Our family court date rolled around, and I was surprised to see that Lolly was there waiting for us. She was early; my parents were forty minutes late. We hugged, and she held me like I’d survived some kind of natural disaster. After the moment passed, though, we had nothing to say to each other. I hadn’t really grown since she’d last seen me two years earlier, and she knew it was pointless to ask me about school, so the two go-to subjects for adult-child conversation were DOA. Waiting on the hard bench outside the courtroom, I broke the ice. I took out the book I was reading and told her about it. She’d read it when it came out in the seventies, and asked if I’d gotten to her favorite part, where the narrator freaks out her parents by dismembering the blond baby doll they got her for Christmas. I said I had, and that I loved that part, too. I wanted her to tell me what the funny names of the three prostitutes meant (“China” and “Poland” I could probably have figured out on my own, but “the Maginot Line” confounded my best theories). But she said she didn’t know; she just reads for pleasure. I knew I was missing something in that statement—I mean, why else do people read novels?—but I didn’t push it, and she seemed happy to sit quietly after that.

Lolly had prepared this stack of research and evidence organized in a neat new folder, bound with elastic and labeled with different-colored tabs and Post-its. Everything she needed, and not a page more. She’d copied transcripts of cases from the past ten years that had any similarity to ours, highlighted passages, composed transitions so one followed another until they formed an airtight case for family intervention instead of making me a super-temporary ward of the state, since I wouldn’t be a minor for too much longer. The judge didn’t even seem bored while she was talking, and actually sat up straight when she told him how much the county would save if they gave her custody instead of keeping me locked up in the prison for kids with bad taste in parents. Everyone’s a winner.