James left the apartment at six-fifteen. Mindy, unable to help herself, reread the blog item on her and James, and her mood became increasingly foul. Nowadays, anyone who committed the crime of trying to do something with her life became a victim of Internet bullying, and there was no retribution, no control, nothing one could do. In this frame of mind, she sat down at her computer and began a new blog entry, listing all the things in her life over which she had no control and had made her bitterly disappointed: her inability to get pregnant, her inability to live in a proper apartment, her inability to lead a life that didn’t feel like she was always racing to catch up to an invisible finish line that moved farther away the closer she came. And now there was James’s impending success — which, instead of relieving these feelings, was only bringing them into sharper focus.

When she heard the elevator ding at seven A.M., signaling Paul Rice’s arrival in the lobby, she deliberately opened her door and let Skippy loose.

Skippy, as usual, growled at Paul. Mindy, still in a lousy mood, didn’t snatch Skippy away as quickly as she normally did, and Skippy attacked Paul’s pant leg with a rabid viciousness that Mindy wished she herself could express. During the tussle, Skippy managed to rip a tiny hole in the fabric of Paul’s pants before he was able to shake Skippy off. He bent down and examined the tear. Then he stood up, making an odd thrusting motion of pushing his tongue into his cheek. “I will sue you for this,”

he said coldly.

“Go ahead,” Mindy said. “Make my day. It can’t really get any worse.”

“Oh, but it can,” Paul said threateningly. “You’ll see.”

Paul went out, and upstairs, Lola Fabrikant got out of bed and turned on the TV. Eventually, James appeared on the screen. Perhaps it was the makeup, but James didn’t look so bad. True, he appeared unnecessarily formal, but James was a little stiff in general. It would be interesting to loosen him up, Lola thought. And he was on TV! Anyone could be on YouTube. But real TV, and network TV at that, was a whole different level. “I watched you!” she texted. “You were great! xLola.” Underneath, she included her new tagline, with which she signed off on all her e-mails and blog posts: “The body dies, but the spirit lives forever. ”

Up at Thirty Rock, the publicist, a lanky young woman with long blond hair and a bland prettiness, smiled at James. “That was good,” she said.

“Was it?” James said. “I wasn’t sure. I’ve never done TV before.”

“No. You were good. Really,” the publicist said unconvincingly. “We’ve got to hurry if we’re going to make it to your interview at CBS radio.”

James got into the Town Car. He briefly wondered if he would be famous now, recognized by strangers after appearing on the Today show. He didn’t feel any different, and the driver took as little notice of him as he had before. Then he checked his e-mails and found the text from Lola. At least someone appreciated him. He opened his window, letting in a rush of damp air.

The day of Sam’s father’s book signing was strangely warm, leading to the inevitable discussion among his classmates about global warming.

They agreed it was terrible to be born into a world where the adults had ruined the earth for their children, so that the children were forced to live under the shroud of impending Armageddon in which all living things might be wiped out. Sam knew his mother felt guilty about this — she was always telling him to recycle and turn off his light — but not every adult felt the same way. When he brought up the topic with Enid, she only laughed at him and said it had always been so: In the thirties, children had lived with food rationing and the threat of starvation (indeed, in the Great Depression, some people had starved); in the forties and fifties, it was air raids; and in the sixties and seventies, a nuclear bomb. And yet, she pointed out, people continued not only to survive but to flourish, given the fact that there were billions more people now than ever before. Sam didn’t find this reassuring. It was the billions of people, he argued, that were the problem.

Marching through the West Village with his friends, Sam talked about how the earth was already two degrees cooler than suspected due to the proliferation of airplanes, which caused cloud cover and the dimming of the canopy, mitigating 5 percent of all sunlight. It was a scientific fact, he said, that during the two days following 9/11, when there were no flights and therefore less cloud cover, the temperature on earth had registered two degrees higher. The exhaust from airplanes caused a smaller particulate in the air and a greater reflection of light away from the earth’s surface, he said.

