In biology we had learned about the sympathetic nervous system, how the body is mobilized for fight or flight when there is a threat. While Sister Benedict had talked at the chalkboard, drawing diagrams to illustrate the responses, I’d thought about my own sympathetic nervous system’s failure that night at Jessie Warren’s house, when I hadn’t been able to make my body move when I needed to the most. I hadn’t been able to summon either response. I’d never been to Jessie’s house before and we weren’t friends exactly. In the seventh grade we’d been paired up in a history class project where we had to act as the defense team in a mock trial of Marie Antoinette. Jessie was clever, and her father was some big-shot lawyer, so she was good at making arguments and counterarguments and knew how to object and redirect. We actually won the case, scapegoating the nobility. She invited me over to her house for a sleepover to celebrate. Her mother collected us from school in a convertible. She had a scarf tied under her chin and bright-red lipstick, and was glamorous in an old-fashioned way, as if she belonged in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, whipping around cliff edges. Jessie was blond, too, tomboyish and gangly compared to her mother.

Jessie’s house had white columns on either side of the front door. She had a swimming pool that stayed covered until Memorial Day weekend. The garage had ski equipment and a boat, which we climbed into, and I sat at the wheel and pretended to steer.

“You’re at the helm,” Jessie said, and I said, “Yes, I am.” I had no idea what the helm was, but I was happy to be there. We played until we were called in for dinner. Jessie’s parents were going out that night to a party, and they’d hired a babysitter, a college student at Penn, who read her book almost the entire time. Jessie’s dad sat with us for a few minutes, drinking his cocktail, while Jessie’s mom used a mirror in the kitchen to put in her earrings and apply her red lipstick. Mr. Warren had dark hair, slicked straight back, and wore round tortoiseshell glasses. He asked what my dad did, and I told him that we had customers in this neighborhood whose gardens and lawns we took care of. He said how cool it was that I worked with my dad and that I had been to Ireland.