“I need to take the car,” I continue, shoveling another forkful of curry down my hole.

She frowns.

I clamp down on the frustration lurking nanometers under the surface.

“I can drive you,” she says.

“I don’t need you to,” I say. “It’s not a big deal. It’s not very far. And I might want to go somewhere with my friend Zoe afterward.”

I see the calculations running in the back of her brain, the cogs and wheels turning ever more rapidly as they determine every possible catastrophe that could result from letting me out of the house behind the controls of a 2,500-pound piece of machinery she’s barely let me touch.

“But what if —”

“What could possibly happen between here and school?” I cut her off in exasperation. “It’s like two miles.”

“A lot of things could happen!” Her voice rises. “Most accidents occur within one mile of home! Did you know that?”

I recognize the look in her eyes. It’s the one she gets before going into full rampage mode — the kind where the entire china cabinet gets cleaned out and rearranged, or the living-room carpet vacuumed until the lines are just so, or something else equally pointless and loud.

“No, a lot of things can’t happen. I will drive safely to the high school, I will see the play, and I will spend time with my friend. I want to be normal. Why can’t you let me have that?” I ask, proud of how steady my voice stays.

“You’re not an experienced enough driver to go off alone in the car at night,” she says. She taps the butt end of her fork on the table. One, two, three, four. Each tap crashes through my eardrums with the force of a battering ram.

“Whose fault is that?” I throw up my hands. “I’ve had my license for over a year. I got a perfect score on my driving test, no thanks to you.” I ought to stop there, but I don’t. “Thank goodness for Will’s parents, who took me out to practice driving, and Will’s mom, who drove us to the DMV on his birthday — almost six months after mine!” Any semblance of control I had over my feelings is gone.

“Will’s parents let you drive?” Her face is ashen.

“Didn’t you stop to wonder when you signed my driver’s license application how I got fifty hours of practice behind the wheel after driver’s ed?” I explode. “Did you even know I needed to log fifty more hours to apply for the license?”

“I knew they were taking you to the DMV, but you didn’t tell me they let you drive,” she says, her voice sharper. “I would have taken you myself.”