I was seventeen and Martin Samuelson—this was his major effort; he soon wearied of the case and he especially grew tired of me—was successful in defining me as a juvenile so my fate would be decided not before a jury but in judge’s chambers. By now, I was out of the juvenile detention center and undergoing a marathon sequence of psychological examinations—they seemed to be a mixture of Scholastic Aptitude Tests and the kind of baffling, embarrassing questions a cornball pervert might ask a child in a schoolyard. I gave my impressions of inkblots, added columns of three-digit numbers, identified pictures of Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy, and answered True or False to questions like: “I feel I go to the bathroom more than other people.” I went through this process of psychological testing twice, the first time at the hands of a court-appointed psychologist. Then Ted Bowen arranged that I’d be retested by a private psychologist. This was Dr. White, a gentle old man with conjunctivitis. (Dr. White was the first doctor I’d ever been to who wasn’t a personal and political friend of my parents: the Party created its share of internists and dentists but few psychiatrists.)

All the while, I was in my parents’ custody. It was the autumn I was to begin college. A few months before, I’d been accepted by the University of California, but since Jade was still in high school and bound to stay in Chicago, I had switched my choice to Roosevelt University, which was hardly a place to study astronomy but was in downtown Chicago. It didn’t matter any longer; I wasn’t going anywhere. I was told by the police, the psychologists, the lawyers, and my parents that I wasn’t under any circumstances to even try to make contact with Jade or any of the other Butterfields. At the outset, this wasn’t a difficult rule to follow. I was incapable of even imagining what it would have been to see them after what had happened. I had no illusions of their sudden compassion or their willingness to see through the act I’d committed to the innocent, lovesick spirit that had triggered it. I could not stop hoping that Jade would contact me, but she didn’t, even though it would not have been that complicated to do so.