“Ha,” said Rorie, my fourteen-year-old daughter. She’d claimed the window seat and had opened the meal I’d packed, dragging her spoon through a bowl of grains with the put-upon expression of someone who’d been served her one thousandth meal of prison gruel. With a repulsed grunt, she snapped shut the reusable container. “I’ve been giving this some thought, Mom, and I’ve invented a social media specifically for you.”

“Okay . . .”

“It’s called Antigram.”

“I don’t think I like where this is going.”

A sly smile. “You start out with followers—let’s say you have a thousand.”

“There’s no way I’d have a thousand follo—”

She cut me off, an imperious hand in the air. “Your goal is to get down to zero followers, which you do by disliking people’s posts. The more you dislike things, the more unfollowers you get.” She thrust up a fist. “Antigram!”

“Rorie. All I meant was it’s not good for your developing brain to spend too much time on a screen. That’s Parenting 101. If you don’t say that, I think you get arrested.”

“I have to spend time on screens. Since you’re always dragging me around the world, I don’t have the ability to forge relationships with real human beings like the other youth.”

We emerged above the clouds. Rorie’s hair, impaled in a stratospheric shaft of the last of the day’s sunlight, lightened from dark brown to a light brown, matching the smooth sheen of her face. She was right about the amount of disruption in her life, of course; during her short life, she’d lived in multiple cities on two continents.

“Anyone referring to themselves as ‘youth’ might as well have the word facetious tattooed on their forehead,” I said, and then had to suppress a smile as I saw Beau trying to spell facetious on his iPad to look it up. I took pity on him: “It means flippant or deliberately unserious.”

“What does flippant mean?”

“It means facetious,” I said. Rorie groaned but Beau offered a delighted smile.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “I’m going to try to be more flippant.”

Rorie resumed her study of the landscape visible from the plane’s window. Now that we’d departed Atlanta, the clouds had given way to clear skies, offering a view of the land below, which was, at the moment, indistinguishable from virtually any semi-urban area in the gloaming edge of night: a patchwork of headlights and glowing buildings and the road-lined edges of geometric neighborhoods. Rorie caught me looking over her shoulder and shifted to give me a better view.

“I thought you didn’t like looking out plane windows,” she said.

I tried to mask my surprise before Rorie could home in on it. “Why did you think that?”

“You always shut your eyes during takeoff and landing if you’re sitting by a window.”

I shrugged, hoping Rorie would lose interest. “Takeoff and landings aren’t my favorite.”