Would I have called my grandparents collect if Kaja hadn’t dumped me for monogram Jenny? If I hadn’t accused Kaja of being a bad daughter and she hadn’t accused me of being a worse one? If Kaja hadn’t called me a blue-eyed devil? If I hadn’t asked her what that even meant, since she and Jenny Dufresne were the ones with blue eyes? If she hadn’t told me to leave and never come back? Probably. Sometimes after fighting with Lillian or while smoking beside a dirty brick wall, I could feel myself turning into what had scared my five-year-old self the day I moved to Park Slope and walked into that Seventh Avenue candy store. In some deep animal part of me, I knew if I didn’t stop that transformation, I’d be uprooting something basic and important that wouldn’t grow back. Cue my grandparents’ mothballed offer popping out of the mental box I’d stuck it in. I began picturing myself inside my Cleveland bedroom with its pale green carpet and matching curtains or coming home to the smell of Grandma’s pot roast at the end of the afternoon, until not living in Cleveland started feeling like an extra punishment I’d inflicted on myself on top of all my other punishments, earned and otherwise.

In the wake of the Cleveland embargo, I treated Lillian like she was invisible. Mornings, I’d maneuver past her from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen and out the door. I’d been smoking at school long enough to earn a place among the other smokers: afternoons, they hung around a playground whose wooden benches had been burned and whose swings had been slashed, pairs of us taking turns going into the Bohack to knock over grocery displays or switch up labels in the produce section. I liked the smokers because the older ones treated me like a kid sister, and because the Stone Foxes left them alone. Plus, despite growing local tensions since the rumble between whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans at the high school on Seventh Avenue, the JHS 23 smokers didn’t care what color you were as long as you were willing to share, which was very Quaker of them.

When I called to apologize for my behavior, Grete informed me that Kaja had gone to live with her father full-time. In the imaginary conversations I’d been having with Kaja since our fight, I’d already told her about Lillian quashing my plan to leave Brooklyn, so real Kaja’s escape to Harlem made it easy to get imaginary Kaja to agree that I was the winner in our long-running worst-mother contest. Competitive though I was, this was not a victory I celebrated. Where Kaja’s superior mother had bowed to her wishes, my inferior one had remained unyielding: in losing, Kaja had won. The evening of Lillian’s gallery show on Grove Street, I pretended not to notice her putting on her one nice dress, ignored her requests for help with her hair, and feigned absorption in a magazine as she walked out the door.