“I just figured, sooner or later, you’d see what a terrible mistake it was to move out here and we’d go back.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, glancing over at Angie as I pulled away from a stop sign. “Who said this was a terrible mistake?”

“Well, first of all, the house is falling apart and—”

“The house is not falling apart.”

“Mom said last night the ceiling fell right into the pasta.”

“The ceiling did not fall. A small chunk of it fell because it was wet because there’s a leak in the upstairs shower, which can be fixed, which does not mean the house is falling apart. And the builder has some two-year warranty or something, so don’t worry about it.”

Angie looked out her window and said nothing.

“I go to school with a bunch of losers,” she said, finally.

I let that one hang out there for a while. “What do you mean, losers?”

She shrugged, a kind of like-this-needs-an-explanation? shrug. “I know you and Mom thought moving out here would mean you’d never have to worry again about schools, about drugs and all that shit. But you have no idea. We’ve got the Crips, and crackheads, and—I mean, look at Columbine. That was, like, the middle of nowhere. That wasn’t some inner-city school or something. And look what happened there.”

“What are you saying? That there are guys in long black coats waiting to shoot up the school?” I had shifted into parental overdrive.

“No, no, jeez, no, God, don’t go all hyper on me. All I’m saying is just because we moved out of the city doesn’t mean that there aren’t still weird people in my school. There’s weird people wherever you go. Just ‘cause we’ve moved doesn’t mean we’re never going to run into crazy people again. It’s really no different out here than anyplace else, at least from that point of view. But you don’t have people willing to be eccentric.”

“Okay, you’ve lost me. We’ve got weird, but we don’t have eccentric.”

“I mean, like, remember my friend Jan? The one with the boots, and the tears in her stockings, and the orange skirts?”

“And the thing in her tongue?”

“Yeah. Like, she barely rated a second glance at my old school, but if you moved her out here, where everyone’s wearing their Abercrombie & Fitch, they’d think she was totally strange.”

“She was totally strange.”

“Yeah, but that’s the point. She kind of was, but no one noticed? You could do that downtown, and no one really thought about it. Out here, there’s this suburban thing, where you have to be borderline normal all the time.”

In some inexplicable way, I knew what she was talking about.