I felt like I had been summoned to the principal’s office—not that I really knew what that felt like, but I imagined it was something like this: a creeping sense of dread, of impending doom. I did not want to have to account for my sudden presence back home, or my tears. I did not want to explain to her all the ways in which I’d done my friends wrong.

“Take it to go,” my dad said, handing me a hunk of warm baguette. “You have to eat.”

Bread in hand, dogs in the lead, my mom and I headed off on the normal route, toward the college campus at the end of the road. Tabitha was the confident leader, with Buckets stopping to sniff every tree, getting himself tangled in the leash no fewer than three times at the end of the block. I took a bite of the baguette and chewed slowly—my dad had added some butter, a generous sprinkle of salt.

“This is really good,” I said, chewing.

“He’s been baking a lot,” she said. She adjusted the leashes and looked at me. “I haven’t seen that shirt in a while.”

“It was deep in the pajama drawer,” I said.

I saw her do the math—that I hadn’t brought anything home with me, which meant I’d left in a rush. There it was: that feeling of dread again. She had an extremely piercing brown-eyed gaze that she used, mercifully, in limited quantities, but sometimes she really let it fly, and in those moments, I was half-convinced that my mother was maybe just a hair magic. Like in spite of the very obvious truth that astrology was made-up, there was still something that she was able to see and interpret the way the rest of us were not. It was a gift, and it was unpleasant to have that gift turned on you.

Just let me finish my bread, I thought.

She seemed, somehow, to hear this.

“Well, it fits you nicely,” she said, and tugged on Buckets’s leash. “Come on, Buckets. We’re not going to smell every flower.”