Lexicon

reporter who writes down what the cops say. That goes on AP and the news services all share it. So it can look like they’ve all done their research and found the same facts, but it’s usually just everyone parroting one source.
    Now, probably the guy in Grand Forks really did just get pissed off with his girlfriend. But I think it’s worth noting that literally nobody has claimed that’s why he started shooting. If they’d said it was a mystery, then people like us would get curious and ask questions, but apparently all it takes is one unsubstantiated hint and we’re satisfied, because we think we figured it out.

[FOUR]
    She became promiscuous. It wasn’t planned. It was because there was nothing else to do. She thought of herself as
promiscuous
rather than
easy
because she was in charge. If a boy came into the clothes store where she worked and had a look in his eye that meant he’d heard about her, she would play dumb and sell him new khaki pants. But if—and it didn’t happen often, only sometimes—there was a boy with curly hair and dark eyes and he was genuinely shopping, then something inside her would yearn. She would walk over and say can I help you, and if the boy was orbited by a badly permed blonde, which he usually was, she would recommend shirts and eye him while his girlfriend fingered skirts. And he would look back and there would be something there. When the girl decided to try something on, Emily would walk directly to him and kiss him like a predator. And he kissed her back, every time, and if she reached down, he was hard as stone. “How’s it going?” she would call, her eyes on the boy, and the girl would say something about fit around the shoulders and color and did they have it without the bows. She didn’t always take it further than that: Twice the girl came out early and the boy walked out of the store on loose legs, throwing her glances. But twice she did. The last time, the boy had been accompanied by a black-eyed girl who didn’t even answer when Emily came over and said hello, and she liked the look of this boy, he was friendly and dumb and played football, so she not only invaded his pants while his girl was behind a change room door but kept going when she came out again. She watched the boy’s face as the girl revolved about the store, fascinated, because he looked so scared yet didn’t stop her. The girl inspected dresses and made a catty comment about the decade in which she believed one of them belonged, and the boy grunted and twitched in his jeans. Emily walked behind the counter. He looked at her like he couldn’t believe she was abandoning him. Like he thought she had a plan to help him out or something. But she didn’t care about that. The interesting part was over, as far as she was concerned. The boy stood rooted there a few seconds, then blurted a bunch of mostly unrelated words, the spillage from two or three trains of thought that had just collided. The girl didn’t even look up. “Okay,” she said, turning over a fluffy hooded jacket.
    This was probably not what Eliot had meant when he told her to
work hard and discipline yourself
. But she was a million miles from everywhere, doing an otherwise excellent job of concealing the fact that she was the most skilled practitioner of persuasion ever to grace this dustbowl, and she needed something. She couldn’t have muscles and not flex them.
    She had slept two nights in a bus station before realizing the town was full of empty houses; you only had to break in and make yourself at home. She found a job at Tangled Threads, Broken Hill’s hippest clothing store for young and old and anyone else interested in one level of fashion above denim and wifebeaters, and it paid cash, which meant she could rent something with electricity. It was all simpler than she had imagined. She even bought a battered old car. Which was a little risky, because she didn’t dare attempt to acquire a driver’s license, but the town had only two cops, both from segments she understood well, and she was really sick of the bus.
    She was “the American girl.” Her story was she had come to
connect with the earth
—a ludicrous idea, patently false to anyone who watched how she squinted at the sun, hugged herself against the wind, grimaced at dirt, but seriously, why else would you come here?
How long are you staying?
people asked, leaning across a counter to marvel at her, this person who had left America to come here,
here
,