We Are Your Future : SMOKED: A True Story About the Kids Next Door, <i> By Leon Bing (Harper Collins: $22; 289 pp.)</i>

These days people speak of “the secret life of teen-agers” as if they were contemplating the undersea mystery of dolphins or some exotic and dangerously beautiful man-eating plant. Is it really possible that we have so lost connection with our children that we’re forced to contemplate them as a strange species known to us only in flashes?

Leon Bing, in “Smoked: A True Story About the Kids Next Door,” seems to think so, and she provides the lurid light by which we can almost, but not quite, see them.

Author of “Do or Die,” an account of gang life in Los Angeles, Bing has turned this time to the shotgun murder of three South Pasadena area high school girls by two of their best friends, and her version of the events and what led up to them makes for the kind of reading that titillates more than it enlightens, that--like tabloid headlines--can’t fail to be momentarily absorbing even while it’s a little sullying.

Bing has spun out at great length a fairly simple story. The length is to provide not only background on the murderers and the murdered but to give us an insider’s privileged view: Here’s what it’s like to shoot--”smoke”--your old girlfriend (aged 16) and her friends on a drunken whim, to live for drinking and drugs, to start your sex life in the fourth grade. (Well, not these kids, to be accurate, but people they claim to know. These kids waited till they were 11 or 12.)

Bing brings us the result of many hours spent in the company of David Adkins, a boy of good looks and alleged, but not demonstrated, charm. He’s got the guts to talk his way around just about everyone, but that proves the inattentiveness and gullibility of adults more than it confirms his genius. Dave, at 12, meets Kathy Macaulay, a well-to-do fellow student, who after giving him years of love, money and a somewhat sordid and inconsistent emotional loyalty, will ultimately die with her two friends for no particular reason.

Dave’s fellow murderer is Vinnie Hebrock, who, by his own testimony and that of a group of informants who went to school with him, compensated for his small stature, his general unattractiveness to girls, and an underfinanced and underaffectionate home life by committing nasty crimes: casually brutal robberies and coolly executed burglaries. At 17, Vinnie could neither read nor write.

If Vinnie is angry enough to express his social desperation with outrageous daring, Dave becomes Vinnie’s loyal sidekick and accomplice for reasons that remain essentially mysterious (unless the excitement of lawlessness is sufficient explanation, or, as Bing represents Dave’s opinion, “This guy Vinnie? Way cool.”). Together they live a totally unsuspected double life of petty crime until bad temper, drinking, drugs and an available firearm make mass murder too alluring to resist. “I keep on wondering,” says one of Dave’s friends when he hears about the massacre, “if at the moment it happened, if killing another person was, like, the most incredible high. Like, whoa!” The story is not meant to be a savory one; but what it is meant to be never quite comes clear, unless we see it as a cousin to those anti-war and anti-crime movies that soak the viewer in blood in order to prove how right we are to be disgusted by war and crime.

“Smoked,” which makes Joe McGinniss’s undocumented speculations look like hard facts, tries with almost touching earnestness to penetrate the adolescent mind that lived this atrociously amoral and empty life. In its early chapters the narrator gives us kid-emotions in kid-speak: “Gnarly, he thinks to himself.” “This party has to be fully happening.” This is useful for a while, until we understand that the only thing we’ll learn this way is how random and unexamined, how utterly without insight or reflection, this blow-by-blow account will necessarily be. These kids are creatures of sensation; like many adolescents they aggrandize and fantasize, act on impulse, are driven by defensiveness and terror and the fear of not belonging. They are not particularly defiant--there’s nothing remotely political when one girl carves a symbol of anarchy into the flesh of her arm. On the scale of available expressions, let alone motivations, for social disaffection, this isn’t exactly profound. Perversely expressed hedonism is more like it. If these kids have a slogan it’s nothing more challenging than “Party till you drop.”

Anyone who has raised--or been--an adolescent recognizes all that. What, then, separates the sociopath from our own kids and (think back) from ourselves, even at our worst? We turn to books to hear someone better informed hazard a theory, advance an argument, at least organize a search party to go looking, not so much for the motive for murder--that comes too late in the game--but for the causes of the kink in the human lifeline.

On the surface the kids shoulder some of the blame. “South Pas is just so baked on . . . It’s like getting a fake tan, and hair extensions, and fake nails, and fake eyelashes,” says one boy whose analytic prowess far exceeds his friends’. “It’ like a Ray Bradbury story, where everything is supposed to be just perfect, ‘cause that’s how it looks. Only it’s not.”

