“That’s the point. We want people to look at you. We’re going to tip off the paparazzi,” Paloma says, getting that grin she always gets whenever she says the word paparazzi. Like it turns her on.

“I still don’t understand the point of this,” I say. I asked Kenny whether it was okay if I left the house with my mother and he said, “Sure, spend time together while you can.” After we hung up, my dad said, “Twenty bucks he bills you for that phone call.”

My dad talks a lot about billable hours now—it’s his fallback conversation; he uses it the same way he used to babble about his last golf game. Both are equally uninteresting. From what I can gather, his annoyance about the cost of all this is not based on real concerns about our finances. Even with both of my parents out of work and mounting legal bills, we have a long way to go before we need to start worrying about money. My dad sat Isla and me down to reassure us about all of this when he agreed to step down from his firm, as if our concern about our depleted trust funds was the thing keeping us up at night. Truth be told, I hadn’t really thought about it, being much more concerned with the whole “my mom and I potentially going to prison thing.”

“The point is that for six weeks the headlines have been saying”—Paloma points at me with one of her pink fingernails and puts on a monotonous, newscaster voice—“Pimpleton Von Wildenstern the Eighth has pleaded guilty to charges in the college admissions scandal that has rocked the nation. Meanwhile, Joy Fields, known for her longtime stint on My Dad, My Pops, and Me, continues to roll the legal dice despite mounting evidence against—”

“Enough,” my mom says. “We get it. Yoga. We’ll do yoga.”

Paloma puts a finger to her ear, like she’s Secret Service, voice dropped low and serious. “Scheduling it.”

—

Twenty-four hours later, after my mom has had her makeup and hair done—all so it looks like she’s wearing no makeup and that her hair was casually thrown back into that perfect ponytail—we find ourselves doing the downward dog at eleven-thirty in the morning. Paloma wants my mom to seem easy, breezy, all calm, cool, and collected. Like she’s confident she’ll beat the charge. I turned down my mom’s offer of a blowout and instead am going au naturel. I’m tired of the world thinking I’m a spoiled, entitled brat, though come to think of it, not sure the image of me looking sweaty in front of 9021-OM will help matters much.

When I come downstairs, though, Paloma sends me right up to change.

“Stripes are not a good idea,” she says.