At the same time, my parents’ friends started spending a lot more time at our house. I wondered how they made friends so easily when I always felt like I never knew what to say to people. Their new friends had an odd quality, something I might have complained about to my mother if I could have named it. It was big, like generosity, except the opposite. They all seemed to want something from me. They were so eager to make me smile that I had no choice—forcing giggles at their stupid coin tricks and dumb jokes. These people smelled odd. Acrid, oily. They had greasy skin and angry zits, mouths vandalized with gaps and patches of metal, orange and black clinging to their teeth like the mold and mildew on our bathroom grout, or sludgy brown teeth that looked like they hadn’t been inserted right and were slipping out. I couldn’t say I hated them because they were ugly, so I held my breath and played along. They’d give me hard pieces of bubble gum and listen so intently to the Bazooka Joe comics, laugh so hard at these jokes that were lost on me, but I had to laugh too. It was like I was quenching something in them. They scratched instant-win lotto tickets and sometimes won a dollar. They liked to stay up late. I remember how I pressed my face into my pillow, waiting for them to pass out and the noise to clear and the sun to come up and send them hiding.

Lolly was around a lot more then too, so it must have been while we were living in Boston. She’d come sometimes on the weekends. There was a mother-daughter softball game and Lolly took me, and she bought ice cream for everyone, and even my friends who’d known me through elementary school seemed happy to think of her as my mom. It made me feel wrong, being there with her instead of my mother, and I put my ice cream in a bush when no one was looking. She took me to the award dinner for an essay contest I’d entered. I won third prize. My parents couldn’t come for some reason. Maybe the hotel was too far away and they didn’t have a car.

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