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man punches him. The white guy staggers back.
    Then, in a fluid movement the heavy man reaches in his pocket and suddenly there is a gun with a hand towel wrapped around it pointing at the white kid. The big man pulls the trigger, and Nana flinches as the muffled explosion blasts and echoes around the block. The towel catches fire, and the big man throws it on the ground as the white guy is sliding down the wall, leaving a track of blood and down feathers from his parka.
    Nana bolts for the stairs, thinking the shooter is taking off the other way, but the heavy man changes his mind and turns around. Nana looks him straight in his brown and yellow bloodshot eyes for a split second before hegets kneed in the testicles and falls to the ground. He squirms in anguish and, out of the corner of his eye, sees the heavy man back up. Nana tries to crawl up and away. He gets a good look at the corpse. The guy isn’t much more than a kid. Pale with blond, almost white hair, and eyes frozen open. As Nana tries to rise, the heavy guys boot misses his temple and hits him in the side of the mouth. He goes back down and doesn’t see any more as the heavy man scrambles for the towel, wraps it around the gun, and shoots him in the head. The heavy man turns back to the white corpse and picks up the little silver gun.

Chapter Seven
    IT’S BEEN A great vacation so far. Lots of parties. Sara Ludlow and one of her girlfriends are walking to another one. They step carefully to avoid wetting their Jimmy Choo knee-high stiletto boots in the puddles of slush. Sara is rooting through the Prada bag she got for Christmas, looking for her compact. She wants to see how she looks. Everyone pays attention to how Sara looks.
    Sara Ludlow is the hottest girl at her school by, like, a lot. When that kid Chris, whose house she is going to, made up the chart about where the girls stood, like the stock-market quotes, Sara always came up on top. Her line on the chart kept rising while other girls tumbled according to the whims of the market or whether they put out. When the chart was finally discovered taped behind the Bob Marley poster in the senior lounge, the girls were fascinated. Egos were crushed and inflated, but no one was really surprised by Sara’s dominance. Long legs, large breasts, blond hair, blue eyes, high cheek-bones.Even people who didn’t like her said that she was great-looking—if you were looking for that conventional sort of beauty. Such statements rarely assuaged any jealousy.
    Sara looks in her mirror as she talks to her girlfriend. “Who’s gonna be there?”
    â€œMostly seniors, I hope. It’s that kid Chris’s house, and his brother is supposed to be back from boarding school or rehab or whatever he goes to now.”
    â€œClaude?”
    â€œYeah. Supposedly he’s clean now.”
    â€œWhatever. Did you notice Jessica got a nose job?”
    â€œReally? I couldn’t tell.” Ha, ha, ha .
    â€œYeah, me either. You know who’s a bitch?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œLayla.”
    â€œYeah, I know. She thinks she is so smart. She never shuts up.”
    â€œShe’s in my English class.”
    â€œWenchler’s?”
    â€œYeah, and she just says anything. Something about how everyone took the holocaust so seriously or something. She made Jane Grey run out of the room crying.”
    â€œJane cries all the time.”
    â€œI know, but Layla was, like, heartless.”
    â€œIs Jane Jewish?”
    â€œNo, I don’t think so. She used to be anorexic.”
    The girls are having a big laugh over that one whenthey get to Ninetieth Street and Madison. They can see the town house where the party is happening. There is a tall kid in an overcoat standing in the doorway.

Chapter Eight
    WHITE MIKE CAN hear some pop rap playing inside. Nelly or something:
    Oh why do I live this life
Hey, must be the money.
    This is Chris’s house and Chris’s party. Chris