She was a senior. I was a sophomore. Seth Colby was a short, drum-playing junior who had shaggy blond hair and who’d been kicked out of band for having a joint behind his ear during a pep rally. He glowed with the fame of that scandal, and there were plenty of kids who longed to be part of his inner circle.

“Good stuff,” I said, trying to sound indifferent, even bored. “I suppose you’re just dying to tell me all about it.”

“What I’m dying to tell you is that Mom doesn’t give a shit what you do, so you ought to start doing what you want. This goody-two-shoes thing is embarrassing, if you want the truth. I don’t bring my friends over anymore because they’d just see this whacked-out ghost-lady, this sixteen-year-old dork, and this little Star Wars freak who’s, you know, kind of old to still be playing with dolls, and they look at me and say, literally, where’s the two-headed chicken?”

This was mean, but not entirely off the mark.

Try having a friend at school ask where your father was, and explaining that you thought he lived on north Tropical Trail but that you weren’t positive because you’d only seen his house once, from the backseat of a moving station wagon, and your mother had ignored the question Is that where Dad lives now?

Or try explaining why your mother had been pulled out of the Communion line during mass more than a few times and escorted to the back of the church by whichever off-duty priest had been assigned to keep an eye on her.

Or why your little brother, who was fourteen, taped aluminum foil over his bedroom windows (which faced the street) and spoke sometimes in a language of his own invention called Sub-Middle-Earth Glocken.

And just try explaining to anyone—your friends, your mother, your fire-breathing sister—what exactly it was that was happening to you.