“It’s worse for me if you do.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I can’t help it right now.”

He shrugs again—whatever—and just like that we’re finally at the school, pulling into the no-parking zone and leaving the car in front of the MORNINGSIDE MONTESSORI: WHERE PEACE RULES mosaic sign, the one we helped make one chilly late-October afternoon during the school’s annual Harvest Day, when Teddy still sat in the backseat and had long drummer hair and wore Led Zeppelin T-shirts and kissed me hello and goodbye without restraint or shame.

And then, as if we aren’t three minutes late for morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong, I take my hands off the wheel and touch his head, the one without a bird on it, and then his hair, pretending to fix it. To my astonishment he lets me and doesn’t pull away, and for a brief moment before we leave the car and race into the school where I know I will embarrass him terribly, we are who we used to be, before the world as we knew it changed.

Morning Meeting

In the school’s multipurpose multiage room, Mr. Noah’s voice, very community-theater-director, rises above the low roar of the hundred or so K-6 children burning through the unrefined-sugar highs of their organic breakfasts. As head of school, in layers of flowy cotton and wool and his man bun affixed to the top of his head with a single black lacquered chopstick, he moves through the crowd, which includes the handful of middle-schoolers—fewer than fifteen teens who have decided to stay for the school’s brand-new seventh and eighth grades instead of switching to a different private school or going back into the public school system. Passing them, he stops to play Kissinger to two boys from the lower school, probably seven years old, or eight, who are fighting over a fuzzy mallet in front of a big bronze disc suspended from the ceiling from what looks like macramé pulleys. There is pushing, shoving, and fierce fleece-hoodie pulling.

“Boys! Boys! You can’t fight over the peace gong! It defeats the whole purpose! We share here!” Mr. Noah separates the boys and then, after some whispered diplomacy and with all hands on the mallet, brings them back in. They tap the gong together.

I turn to roll my eyes at Teddy but he is no longer next to me, or right behind me, or wherever he was when we’d rushed from the car into the school. I scan the sea of small heads and hooded jackets, hoping to find him in a group of boys, yelling and laughing and doing something completely idiotic and annoying and un-Montessori-like, but by now I know better. He’s become a solitary child—neither academic nor athletic; neither popular nor universally loathed; no longer a tween, but barely a teen. It is an existential purgatory, not knowing who you are and who you will become. Even though I can’t see him I know that he is waiting somewhere on the periphery of the faux gymnasium for the unspeakable torture of Bring-Your-Parent-to-School Day to begin: alone, without a friend to confide in or roll his eyes to. My heart balls up like a fist in my chest. No wonder people day-drink.