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if you looked too long. Relax; he doesn’t know; no one here does; just let it slide . . . .

    ―Welcome back, boys and girls!‖ Dewerman barreled in, an enormous mug clutched in one paw. My God, Bob, every single adult in this place was this major addict. Dewerman was this bearded 1960s throwback: a Teletubby in tie-dye, suspenders, and thinning hair scraped back into a stringy gray rat. ―All right, let‘s roll.‖

    He did the attendance drill. Ponytail was Danielle Connolly, which fit. I gave my prepared Hi-I’m-Jenna spiel and was about to sit back down when Dewerman shot me a curious look. ―Your mother owns a bookstore? Is it MacAllister‘s?‖

    ―Uh.‖ Why had I mentioned the store to begin with? I knew he had the book. It was like I was daring him to put two and two together. I could‘ve lied. Maybe I should‘ve. But, instead, I said, ―Yeah.‖

    ―Well, I‘ll be damned.‖ Dewerman bustled over to the bookshelf, fingered out the paperback I‘d recognized and held it up. It was one of the reissues because THE
    COMPLETE UNEXPURGATED EDITION OF THE SHATTERING NOVEL screamed from the cover. Because, of course, Dewerman was a fanboy.

b
    A little sidebar, Bob, because you don‘t look like the bookish type. That‘s not a slam, it‘s just . . . well, it‘s probably a fact. If I were directing the movie of your life, I figure you must‘ve been a star athlete in high school, probably football. Ten to one, you were angling for a scholarship, only you messed up your knees or back, and that‘s why you became a cop. Only I bet you got bored or sick of standing by while EMTs scraped people you knew—friends, old drinking buddies, maybe a girlfriend— off the pavement. Maybe you cut one too many people out of crushed cars. You had to think that, hell, making detective‘s got to be better. Break-ins, assaults, drug deals, but not a lot of bodies. You had to think that there just aren‘t many homicides this far north. Maybe one or two a year, tops.

    Of course, at the time, you hadn‘t met me.

    Anyway . . . my grandmother was Stephanie A. MacAllister. To everyone else, my mom‘s mom was this brilliant writer who started sleeping around when she was ten.
    Honestly, Bob, if you believed her, Grandma MacAllister had sex with just about everything but a gerbil and then wrote about it. Give her enough time, she might have figured out the gerbil, too.

    Of course, the book— Memoirs of a Very Good Girl —was banned and burned and trashed, so just about everyone read and talked about it. My mom always says there is no such thing as bad publicity. By the time she was thirty-five, Grandma MacAllister had made a fortune, started a pretty famous artists‘ colony, opened up her bookstore, discovered new talent, promoted reading, blah, blah, blah. She never wrote another book. I never asked why because I hadn‘t been born when she hanged herself from a sturdy wooden closet dowel in a swank New York hotel the night she won some award for lifetime achievement.

    She left the store to Mom, which pissed off Grandpa—he of the drunken, chain-smoking, torch-the-house rampage. Mom used to be a poet and did pretty well.

    Although after Matt was gone, she bought up all the copies of her one collection she could find and burned them in this giant bonfire in the old, pre-McMansion backyard.

    After Grandma died, Mom poured everything into the bookstore. That hummed along fairly smoothly until 2003, which is when Matt left. Since then, sales have crashed, publishing has cratered, and Mom and the store . . . well, it‘s like handing a bucket to a bulimic, Bob. No matter how much you vomit, the bucket‘s never quite full enough.

c
    As Dewerman rambled on, my back began to burn, and I felt the wings of my skin grafts, the ones between my shoulder blades, straining to tug free. My throat tried to close against the memory of thick, acrid smoke. Until that instant, I had been the new kid, a nobody, just another transfer.