After Lucy left to go to her study, Millie took a few minutes to just look at me. Then she stood and went to the kitchen. I followed. Then she looked at me some more, and standing next to a giant bag of cat food that already had a hole in the bottom, she drilled her lesbian laser beams into my brain. Searching. Assessing. Debating. Judging.

“Please say something,” I cracked, dropping my head back.

“Say something?” Millie mused. “Anything? Why pizza? Why on the first day? That kind of thing?”

“I’m sorry,” I moaned. “I’m sorry I hit Tanner with pizza and then it started a whole pizza fight.”

“Yeah, the problem with that is that it sounds funny,” Millie said, kicking a stray pebble of cat food across the floor, to Bjorn’s delight. “But it’s not really funny.”

“No.”

“You know, when you were a kid, your doing this sort of thing was admittedly kind of amusing to me,” she said, walking back over to the couch and flopping down. Monty promptly joined her. “And I thought it was good you were standing up for yourself because I knew you were going to have to do that. Probably your whole life, for some reasons that are obvious and many reasons that are not.”

“Okay.” I sat on the coffee table as Bjorn plopped down and rolled over to show us a belly that suggested he’d been breaking into the cat food on the regular.

“Can you tell me exactly what happened?” Millie asked.

Monty picked up her head from Millie’s lap and raised her dog eyebrow at me. Like she knew. Golden retrievers always know.

Damn their adorable dog faces.

“That kid, Tanner, said something shitty.” I frowned. “It wasn’t. . .I just. . .I couldn’t just not do anything, so I did a shitty thing, okay?”

“So two. . .crappy things? How’s that working for you?”

“I don’t think they’re equal,” I countered. “If someone says something hateful, that’s not the same as a pizza in the face.”

“I think it’s hard to say what is what, especially when you weren’t exactly in control of your actions. Right?”

“You don’t know what kids here are like.”

“Oh yeah, I do,” Millie rubbed Monty’s ears between her fingers. “Believe that, kid. I do know exactly what they are like.”

“Well, then if you know, you know how crappy it is, and you know how bad it can be.”

The thing about Millie is, she’s stealth. She’s observant. She’s always right in this way I find really annoying.

“Well, given how bad it is,” Millie noted, “it’s a good thing you dealt with it in a way that will make everything better for you, and for your mom.”