“I told your mom she should have told the Marie Claire lady: ‘Do you expect your male interviewees to make goddamn breakfast?’ I don’t think so, but she said Paloma would fire her as a client if she said that,” my dad says.

“Paloma can suck it,” I say, and my dad gives me a high five. We’re united in our hatred for Paloma, my mother’s publicist. If we are actors in a sitcom come to life, she’s our director. Such is the power of Paloma that at last year’s Emmy party, she made our family wear coordinating beige outfits and pose on a red carpet in front of a wind machine, so if you google me, what pops up is a deranged version of a Kardashian Christmas card.

“My mother would wash your mouth out with soap if she heard the way you talk, Mr. Bellinger,” Shola says.

“A boy can dream,” my dad says.

Shola once told me, “Your dad is super hot. He talks like he knows what he’s doing in all the things, Chloe. All the things.”

I think about this a lot, in that strange way a random detail can get lodged in the brain. Not about my dad’s attractiveness or prowess, of course, which is gross and will never be mentioned again, but I wonder at the casual ease with which he moves through the world and convinces everyone he’s got this. That heady combination of white male privilege and substantial wealth that inspires restaurant hostesses to give him the best table, makes investors hand over their money, and generally forces the world to bend to his will.

Though I’ve inherited the white privilege and I guess, eventually, some of the money, I do not got this. On any front. If I were one day given my own fragrance line, it would be named, in that sexy breathy whisper of perfume commercials, Indecision.

“Shola, how many times have I told you to call me Richard?” my dad asks.

“Approximately eleventy billion,” she says.

“Call me Richard,” my dad says.

“Eleventy billion and one,” Shola says, and not for the first time, I wonder what she really thinks of my family. Weird seems too small, too limiting a word, like she’s intentionally being vague.

I might pick these two words instead: lovingly deranged.

“This one’s quick.” My father taps his nose and grins at Shola. “You should give some SAT tips to Chlo. God knows she could use all the help she can get.”

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