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Confession of what? How could Alice have confessed anything? How could Mom believe it?
    It was harder than she had expected to keep her speed steady. Her foot played with the accelerator, trying to learn the right amount of pressure, but the trouble was, going uphill or downhill or on the flat required different amounts of pressure.
    I killed him good , the almost-familiar voice had muttered.
    What did “good” mean in that context? Thoroughly? Or with pleasure?
    Alice needed cruise control. She could see buttons and dials with words on them, but she could not read. Was she crying too hard? Or could shock shut down the reading segment of your brain?
    People admired the Corvette. As she passed them, or they passed her, their eyes floated down the slick scarlet body of this sexy car, and in each case they were startled to see her. She was the wrong driver for such a car, and everybody knew it.
    And Alice thought: They announced my license plate over the radio.

Chapter 3
    T HEY HAD ANNOUNCED HER license plate and described her car.
    Alice had so much to think about, she could think about nothing at all. Was she a fugitive from the police?
    She, Alice.
    Tenth grade. Taking American literature, and physics. French Two and Algebra Two. American history. Chorus and gym.
    She, Alice.
    A nice pleasant girl who didn’t butt in line, didn’t write graffiti on the bathroom stall doors, didn’t drop her hamburger wrapper out the car window, didn’t cut pages from library reference books.
    The police, the radio announcer, and her very own mother believed she had committed a murder.
    The murder of her very own father.
    The red Corvette was a splendid decoration on the road. Nobody could miss it.
    How many people who admired her
    Vette were listening to the radio right now? Had the boy in the ice cream shack been listening to the radio? Who, speeding down the parkway, had a car phone? Dad’s Blazer had a car phone, but he didn’t keep one in the Corvette. The Vette, he said, was for escape.
    Dad had a daydream he liked to use when he drove the Vette—that he was escaping. Running. Keeping pursuit off his tail. “Look back,” he used to say when she was little, “recognize any of those cars? That white sedan, the one with the tinted windows—it’s following us! Here. We’ll leave ʼem in the dust.” Alice and Daddy would holler joyfully while they left ʼem in the dust.
    Then Mom, who had loved this game for years, suddenly said it was childish and dangerous and stupid.
    Alice wanted to shove the accelerator to the floor, drive two hundred miles an hour, put dirt and towns and mileage between herself and the phone call to her mother. This was the car to do it in.
    I can go eighty. In a Vette, I can do ninety. A hundred. That’s what it’s for.
    But this was not a good time to get a traffic ticket.
    She let a glitter-beige Avenger pass her. Dad would never have permitted such a thing. Corvettes do not get passed; they do the passing. Dad loved the name of that car— Avenger —but not the handling. Dad had always wanted to be a car namer. Dodge Ram, he would say. Great name. Great truck.
    Coming toward Alice, cut off by the scenic divider, was a police car. Its lights and sirens were on. It hurtled forward. The sound of its siren was heart-slicing. The lights ripping around in circles were the lights of hell, of jail, of torment.
    The lights of your very own mother believing quite easily that you, her only child—you were capable of killing your father.
    Mommy, thought Alice, how could you ?
    Her mother was a pretty woman, but not beautiful; a little chubby; fond of jewelry, always changing her hairstyle, always on the phone with her friends. Her mother loved to cook. Loved to decorate. She worked in the city for a firm that designed mail-order catalogs. It was a job that fascinated her, and she could never resist the useless but beautiful objects sold in the catalogs she designed.
    Alice drove faster. The Corvette turned