But that is a symptom; what is the underlying illness? Bing hints at the true guilty parties (though the accusation fails as a legal defense during the long murder trial that ends the book): emotionally derelict parents and, behind them, vague as a distant painted backdrop, all of society: “us.” But she never investigates the absent parents as the villains of the piece--in part, perhaps, because of a lack of access she doesn’t fully acknowledge. The bewildered voices of the mothers and fathers of the delinquent children sound as irrelevant as those ludicrous off-stage oinks and murmurs that so accurately represented the parental generation in the old Charlie Brown television specials.

If the parents are accused by innuendo of failing to patrol their children’s world, is it solely because the children are clever enough to outwit them? “With the grown-ups it’s all about good manners,” says one boy. “As long as you’re polite, that’s all it takes.” Or is Bing leveling blame on the step-father who’s off in Washington too often, the mother who gives the Mercedes keys to her daughter without enough questions asked? The father of one of the slain girls, Heather Goodwin (shown as a hot-tempered, promiscuous, foul-mouthed hoyden; small, like Vinnie Hebrock, and equally defensive about it) is seen once or twice as pathologically silent: “You wanna hear something pitiful? Me and Kathy Macaulay have known each other since like the third grade, and she’s been coming to my house for sleep-overs practically every week since we met. And in all that time I don’t think my father has ever said one word to her. Not one word. . . . Of course, he doesn’t talk to me, either. He just hangs out in this room he has and smokes cigars and reads and--I don’t know, thinks deep thoughts, I guess . . . hey, (expletive) it all. Let’s get wasted.”

But this is one of the teen-agers talking; or rather--since she’s one of the murdered girls--being re-created. Practically the only time we hear the dead girls described by adults, their parents and siblings are presenting their quite unrecognizable eulogies at the murder trial. Obviously there’s value in hearing the teen-ager’s points of view--these are covert lives they’re admitting to and it’s finally truth-telling time--but in the end Bing does what, without quite framing it as accusation, she blames their parents for doing: She’s letting the kids construct the world as they see it and yielding all authority to them. And by giving us layer on layer of the accurate-sounding, though frequently second-hand, banality of “he-said- then-she-said-so-she-goes-and- I’m-like,” she is only complicit in giving us a voyeur’s look at the California life we love to hate.

Joan Didion writes about the Golden State, and frequently, with cold moral fury. (A recent New Yorker essay, for example, probed with sympathy and a grounding in historical context, the economics of the community that gave us the Spur Posse.) She discovers the telling details that nail her protagonists with their own fatuousness, their self-serving illusions. The concreteness of her prose delivers to us a stage set (make that a sound-stage) on which the players enact their roles with precision. But Didion is doing the choosing and juxtaposition of evidence, and her voice, numbed but keen and long since stripped of illusion, directs our attention where she believes it needs to be so that we can assemble the pieces of a whole, complex world as busy with reverberations as the Richter scale.

Leon Bing is, instead, a dutiful reporter with a daily journalist’s notebook full of undigested data but without a voice of her own to help us make sense of it. Her idea of a dramatic chapter ending is “For Kathy Macaulay, things are great. She’s seeing Dave Adkins every day.” Her descriptions don’t go much deeper: Kathy Macaulay’s stepfather is “in his late forties; a soft-spoken balding man.” Her mother “is in her forties; a blond, gently pretty woman, with a resemblance to Faye Dunaway.”

Must the mystery be solved that tells us why some Pasadena kids go to jail while others go upstate to Stanford? Decidedly not--human nature is too complex to demand monolithic answers to such obdurate questions. But, intermittently absorbing though any crime story may be as symptom of personal or societal disorder, and for all the empathy she’s shown “the kids next door,” Leon Bing hasn’t gone deep enough to bring us much more analysis or insight than a solid newspaper feature might. If anything, in fact, she seems committed to the morally neutral thinness of the beat reporter, trying not to make judgments even while, in the shadows, lurk those large, unstated condemnations of absent grown-ups, absent social boundaries. Because of that, however sympathetic she’d like to help us to be, there is no one here we feel we understand sufficiently to share this nightmare with.

Bing ends the book with a terrifying prophecy, copied off the wall of a houseful of runaways in Venice, California: “F--- you. I’m your future,” it says. But if we’re all in the cross-hairs of these kids’ vicious dreams, we need to ask harder questions than Leon Bing has managed. And after the children have spoken, we desperately need to hear what the adults answer.