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bombing Afghanistan, or some yuppie couple meeting as they fled up Fifth Avenue in the rain of ashes, or the wake-up call about terrorism, or the flag stuff, or the rest of that. And I don’t count my surviving. I mean, this thing didn’t make me live, it almost killed me. It would have killed me if you hadn’t been sick. And not being killed doesn’t count as something good coming out of something bad.”
    I hated it when she talked like that. Because I didn’t feel I could tell her what I really thought: Nothing good was going to come out of this. Sometimes bad things happen, and they’re just bad. End of story. No compensation. No points earned for suffering. But no one wants to listen to philosophy from a thirteen-year-old, not even the thirteen-year-old’s mother.
    It wasn’t until I watched Mom working to make a good impression on bouncy Dr. Bratton that I realized that my being offered a full scholarship to the fanciest, snootiest, most expensive school in northern New Jersey could have been seen by someone—not by me!—as something good coming out of something bad. In fact, my going to Baileywell was what Mom had always secretly—well, not secretly at all—wanted. To me, it was more as if something bad was leading to something even worse. I would explain that to my mom later, as soon as Dr. Bratton left. And it would have been fine with me if he’d left right away.
    When had Mom made coffee? Dr. Bratton took his with tons of milk and sugar. We settled inthe couch, from which the plastic cups and Chinese-food containers and pizza boxes must have been removed by elves in the middle of the night.
    Dr. Bratton sipped his coffee. All his gestures had a kind of delicate, chirpy grace that I couldn’t quite put together with the headmaster of a school for manly bullies and future masters of the universe. Frankly, he reminded me a little of my aunt Grace, who had married a big mafioso and somehow managed to turn into a British person.
    â€œI’m so sorry for your loss,” Dr. Bratton said, and we all did that sheepish nod.
    â€œIt’s been hard,” said Mom in a way that made her seem even prettier than normal.
    â€œI can imagine,” said Dr. Bratton. “I mean, I can’t imagine.”
    â€œYou can’t, actually,” said Mom. A silence fell, and we stared at one another. The ball was in his court.
    He tapped his fingertips together, as if he was afraid they might be sizzling hot and he was testingthem to make sure. Then he joined them into a peak, like a church roof, with its spire just under his nose, as if he was sniffing the steeple.
    â€œLike everyone else in this country, in the world ,” he said, “the Baileywell community has been asking itself what can we possibly do. How can we help, how can we make a difference, how can we react to this terrible tragedy that has shaken us to the core? Of course, a number of our parents and faculty have been going to work as volunteers at Gro—”
    He stopped short as he got to “Ground Zero.” He’d remembered who we were.
    â€œAnd then we read the inspiring, hopeful story about you and your son, having lost so much and having been saved, by sheer chance, really, from losing so much more. And what I want to tell you, Mrs. Rangely, is that it wasn’t your tragedy so much as the whole scenario: a mother who chose her child’s needs over those of her job, a mother who even now must continue to put her professional life on hold because her orphaned childneeds her. And the simple eloquence and dignity with which you, Bart, have dealt with the reporters and with all the interviews that must have been so terribly painful.”
    â€œTo tell you the truth, I was pretty numb,” I said. “It was sort of like I’d gotten a big shot of Novocain. So the interviews weren’t all that painful.” In fact, I could hardly remember any of my