Alexis remembers with special clarity the day they took her to the airport. She was thirteen, and it had been decided that a girl as preternaturally silent and awkward as she was would benefit from a boarding school in Geneva that could address her special needs. It simply wasn't natural for such a pretty girl to be so diffident. Eyes wide, mouth closed, she hugged both of her parents goodbye, stunned by the glimmer of tears in her mother's eyes and the catch in her voice. She saw her father take her mother's hand as she stepped onto the jetway, unaccompanied.

Across the ocean, she was met not with the support she so desperately needed, but with ridicule from her peers, who mocked her perpetual saucer gaze. "Stop staring, you freak. Say something!" were the words that most often found her ear. It wasn't that she had nothing to say. Indeed, she had volumes of thoughts and observations she never shared. But being the youngest in the Rose household, she often struggled to get a word in edgewise, and took to watching, always watching for an opening that never seemed to come. Watching for the right time to bring up the right subject, so as not to set anyone off. Dad was under a lot of pressure, always. Despite her best efforts at motherhood, Mom was, well… a tornado on a minefield. And David had deep and abiding problems of his own. A born people pleaser, her cultivated reticence became rote, and the family eventually came to believe that something was very wrong.

The boarding school therapists she met with were of little help in protecting her from the constant psychological battery of her dormmates, so as a matter of survival, and defying years of self-training, Alexis evolved. Her keen powers of observation served her at long last, as she transformed herself into the apotheosis of all the bubbly, extroverted society girls she'd ever known.

When she returned from Switzerland that summer, her family was met by a different child altogether. The girl formerly given to long, unsettling reverie could scarcely sustain eye contact, and her voice, once barely heard above a whisper, was looped in endless high-spirited monologues about only the most vapid of subjects. Her social commitments were compulsive, lest anyone suspect she wasn't fully connected at all times. She was the picture of popularity, and her family took her hypersocial activation as an unqualified success. They never once stopped to question what was left behind.