allie became known in the hallways of academia as a girl who could actually give pharmaceutical change. Then Allie went to another doctor and claimed to be really, really depressed, whereupon the good doctor referred to his PDR and discovered that the treatment for depression was an antidepressant and wrote scrip for it. So Allie had an unlimited and legally sanctioned supply of speed. Allie had her dawns and dusks, and could swap and trade with her friends.
    Teenage boys, their hormones bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls in a vacuum, sniffed her out as an easy mark. Allie discovered sex, which wasn’t so bad except she didn’t discover birth control with it, and she got pregnant. Scared enough to confide in her mother. Allie then made the discreet visit to the discreet office. (“Dad is going to have you killed,” she told the doctor and nurse, “to keep you from talking.”) After that, teenage boys became too immature for Allie, who made the important transition from prey to predator and found any number of older men willing to be stalked and brought down.
    And it was pathetically easy; boring, really. Allie had inherited her mother’s hair, and from somewhere a pair of blue eyes that shone with life even in the photographs. The genetic sculptor had fashioned a classically chiseled face and a form that embodied the current American ideal. “How could a girl as pretty as you …” was a refrain that Allie heard over and over again after spectacular screwups or misbehavior. She was expected to be the prom queen and the sweetheart, and she responded to these expectations with an almost savage perversity. Sex was a weapon. Sex was revenge.
    So by age seventeen, she had done it all: all the drinks, all the drugs, all the boys, and all the men. And she was so tired of it all. So one fine day, she looked out her window at the big ocean and decided that the other side might offer something new, and she whipped out the old credit card one more time to open the airplane door and flew to Paris. That was three months ago, and nobody had heard from her or seen her until three weeks ago, when some kid had spotted her in London.
    The description of Allie’s youth had taken some time, and a working lunch had been