Last year, we got to be in the audience. It was very dramatic. A girl said her first sentence three times and then ran off the stage crying. Someone’s mother stood up and shouted, “Moishy, you’re not enunciating, start again!” Another girl spoke with what my mother calls “poise” in a way that seemed otherworldly to me. The judges, of which my mother was one, chose her as the winner.

“How about something sports related?” suggests Shmuel Yosef. “Like, ‘Everything I Know About the World I Know from Snooker’?”

My mother rolls her eyes.

“What’s snooker?” Honey, Max, and I say at the same time.

“It’s like pool,” Shmuel Yosef says, as if that should clear things up. My mother’s eyeballs roll all the way into her head and might require a search party to retrieve them.

“With the eight ball and the cues,” my dad supplies, joining my mom in the doorway. Shmuel Yosef mimes something unintelligible. “But, actually,” my dad says, “it’s a good idea—just pick your favorite sport—hockey, baseball … badminton.” My dad winks.

“That could be good for you, Sugaree,” my aunt says, looking adoringly at Shmuel Yosef.

“Yeah, that’s not bad,” agrees Honey.

“Yes,” my mom interjects. “But—not to be glib—it’s the isms that always win. You know, like—” She pauses as she glances at Aunty Steph and Shmuel Yosef looking deep into each other’s eyes and flashes a not-so-subtle face at my father. She cannot handle what she calls the “goo-goo eyes.” Me and Honey look at each other and smirk.

“What’s so funny?” Max says.

“Oh, your mommy, she’s just so silly,” my dad says with a straight face.

“She is?” Max says, bewildered.

“Jonathan, even Max knows I am the least silly person alive!” my mother says indignantly, leaning over to whack my father’s arm. “And in all seriousness, Milla, you should do feminism for your speech. I can help you with it!”

“One year, this girl in my class did her speech on how to peel an orange,” Aunty Steph says, turning away from Shmuel Yosef’s face and toward the rest of us. “It was super cool.”

An image of a mandarin orange pops into my head and how my grandfather in Israel peels it in one long curling strip. My mother refuses to peel oranges with her bare fingers and wears latex gloves because she hates when her hands smell like oranges. Ezra Wine cuts the peel in big slabs with a knife and then carefully pushes the glistening sections out of their skin and into a salad. I wonder if you could tell something about a person from the way they peel an orange. Suddenly, I wish Shabbat was over so I can run up to my room, turn on the computer, and start writing my speech already.

I have my topic.

The rest of the afternoon, we hang out with Aunty Steph and Shmuel Yosef in the den, and I’m sure we talk about lots of interesting things, but I have no idea what they are because all I am doing is writing my speech inside my head. And thinking of good lines and what the order of everything should be.