“Every class thinks it’s special, of course. But in a town as small as Natchez, and a school as small as St. Stephens, you have to have something like a genetic accident to get a class like ours. Our football team had eighteen people on it. Everyone played both ways. And we were ranked in the top ten in the state in the rankings of public schools. That’s ranked against schools like yours, with seventy players on the squad. Our baseball team was the first single-A team in the history of Mississippi to win the overall state title.”

She rolls her eyes. “So you were big-time in Mississippi sports. Let’s call CNN.”

“Sports means a lot in high school.”

“What about academics?”

“Second-highest SATs in the state.”

“When do we get to Miss Perfect?”

“Livy was the center of all that. The star everyone revolved around. Homecoming queen, head cheerleader, valedictorian . . . you name it, she was it.”

Caitlin groans. “Gag me with a soup ladle.”

“If you plop most high school queens down at a major university, they’ll disappear like daisies at a flower show. Not Livy. She was head cheerleader at Virginia, president of the Tri-Delts, and made law review at the UVA law school.”

“She sounds schizophrenic.”

“She probably is. She was born to a man who wanted sons, in a decade when the cultural dynamic of the fifties was still alive and kicking in the South. She was a brilliant and beautiful girl with a mother who thought in terms of her marrying well and a father who wanted her to be president. She killed a ten-point buck when she was eleven years old, just to prove she could do anything a boy could.”

“Spare me the body count. I suppose she graduated, won the Nobel prize, and raised two-point-five perfect kids?”

I can’t help but laugh at the animosity Livy has inspired in Caitlin; it can only be based on the degree to which Livy has intimidated her. “Actually, she sold out.”

Caitlin cringes in mock horror. “Not the head cheerleader of the law review?”

“She took the biggest offer right out of law school and never looked back. Chased money and power all the way.”

“Who did she marry?”

“This is the part I like. She had this Howard Roark fixation. You know, the architect from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead? She wanted the absolute alpha male, an artist-logician who wouldn’t take any shit off her or compromise once in his life.”

“Did she find him?”

“She married an entertainment lawyer in Atlanta. He represents athletes and rap singers.”

“There is justice,” Caitlin says, laughing. “Though I guess he made a lot more money than a Houston prosecutor.”

“Twenty times more, at least.”

“Why did you stay in the D.A.’s office so long? I thought most lawyers only did that for a couple of years to prep themselves for private defense work.”