Walking up Sixth Avenue, the group passed a basketball court with a game in progress. Sam forgot about climate change and peeled away to get in on the action. He’d been playing basketball on this particular litter-strewn, cracked asphalt court since he was two, when his father would bring him on spring and summer mornings to teach him how to dribble and throw. “Don’t tell your mother, Sammy,” his dad would say.

“She’ll think we were goofing off.”

Today the pickup game was particularly vicious, due perhaps to the warm weather in which everyone had come outside with their pent-up winter energy. Sam was off his game, and after being elbowed in the throat and knocked against the chain-link fence, he called it quits. He picked up a bagel with cream cheese on his way home, then worked on his website, which he was upgrading to Virtual Flash. Then the buzzer rang, and the doorman said he had a visitor.

The man standing in the foyer had a distinct air about him — seedy, Sam thought. Looking Sam up and down, the man asked if his parents were home, and when Sam shook his head, he said, “You’ll do. You know how to sign your name?” “Of course,” Sam said, thinking he ought to close the door in the man’s face and call the doorman to escort him out.

But it all happened so quickly. The man handed him an envelope and a clipboard. “Sign here,” he said. Unable to challenge grown-up authority, Sam signed. In a second, the man was gone, disappearing through the revolving doors of the lobby, and Sam was left holding the envelope in his hand.

The return address was for an attorney on Park Avenue. Knowing he shouldn’t, Sam opened the envelope, figuring he could explain later that he’d opened it by mistake. Inside was a two-page letter. The attorney was writing on behalf of his client, Mr. Paul Rice, who was being maliciously and systematically harassed by his mother, without cause, and if such actions did not cease immediately and reparations begin, a restraining order would be placed on his mother by Paul Rice and his attorneys, who were prepared to pursue this case as far as the law allowed.

In his bedroom, Sam read the letter again, feeling a white-hot adolescent rage engulf him. His mother was often annoying, but like most boys, he felt a fierce protectiveness toward her. She was smart, accomplished, and in his mind, beautiful; he placed her on a pedestal as the model to whom other girls must compare, although so far he had yet to meet another member of the female species who measured up. And now his mother was being attacked once again by Paul Rice. The thought infuriated him; looking around his room for something to break, and finding nothing of use, he changed his shoes and headed out of the building.

He jogged down Ninth Street, past the porno shops and pet stores and fancy tea outlets. Sam meant to run along the Hudson River, but the entrance to the piers was blocked by several red and white barriers and a Con Edison truck. “Gas leak,” a beefy man shouted as Sam approached.

“Go around.”

The utility vehicle gave Sam an idea, and he headed back to One Fifth. He suddenly saw how he might get even with Paul Rice and his threatening letter. It would inconvenience everyone in the building, but it would be temporary, and Paul Rice, with all his computer equipment, would be the most inconvenienced of all. He might even lose data. Sam smiled, thinking about how angry Paul Rice would be. Maybe it would make him want to leave the building.

At six-thirty in the evening, Sam headed over to the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Union Square with his parents. It was ten blocks from One Fifth, and the publicist wanted to send a car — no doubt, Mindy said, to make sure James would get there — but Mindy turned it down. They could walk, she declared. And reminding everyone of her recent vow to go green, she pointed out that there was no reason to waste gas and fill the air with carbon monoxide when God had given them perfectly good implements on which to get around. They were called feet. Ignoring his parents’ banter, Sam walked a few feet ahead of them, still brooding about his day. He hadn’t shown his mother the letter from Paul Rice’s attorney. He wasn’t going to allow Paul Rice to ruin his parents’ big day.

Sam wouldn’t have been surprised if Paul had done it on purpose.

Outside the store, the Gooch family stopped to admire a small poster announcing James’s reading, featuring the photograph of James taken at the shoot on the day he’d gotten the ride from Schiffer Diamond. James was pleased with the image: He looked appropriately brooding and in-tellectual, as if he alone were privy to some great universal secret. Stepping inside the store, he was greeted by the blasé publicist from that morning and two employees who escorted him up to the fifth floor. They sequestered him in a tiny office at the back of the store to wait while a cartload of books was brought in for him to sign. Holding a Sharpie, James paused, staring down at the title page and his name: James Gooch. This was, he thought, a historical moment in his life, and he wanted to remember his feelings.