“What? Ha, my god. Your mind. No, honey, I don’t think so. I mean, this is Storytellers, right? He would have mentioned that. This is his chance.”

“He is, I think,” I said.

“He’s not. Not to me.”

“And that girl was sixteen. The one in the leotard. That’s creepy.”

“Well, it was the seventies.”

“It wasn’t creepy back then?”

“Well . . . no, it was. Honey, I love that song. I’m letting you go to Memphis. Don’t make me regret that.”

“Okay, okay, sorry,” I said.

“Here’s the thing, sweetie. If you love something, you can’t think too much about what went into making it or the circumstances around it. You just have to, I don’t know, love the thing as it is. And then it’s just for you, right?”

“That’s really philosophical,” I offered. I don’t know why I said this all the time, that things that were just slightly confusing were philosophical. Also, I want to say that in college or in grad school, I never took a single philosophy class. But I still say this sometimes when I get anxious about a thing I don’t understand.

“Well, your mom is pretty smart,” she told me, smiling. “Now please shut up. This next song is about a guy he knew who got killed trying to rob a place, and I swear to god, if you try to mess this up for me—”

“Okay,” I told her. I kissed her cheek. “Thank you, Mom.”

“You’re welcome, sweetie,” she said, and she let her mind settle back into something that would make her happy.

AND SO WE LEFT FOR MEMPHIS THE VERY NEXT DAY, JUST ME and Zeke, the car loaded down with Mountain Dew and Golden Flake chips and three boxes of Sugar Babies. Zeke played a cassette tape of Three 6 Mafia, because they were from Memphis, and, honestly, when I heard those horror movie pianos, I was like, “Oh, this feels like our poster.” And there was all this weird imagery and devil-worship stuff, which I didn’t know rap cared about, but then they started saying some really explicit stuff about the female body, and both Zeke and I got real red, and I put in Guided by Voices, and we listened to Robert Pollard sing. And I thought, Yes yes yes yes yes. To be a teenager, it takes very little to think that someone else might actually know who you are, even as you spend all your time thinking that no one understands you. It’s such a lovely feeling.