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object is to shoot and kill as many others as you can.
    Look at the message the courts are sending out.”
    Joyce didn’t know what to say to all this, or even if she should say anything at all. She was sorry her friend was so bitter, but she knew that cynicism was also found among the young.
    One of her good friends at college used as a motto, “People are assholes.”
    “When I was young, people helped each other. We all worked together for the common good,” Cliff said. “You didn’t have these horrendous, conscious-less crimes like you do today.”
    “What about Leopold and Loeb?” Joyce had observed, but as she suspected this was not a conversation but a diatribe. She listened politely for a few more minutes and then had excused herself.
    Edging back onto the highway, Joyce worked her way over to the far right lane and stayed there, maintaining a constant speed except to let cars merge in front of hers.
    Soon, after passing the hulking buildings of Co-op City, she crossed over to the West Side Highway. Joyce had been to New York City a few times before: for a weekend of Broadway shows with her grandmother that included the legendary “Rent,” and to the museums and a Mets baseball game with her father.
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    She remembered that on one of those trips with her father he had pointed out that more people lived in one of those large brick housing projects near 125th Street than did in Waldoboro.
    Joyce already felt small as the office towers of midtown Manhattan sprang up around the car. She got off the crumbling highway near 42nd Street and cruised down Eighth Avenue and along the piers where the trans-Atlantic ships once docked, when that was the main way to travel.
    She headed downtown, past the fabled Macy’s in Herald Square and to Washington Square Park at the edge of the New York University campus. Joyce had wanted to go to NYU and major in theater there—with its famous faculty and with the city’s hundreds of venues as her lab. But her parents had forbid it, and they were paying her tuition.
    The sights and smells were fascinating to Amelia; the small dog pressed her muzzle against the passenger window, her saliva obscuring the view.
    Amelia barked sharply when a young man slapped the hood of Joyce’s car as he crossed in front of it at a red light. “It’s okay, girl,” Joyce laughed. “They’re allowed to do that here.”
    She turned onto Macdougall Street and headed toward the address the Collins’ had given her, an older brick building with a.
    tea shop and a newsstand on the first floor. Then she pulled up to the curb, let Amelia out and grabbed her suitcase from the hatchback.
    Joyce could hear several locks sliding back off their metal arms after she had been buzzed in and identified herself again at the apartment door.
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Chapter 5
    Debbie, her new roommate, was a short, slightly plump woman with straight dark hair to the middle of her back and large, round brown eyes.
    She looked, Joyce thought, like a high school cheerleader. And in short order she found out Debbie had indeed been one, as well as the girl in her high school voted most likely to become a star.
    This neighborhood is probably filled with people who can make that claim, Joyce thought to herself as she was shown the kitchen, living room, bathroom and the bedroom she would occupy.
    The furniture was older, yard sale stuff but it had a certain charm and it was in the first place of her own—Joyce loved it.
    “I thought we could go to lunch but you probably want to unpack first,” Debbie said.
    Joyce opened one of the dresser drawers, dumped the contents of her suitcase in it and put the suitcase under the bed.
    “I’m unpacked,” she announced.
    “We’re going to get along fine,” Debbie laughed.
    After putting down bowls of fresh water and food for Amelia, the girls climbed into Joyce’s car and headed back uptown toward Times Square.
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    “You’re going to find having a car is a major