“How would you feel if he had died?”

He shrugged with a nonchalance that would have been stunning if they had never had this conversation before. “Why did you do it, Dennis?” she asked.

Dennis rolled his eyes. “You keep asking me that. I keep telling you: just because. I just wanted to see what it felt like.”

She had never asked him to describe what it had felt like to plunge a knife into the stomach of his only friend. “Have you done your homework?” she asked.

“Why should I?” he challenged. “What are you gonna do to me if I don’t? Put me in jail? Put me in the loony bin?”

“I’m not going to do anything to you. But you would be helping yourself if you did it. Do you want to repeat the fifth grade when you get out of here?”

She had taken it upon herself to tutor him. No one else was interested in the job.

“I’m never getting out of here,” he said. “Or I’ll go to prison. Prison might be cool.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s killers in there.”

Anne sat for a moment with her chin in her hand. This was like a chess game. How did she know she was making the right move? She felt way out of her league.

“You think killers are cool?” she asked. “Why?”

Now there was something like excitement in his eyes. Anne’s stomach twisted.

“Because,” he said, “if they don’t like somebody, they just kill them. Then they never have to see them again.”

What should she say to that? That killing is wrong? Who would he like to kill? She tried never to take the bait with him, thinking he mostly said these things for the shock value. What if she was wrong? For a moment she felt like she was drowning.

Dennis was watching her from the corner of his eye as he turned and sat sideways on his chair.

“I would kill Tommy Crane,” he said.

Anne didn’t react. It was no surprise. In fact, it was nothing he hadn’t said before.

“I know you don’t like Tommy,” she said. “You think he has a perfect life, but he doesn’t, Dennis. His father is going to go to prison.”

“Yeah. He’s a killer. That’s so cool.”

So was yours, Anne was tempted to say. What would he do? Would he react? Would that crack the hard shell? Would he break down and cry?

Tommy Crane had been the object of Dennis’s jealousy and bullying. Outwardly, Tommy had appeared to have the perfect family. His father was a well-respected dentist with an office on Oak Knoll’s trendy—and expensive—pedestrian plaza. His mother was a real estate agent. They had lived in a beautiful home, in a beautiful neighborhood. But Tommy’s life had not been beautiful.