“What’s this about a car?” she asked.

Paul brought her up to speed.

“Get a Hummer,” Angie advised. In my head, I could see the headlights of the Annihilator, like eyes on a dragon, filling the Buick with cold, cold light.

“If there’s one thing I won’t be getting, ever,” I said, “it’s a Hummer, or a Suburban, or an Annihilator. They run over other people’s cars, pollute the atmosphere, get a mile to the gallon, you can’t see around the damn things, they—”

“Okay, Dad, we hear ya,” said Paul. “SUVs, bad. Little cars, good.”

According to the AP story, this boy in California was pretty reclusive. A loner. Obsessed with counterculture, not particularly good at making friends. Liked to take pictures of people without their knowing it, post them on a website. He’d had a crush on some girl, but she’d rebuffed him, and something snapped. He finds his dad’s revolver in a drawer, takes it to the park one night where he knew his classmates went to make out, drink underage, and smoke a few joints, and shoots three kids from his class.

Everyone interviewed had said that yeah, he was kind of weird, they weren’t totally surprised by what he’d done, but no one had reported his behavior to anyone. No one thought it worth mentioning. Not until after he’d killed three of them.

I said, interrupting the conversation at whatever point it happened to be in, “Has this Trevor guy called you anymore?”

Angie glanced over at me, deciding, I guess, whether she was speaking to me these days, other than to tell me not to answer the phone. The Pool Boy incident was several weeks old now.

“A couple times. Five times last night my cell rang in one hour. I was hanging out at Deb’s? And it’s going off in my purse every ten minutes. And I have to check it every time, because it might be—”

She stopped herself.

“Might be who?” Sarah asked.

“Just anybody. It could be somebody I actually want to talk to, and not him. But he’s got this thing, so his number doesn’t show, so I don’t answer any calls unless I see an actual number. So I guess he figures this out, and he goes to a pay phone, I don’t know, and calls me, and this time I see an actual number, so I answered.”

“I hope you weren’t mean to him,” I said, scanning the rest of the story.