Besides, I was too embarrassed to talk to him anyway. He’d seen me seminaked. What did he think of me? He was probably used to seeing girls from the Hot List like Nina-M and Amber naked; all long and svelte and impossibly pretzel-thin.

But Jake proved hard to avoid at school, because he was absolutely everywhere. I spent the day ducking behind pillars and walking in the opposite direction, and at second break, I confined myself to an empty class at the end of the hall where I spent time doodling in my drawing book. But when the bell rang and I looked down at my book, I realized that I’d drawn what looked like the waves in Jake’s hair.

I had my first session with Dr. Stride that afternoon. My mother had sighed loudly and told me that although she had numerous wildly important things to do, she would look after Zac. She said this as if it was the biggest imposition in the world. As if she was doing me the greatest favor known to humanity. When I was growing up, my mom was the kind of mother who would rush to school and drop off a book, or my lunch, if I’d forgotten it. She was the kind of mom who drove me across town for extra art lessons. Everyone used to tell me what a great mom I had. How she was always there for me—for everyone.

That Barb is a saint, they declared when she swooped in and saved the school bake sale after one of the tables collapsed and all the cupcakes slid off and fell into a sticky pile on the floor.

How does she do it all? they asked when she took me to school, rushed off to do soup kitchen for the needy, defrosted the freezer, cooked supper, and still managed to help me with my biology project and organize my dad’s end-of-year office party.

But that was then, and this was now. And the mother of now was not a person I understood at all. On one hand, she acted like Zac was an imposition, but on the other, she’d uprooted our lives to put him in the best school money could buy. My mother was this basket of contradictions that didn’t seem to fit together quite right, much like the features of her face. Over the last few days I’d started to wonder if moving here had more to do with fulfilling her dream of becoming a luxury real estate mogul in Africa’s most expensive city than finding the right school for Zac. Could she be that selfish?

I drove down the main street of Clifton. It was glistening—pristine in the afternoon sun. It sparkled with cleanliness in a way that was almost unnatural, as if someone had run a disinfectant wipe across its surface. No germs. No dust. No dirt. Nothing to tarnish its appearance of perfection.