Tuesday of the next week, you’re driving home from work and Maura is with you, which means that technically you’re driving her home from a school, the sun on both of your heads and the crossing guard smiling at you like you’re her mother. Maura the tenth is talkative, and that’s how you learn your mother was wrong about something. Because Maura’s fourteen and since you’re driving her home from school she’s talking about school and she starts talking about being bullied. She’s really specific about it too, she’s got this look like she’s trying to be casual but she wants you to be worried. You hate that look because you know that’s something you still do, where you’ll say something like it’s nothing, but you know it’s bad, and what you really want is for someone to say that it’s bad, to say that it’s awful. But Maura tilts her head like she’s talking out the window, and says that Ashley in her chemistry class called her a “saggy cunt.”

You stare at her.

“I’m just repeating it,” she says, folding her arms sullenly across her chest. Like you’re upset about her language. The thing is you don’t remember Ashley from your chemistry class but you’re pretty sure if someone had called you a saggy cunt when you were fourteen, or ever, you’d remember. It’s hard to ask Maura questions because at this age you were kind of a bitch but eventually you realize that your mother thought you were unhappy when you were fourteen because you were being bullied.

“Do you remember Mr. Shelbert?” you ask. She doesn’t, though, you can already tell. Your heart is doing something lovely in your chest, achieving liftoff. Your heart is singing.

When you were fourteen, a man who was sort of a neighbor, not on your street but two blocks from your street, burned down his house with his family inside. His family was a woman and a little girl. You cannot believe your mother forgot this. Or maybe just thought that it did not sink into you, even though she always called you a sensitive child. You’d never met the man, but you imagined that you met him. You assigned him faces and put him in crowds, like the devil.