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hardens from best-friend puppy to attack dog. “My tattoos and yours are not the same!”
    “I know that,” Nolan says.
    “You don’t. You don’t know!” Maslow says.
    “I’m learning,” says Nolan. “Believe me.”

 
    A FTER B ONNIE AND V INCENT have pretty much covered the riveting subjects of the weather (hot for April!) and the traffic (hardly moving!), there’s nothing to do but sit in the van, foreheads popping beads of sweat into the hideous silence. Bonnie’s fighting the impulse to fling open the door and run screaming down the highway, which would make perfect sense since it’s obvious she’s already lost her mind.
    But why should it seem crazy, or even odd, to be taking a skinhead stranger home to spend the night alone with you and your children? Why? Because it’s outrageous. Totally suicidal. How could Bonnie—a grown woman, a mother, the person more or less single-handedly responsible for raising the annual budget of a great human rights organization—have let Meyer talk her into this? Why? Because she believes that Brotherhood Watch is a great organization. Everything follows from that. It makes everything into a test. Is she great enough to work there? Bonnie loves the foundation, she loves her job, and above all she loves the feeling that she is doing something worthwhile with her life, something more important than what she did at her previous job, which was shaking down her suburban neighbors so that the Clairmont Museum could buy another antique print of a riverboat steaming up the Hudson.
    “Tappan Zee traffic,” says Bonnie, the Martian’s tour guide to Earth.
    “I figured.” Vincent’s staring straight ahead and sitting up so rigidly he could be one of those mannequins solo drivers buy so they can ride the commuter lanes. Is it nervousness? Some paramilitary thing? Or was he taught as a child to take up the minimum possible space? How sad that a child should be taught to get small. But that’s what Meyer had to learn. That’s how Meyer survived.
    How different from her own kids—squirming, sprawling, occupying every inch of the world that exists for them to fill with their glorious bodies. Bonnie has to admit that even with their broken home, their self-involved dad, and the soulless home-wrecker he currently lives with, Danny and Max are lucky. She knocks on the little square of wood she carries on the dashboard for that purpose.
    “Superstitious?” Vincent asks.
    “Extremely,” Bonnie replies.
    It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that knocking on wood means you’re superstitious. Still, Vincent’s getting it right might seem like an encouraging sign—he’s paying attention, taking things in, he is from Planet Earth—except that he hasn’t turned to face her or so much as twitched during their brief conversation. If that isn’t creepy, what is? Perhaps he’s just being polite, trying to inflate a bubble of privacy around himself in this awkward situation. It would be worse if he were, say, staring at her knee as she swivels between the gas and the brake, revealing stretches of thigh. Her skirt seems six inches shorter than it did this morning. Most men couldn’t sit still, couldn’t suppress their body-language critique of Bonnie’s driving. Joel rarely let Bonnie drive, except sometimes after a party; then he’d slide all the way down in the seat and cover his face with his hands. The worst part was that Bonnie laughed at this cute married joke.
    No, the most humiliating part was how Bonnie trained herself to respond to Joel’s every gesture: that almost imperceptible lip-curl that meant the steak was a shade too rare. She should have made him burn it himself. Maybe they’d still be together. Not that Bonnie wants that. Since the divorce, she’s begun to see many aspects of Joel that she’d chosen to overlook. But monitoring his tiny tics has turned out to be excellent training, useful now in her work as she watches a donor’s face for the perfect