I told her I didn’t want to talk to Aaron. I didn’t want to talk about any of it. I settled in as best I could in my old bedroom. But a couple of days later, my mom and my sister took me out to dinner so they could gang up on me. Anita was six years older than me. My mom would swear up and down that she didn’t play favorites, but Anita was just easier for her. She didn’t have a learning disability or attention deficit disorder or whatever it was that kept me in low-grade trouble all through my school years. Anita applied herself, my mom said, like that was something I knew how to do and was willfully refusing to. Anita had put together enough scholarships and loans to get through Sonoma State. She’d gotten her degree in art education, and she taught kids in disadvantaged schools how to make compositions out of toothpicks and glue and tissue paper and other low-cost supplies.

She got married, of course, and her husband was kind of a jerk, but she seemed okay with him. She’d picked out the names for her two kids years before: Sailor Johanna and Raymie Cole. Since my mom was who she was, she still worried and fretted about Anita, but not in the global ways she worried about me. Anita’s life was on track. Mine was missing a wheel and running on fumes.

The dinner was billed as a treat for me, something to cheer me up and distract me from my personal setbacks and betrayals. I was pretty sure it was going to involve some effort at reeducation. We went to a restaurant that featured oversized salads and sandwiches, also drinks served in fishbowl glasses. I ordered a strawberry margarita. It didn’t taste like much of anything, but it gave me something I could occupy myself with.

My mom knew what had happened at the party, in a general way, and that meant Anita knew, too. They were both being super nice to me. Was I comfortable? Would I like a fried onion blossom? Anything?

“How are the kids?” I asked Anita. You could always get her talking about them.

“They’re great. Well, Raymie had pink eye last week, but the rest of us didn’t get it. Sailor starts Teeny Ballereenies this weekend.”

“Take lots of pictures,” my mom said. She looked pretty tonight, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, like a girl’s. She wore little pearl earrings and a white linen blouse. I was still wearing Jonathan’s sweatshirt.

“So cute,” I said, chiming in. They really were cute kids. I hoped I’d still like them when they got older.