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fight with Amanda, and each time she had turned in a note with Jacque’s signature.
    “I drove down to the school and met with a school counselor,” Jacque said. “He showed me one detention slip after another where Shanda had been tardy to classes or had skipped classes with Amanda. Shanda had signed my name on every one of the slips. She’d even signed my name to her progress report. It was all F s.”
    The counselor decided to get to the bottom of things and called Shanda to his office. When she saw her mother, Shanda collapsed into a chair and began crying.
    “What is wrong?” Jacque asked, kneeling down in front of her daughter and touching her knee. “What is going on with you?”
    Shanda wiped the tears from her face. “I’m so ashamed,”she said. “I’ve been so bad. I’ve let you down. I lied to you.”
    “Did you sign these notes?” Jacque asked.
    “Yes,” Shanda answered, whimpering. “I wrote your name on all of them. I know I shouldn’t have done it. Please forgive me.”
    “Shanda, I look at these notes, and every time you’ve gotten in trouble it had something to do with Amanda. Why are you continuing to hang around with her when I’ve asked you not to?”
    “I’m afraid,” Shanda said softly.
    “Afraid of what?”
    “Some girls want to beat me up and Amanda won’t let them,” Shanda said.
    “What girls?” Jacque demanded.
    “Melinda and her friends,” Shanda said.
    It was the first time that Jacque had heard Melinda’s name. The counselor intervened at this point and explained that Melinda Loveless and Amanda Heavrin had been in a series of problems over the past two years.
    “He told Shanda that they were not the type of girls she should associate with,” Jacque said. “He said they had been in trouble before and would continue to get into trouble, and if Shanda kept hanging around with them she would find herself on a road to trouble and she wouldn’t be able to find her way back. He told her that she needed to get away from these people and that if they gave her any more problems she should come to him.”
    Shanda promised her mother that she would stay away from Amanda and Melinda and would buckle down with her schoolwork.
    “Shanda had always been in the popular group at St. Paul,” Jackie said later. “She had always been a leader. But these kids were older and rougher, and she got herself in a position where she was no longer a leader, she was a follower. I knew she was in a predicament that was difficult, but I wanted her to be strong enough to walk away from it. I think she honestly tried to do that, but I think the other girls were so overwhelming that she just didn’t know how to get away from it.”
    The day after the meeting, Jacque hired a tutor to help Shanda with her schoolwork. Shanda had always been an above-average student, but she had fallen so far behind in her studies that the tutor had to spend three nights a week with her.
    Although Shanda had promised her mother that she would have nothing more to do with Amanda, that didn’t prevent Amanda from calling Shanda at home. Amanda would disguise her voice, or she would have other girls call on a three-way connection.
    “I’d catch her trying to disguise her voice to me,” Jacque said. “I’d tell her not to call back, but she didn’t know what it meant to listen to an adult when they told her something. I was aggravated with her.”
    Fed up, Jacque drove to Amanda’s house and confronted her father, whom she’d talked to on the phone before but had never met personally.
    “I told him that Shanda had been in a lot of trouble and that everything she had done had something to do with his daughter,” Jacque recalled. “I told him that I did not want Amanda to hang around with Shanda. He looked at me and said, ‘You know, it’s funny, but every girl that my daughter has ever been friends with, the parents ended up telling me that they didn’t want their daughter to have anything to do with