We were in the middle of Hart to Hart—all four of us—when my mother turned to Karen and said, “I’d like it if you’d at least tell me about the major events going on in your life.” They were sitting at opposite ends of the couch. I was in the recliner on Karen’s side and Frankie was on the floor in front of the coffee table, wrapped head to toe in a bedsheet with only his face showing.

Karen looked across the couch and said, “Hart to Hart. It’s a major event in my life.”

“I don’t appreciate sarcasm,” my mother said.

“So?”

“If you’ve been suspended, I’d like to learn it from you, not from some school secretary.”

Karen made a halfhearted attempt at swallowing a laugh. “They just called you about that?”

“This is why you’ve been sleeping late,” my mother said. “This is why you haven’t had any homework, why you’ve been staying out till two A.M.—”

“Mother,” Karen said, shaking her head, “that suspension is over. That was last week. This week I’m not going because Seth got suspended again and I’m his girlfriend.”

Frankie began to rock back and forth: a metronome wrapped in swaddling clothes.

“I don’t even know who Seth is,” my mother said. “You could meet me halfway, you know, just give me the highlights. Is that too much to ask?”

“Seth Colby,” Karen snapped, as if the name should have impressed my mother. “You want the highlights? I hate school, I love Seth, he’s screwing me, and it’s great. How’s that?”

I had the recliner’s footrest up and felt as if I were floating—not free of all this, but a part of it, drifting alongside the rest of them, like a bona fide member of the ragtag fleet of spaceships following the battlestar Galactica in the mural taped to Frankie’s ceiling. I felt a pain when I swallowed: the spot Wes Markham had battered as he held on to my head, his hands stretching from my jaw hinge to the top of my spine. There was an ache in my jaw and a sour fold in my stomach. My mother’s daunted face was just one more item adrift. “I don’t want to hear that,” she said. “I don’t want to hear that at all.”

“Well, then, you shouldn’t have asked.”

“I have to ask,” my mother shot back, raising her voice. “I’m your parent. I’m the one who’s here.”

“Bok, bok, bok, braaack!” Karen darted her head forward and flapped her elbows like a chicken.