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screeches.
    “People are concerned for you, Rainey. No one is gossiping. Don’t be angry.” Miss Brennan stands, too. “One more question. Please. Is it true there’s a man living there who isn’t related to you?”
    Rainey possesses an expression of baffled innocence, and she puts it on now. “Gordy? My cousin?” She waits for doubt to register on Miss Brennan’s face. “He’s lived there since I was two.”
    Miss Brennan says, “Your cousin.”
    “He’s a genius on horn,” says Rainey. “He and my dad play in the best clubs.”
    Miss Brennan nods. “Rainey,” she says, “if you ever need to chat, I’m here. It can be hard without a mom. I think things are tougher than you let on.”
    The English teacher, Zach Moreno, always sits with Miss Brennan at lunch. And he is gorgeous, too. Mr. Piriello is fat, and Mr. Noble is craggy in a romantic way, but he is old. So, Mr. Moreno. It is like matching up Barbie and Ken, Rainey thinks. Maybe there is something she can do with that. Maybe she could flirt with Mr. Moreno more. In her mind, she picks up her chair and smashes Miss Brennan’s head. Only when she can see the blood does she shoulder her pack and say in her sweetest voice, “May I go now?”

    T HE PIETÀ BY J ACQUES Bellange is the most delicious in the show at the Met, and Rainey is riveted. In the picture, Mary tips her head back and dips her fingertips into the tiny bowl between her collarbones as if holy water might have collected there. Her face is radiant with pain.
    It’s Monday afternoon, the afternoon of the humiliation. Rainey lets her pack thud on the museum floor and pulls out her sketchbook.
    A tour group sifts around the corner. Rainey feels it rather than sees it swelling behind her. “Ah, we love our art students.” The guide has a faint Germanic accent. “But this is the one you should be copying, Miss. It’s filled with contradiction. Come join us.”
    Drop dead, thinks Rainey.
    After a moment, he goes on in his tour-guide voice. “Let us explore the tension in this engraving by Claude Mellan.”
    Rainey balances her sketchbook on one arm. The Mary in the pietà is a real woman, not like those stiff ones from the 1400s. She doesn’t try to copy the pietà precisely, with its fine hatch marks. Rather she wants to capture the curve of Mary’s neck, the folds in her garment, the muscles in the thigh of the Christ.
    Never has she seen such muscles in the thigh of a Christ.
    “We see Mary Magdalene with two symbols of the religious contemplative,” says the guide, and from his accent Rainey imagines him with skis and Alps. “The cross and the skull,” says the guide. “We don’t know why Mellan omittedthe third symbol, the book. And yet, and yet. Look at her, this reformed prostitute. Her robes have slipped. Her hair is undone. She’s a lush young woman, our Magdalene. This is a typical pose for her, during her desert days.”
    Rainey totally sees it. Spiritual, pretty, a little loose, deep into her thoughts, not a big reader. Hair to her waist.
    She refuses to look.
    In the Bellange pietà, the Mother Mary sits with her legs apart and the body of Jesus on his knees between them, facing the viewer. This Mary is not embarrassed about any damn thing. She may be pure, but she is still a sensual, fleshy woman, caught up in grief.
    The thing Rainey doesn’t get, as she sketches, is how the Christ stays upright, kneeling, if he’s dead. Every muscle is delineated. His nipples are erect. A fold of Mary’s hem flutters up strategically across his hip.
    “So I wonder,” says the guide, as if musing to himself, “does she know? Is Mary Magdalene so transported by religious fervor she does not realize her bosom is bared? Or are the artists telling us, once a whore, always a whore?”
    Rainey hears tittering and turns, furious. The engraving is small, but she can tell right away that the Magdalene, a big-boned, dark-haired sexy chick, is dreaming away. She could almost be Mary’s