“Miracle Park, you don’t even know what real poverty is.”

“Yeah, like you’re Miss Rwanda Baglady.”

Rosemary pulled the driving book out of her shirt and threw it at her sister.

“Your turn.”

“Any luck tonight?”

“I figured out high beams, low beams. Which means we can make a getaway, in the dead of night.”

Rosemary rode the bus to school twice a week for summer drama. The kids unfortunate enough not to be attending camp or loitering around piazzas in Italy sometimes signed up for the class, just to have something to do apart from PlayStation, or porn.

But Rosemary was actually serious about the class. There was nothing to keep her at home—the Brittany Ann Yamasato saga had run its course. Two months before, sightings of her were reported as far north as Vancouver, where she’d been seen riding in a wood-paneled van with an older man, and as far south as Corpus Christi, Texas, where witnesses said they saw her stick her tongue through a glazed donut. But those leads tapered off. A cuter, younger kid—a missing Boy Scout from Utah—was now the hot item; all the cameras were trained on his blindingly blond family as they prayed.

The drama class’s main draw was Mr. Zehring, a boyish man who could have been twenty-six—or forty. His light-brown hair bounced on his head like a toupee whenever he made jazz hands, which was often. And he did so derisively, which was odd for a theater guy. He always seemed at a slight remove from the room, a bit soliloquyishly meta. She thought he looked like a handsome JFK, though his patter was less presidential, more motivational speaker. He made the kids call him Mr. Z, for short, and some actually called him by his first name, Bryce.

At first, the class wasn’t something that Rosemary was dying to do—theater kids and their transatlantic affectations gave her the creeps—but the guidance counselor had suggested she take up an extracurricular activity that wasn’t purely academic so her college application would look less stereotypically Asian. She started Mr. Z’s class and enjoyed his approach so much that she didn’t feel insulted when he funneled her into a supplementary class with three other students of East Asian descent who had trouble, in his words, “releasing their face.” Until they learned to be expressive with their bodies, he said, they would be of no value in a regular drama class.

He said that as someone who was raised as a Lutheran in the upper Midwest, he had some of the same problems—his face was “all closed up” and his feelings were “compacted.” He’d been programmed not to show emotion because his father believed that emotion in boys was evidence of weakness.