“Ha!” She heard someone laugh in the other room. Who had it been?

“Oh, okay, she got one! Nice! Go, Marianne!” She recognized the voice of Aunt Kendi.

“She’s rocking it,” Marianne heard Lillian say.

She meandered back toward the room to grab the glasses.

Her dad sat beaming. Next to him, her mom watched quietly.

“Marianne kinda has an Elle Woods thing going on,” Uncle Sean said.

“Who’s that?” Suri asked.

“From a movie. This airhead type—Valley girl, really pretty—who ends up going to Harvard Law School,” Uncle Sean explained to his daughter.

“Oh. Ha!” Suri laughed, but Marianne was sure Suri didn’t understand what he meant.

“It’s an old movie called Legally Blonde,” Lillian told the girls. “And she’s the best lawyer in the law school.”

Aunt Kendi started listing all the movies she liked with that actress. Marianne googled the woman. Marianne did look a little bit like her, actually, but way less thin and without the platinum hair. Why were movie stars all so skinny?

Anyway, she didn’t think Uncle Sean meant that Marianne looked like her.

“Shh, shh, the end is great. It’s coming,” her dad said.

“And then pie?” her mom checked in with the crowd, but no one answered.

Marianne had cleared the whole table and couldn’t find another job. She watched the team tie. She could see how the Ermines were working as one, like one mind, while Remington wore their previous arguments all over them. She’d helped the team that day, she saw. She really had.

Her dad didn’t know about that part.

And then she hit the buzzer and said with total calm and confidence, “The big bang theory!” and the whole room on the video clapped and the whole room before her clapped, too, and Marianne remembered Vi turning to her and saying, “I knew you could do it!,” and then Uncle Sean said, “This is great news. Honestly, I was getting kind of worried for a while there that Marianne would go down the MRS-degree route, but things are really looking up.” He laughed at whatever joke he’d just made.

“Sean, shut up,” her mom said, her body still and her voice ice-cold.

“Hey, hey—” her dad intervened.

And Uncle Joseph interjected, “Guys, come on…” while Aunt Kendi hurried the girls away by telling them she forgot to grab their activity books from the car.

Meanwhile, Marianne googled MRS degree on her phone.

An MRS degree was a commonly used term in the mid-twentieth century and for some time after to refer to a woman attending college solely in order to find a potential husband.

That explained why her mom was berating Uncle Sean by saying, “Are you seriously bringing the 1950s into my home? With our daughters around? What are you thinking? Are you really that fatuous?”

“I was making a stupid joke!” he said. “The 1950s thing was the joke! Because it’s absurd! Get it?”

“My daughter”—her mom stepped forward toward him, finger pointed at his chest, and Marianne wondered for a minute if they’d have a fistfight because she’d never seen her so ferocious—“is sweet and thoughtful and funny and—”