DEAR ABBY: What do you think of a very intelligent 15 1/2-year-old girl, a straight-A student, who asks her noncustodial father to kill her mother's boyfriend –- which the father, of course, will not do?
This girl is not a gang member or on drugs. How do you justify this kind of thinking in a teenage girl, and how do you reconcile the fact that she claims to love her father while asking him to kill somebody for her? -- CONCERNED IN NEVADA
DEAR CONCERNED: Either the girl has serious emotional problems, or she's having serious problems with her mother's boyfriend. I would not question the girl's love for her father, but I would urge him to intervene and see that his daughter receives the help she obviously needs, including assuring that she's out of reach of the boyfriend. She could have been emotionally abused or molested by him.