“Will you shake it, Mom? Super fast?”

“Sure, I will. But it’s not going to change.”

Cami waited while Izabel shook it as fast as she could over her head.

“See?” Izabel said.

“Someone at school said they did.”

“Maybe they were talking about how Pokémon evolve?”

“Yeah!” Cami said.

“But the cards don’t change.”

“Oh,” Cami said, her face fallen.

“Let’s go to the mall, okay? And we can look up what Scatterbug evolves into in the car?”

“Can we look it up first and then go to the mall?”

“Yeah,” Izabel said. She brought it up on her tablet. Scatterbug evolved into Spewpa, which evolved into Vivillon.

“Vivillon is super pretty,” Cami said.

“I really like Scatterbug. I think Scatterbug is probably the best card ever.”

“It’s not even evolved!”

“I know. But that’s how I feel.” Izabel smiled at her.

Cami was on the verge of understanding what Izabel was doing—this sort of exaggerated falsity, about a trivial thing, to cheer a child—but only on the verge.

At the mall, they got a snack. Near them, on the wall, were two posters. One was for a community theater group that was holding auditions for The Music Man. Izabel wanted to pull it off the wall and show it to Opa, like a kind of proof of how unconcerned everyone was. The other was a new monster poster—an Oni this time, one horn coming out of its head, and wearing a tiger’s pelt over its penis, if a penis was even what it had between its giant legs.

“Is that the Oni that Momotarō defeated?” Cami asked.

“I don’t know,” Izabel said. But for the first time, Izabel didn’t resent the image, and its intrusion into the public spaces of her life. She thought that, maybe, the artist wasn’t trying to scare people, but only trying to understand, to understand the monstrous and the grotesque, the aberrant and the inexplicable.

Izabel played a Match 3 game on her tablet while Cami slowly ate a banana. The ads that came up during this game were for playing slots. And the slots were Pompeii-themed. To get a jackpot, you matched erupting volcanoes. Izabel was part of one catastrophic event mocking another.

“Mom!” Cami said.

“Yes!” Izabel said.

“If I were a snake Pokémon, my snake attack would be very much hidden venomous bigger.”

“Wow, that’s a cool attack.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you done with that banana?”

“Yeah,” Cami said, and she put the end of the banana in Izabel’s hand. It was warm, and Izabel had to pretend it didn’t disgust her, and then she had to decide whether to eat it or throw it away.

Izabel put it in her mouth and immediately regretted it. Cami was already playing a game with her hands, so Izabel spat the banana back out into a napkin.