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Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Cast of Characters
  7. Part One
  8. One
  9. Two
  10. Three
  11. Four
  12. Five
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. Eleven
  19. Twelve
  20. Thirteen
  21. Fourteen
  22. Fifteen
  23. Sixteen
  24. Seventeen
  25. Eighteen
  26. Nineteen
  27. Part Two
  28. Twenty
  29. Twenty-one
  30. Twenty-two
  31. Twenty-three
  32. Twenty-four
  33. Twenty-five
  34. Twenty-six
  35. Twenty-seven
  36. Twenty-eight
  37. Twenty-nine
  38. Thirty
  39. Thirty-one
  40. Thirty-two
  41. Thirty-three
  42. Thirty-four
  43. Thirty-five
  44. Thirty-six
  45. Thirty-seven
  46. Thirty-eight
  47. Thirty-nine
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-one
  50. Forty-two
  51. Forty-three
  52. Forty-four
  53. Forty-five
  54. Forty-six
  55. A note on the Author

“The friendless, bullied, Gothic girl takes her class hostage. She has already wounded the teacher when a handsome, popular athlete has the nerve to try to talk her into surrender. It takes all day but by the end of it they have fallen in love. By then the love is doomed because cops are outside waiting to arrest her. I like to think of it as Romeo and Juliet across the anger divide. Or the relationship between Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club if it had been written post-Columbine,” he’d tell potential backers, before the door bumped him on the way out.

I met Sean at a fancy hotel in SoHo, where he was noticeable a mile off among the men and women talking into cell phones as they tapped on their laptops. Sean has a face from the nineteenth century, but it’s quite nice when you get used to it. At first, though, I was a little shocked. Soon his big, Victorian head was aquiver with twenty-first-century cuss words as he described the laborious process of getting his film made, and I found him less alarming. They wouldn’t let us order drinks in the lobby unless we were guests, so he booked a room, even though all he ended up drinking was tomato juice. There wasn’t an inch of anger in the swiftness with which he pulled out his credit card. He shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Well, if this is what I need to do …”

Four to five is usually my nap time and I wasn’t very coherent. When the meeting ended I asked if I could use the room he had just booked. He handed me the key. As I dozed, he rang my agents and handed me the role of the psychopathic student. By the time I awoke from my nap, plans had been drawn up at CAA for how I might tone up in time for shooting. Sean told them to forget it, saying he wanted me just as I was. Nevertheless, as the film went into production, I did lose a little weight, because I was so excited I couldn’t eat. I took dialect classes to ditch any semblance of Brooklyn twang and slip into a Texan drawl. I worked hard and felt happy.

It felt odd when I turned up in Page Six of the New York Post, the next morning, linked to Scott. I looked at his photo, millions of dots in gray, black, and white, and found I had trouble placing him.

Seven

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The red-knuckle ride