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platform shoes by a female classmate who considered the way she dressed a personal affront. But this girl simply shoved an envelope into Karen’s hand and galloped away. Inside the envelope was a picture postcard of David Bowie. Scrawled on the reverse side was “because you remind me of Angie”—which any fan would recognize as a reference to Bowie’s wife.
    The next day the tall girl was waiting outside Karen’s classroom again. And she continued to come back every day after that. Before long the two were friends, and their relationship—and outfits—were topics of constant comment and speculation among the students at Lincoln. They were the women who fell to earth.
    Karen Karuza’s pal was the new and reproved Gia: now identifiable only by certain physical features—the broad lips and tiny nose, the thick hair and perpetually bitten fingernails—as the spoiled little girl whose life had been leveled by the separation, and eventual bitter divorce, of her parents. Some of the changes in her had been the standard ones brought on by adolescence: the spurt in lanky height and the very beginnings of a curvy figure.
    But other changes were attributable to the sheer volume of weirdness she had endured and, in a way, perpetuated. A year after she moved out, Gia’s mother married Henry Sperr, in a private ceremony that the children were told about only
after
it happened. Gia didn’t know her new stepfather, but she disliked him on general principle. She was envious of the way Henry monopolized her mother’s attention. And after hearing her father’s jealous rage, she decided that Henry was the sole reason for the dissolution of her parents’ relationship. No matter how often Kathleen tried to explain the irreconcilable problems she had with Joe, Gia continued to see Henry Sperr as the main obstacle to her parents’ reunion.
    In fact, just the opposite was true: Gia was the only thing that remained between Kathleen and Joe. The boys had sided completely with their father and showed no interest in being part of their mother’s new life. But Gia continued to exploit whatever connections remained betweenher parents by yanking at their heart-and-purse strings, an emotional exercise made both simpler and more complicated when she chose that newest form of home life: Divorce-Dual Residency. Gia maintained a bedroom in her father’s home. But she officially moved in with her mother, or her “mommy,” as she always referred to her, and her stepfather, who she referred to as Henry if she referred to him at all.
    The three of them shared a small, two-bedroom duplex just a few blocks from the Carangi home. And suddenly child support, scarcely mentioned at the time of the divorce, became an issue. Kathleen and Henry did not have the kind of money Joe Carangi did. Henry had just begun free-lancing as an accountant and financial adviser, and building a client base took time. It seemed only fair that Joe pay them something—especially since the original divorce settlement had not favored Kathleen.
    “I ended up walking away from everything,” she recalled. “I gave away quite a bit. I didn’t fight him for anything I might have been entitled to, and those businesses were very healthy. But Pennsylvania didn’t have no-fault divorce then. A woman leaving had no rights at all. When I originally moved out, he co-signed a lease for an apartment because he thought it was temporary. When it started sinking in that this was for keeps, he started giving me trouble. I wanted out so bad, I told my lawyer I just didn’t care.”
    An amount of child support was agreed upon, along with a payment schedule, but Joe rarely kept to either. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. In a way, it seemed he even liked it when Kathleen stormed into the restaurant screaming about money if he was a day late. It was like a little soap opera all the Carangi men could watch.
    “I remember one day Kathleen came in yelling about something,” said Dan