I imagine my daughter sitting behind a desk, one of that kind that has the cubby under the seat where books and bright Hello Kitty pencil cases and, later, secret notes spelling Do you like Tommy? I think Tommy likes you! would hide. Formica-laminated writing surfaces where you scratched hearts and initials, or where you traced the carvings of some other boy or girl in some other year, wondering if BL ever married KT or if Mr. Pondergrass the algebra teacher really was a pig-monster with eye boogers. Black-and-white composition books, later thinner and bluer when the writing assignments shifted from “What I Did During Summer Vacation” to “Compare and Contrast Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth.” All those things, simple and ordinary, that we assumed we would never lose.

What do they study now, our girls? A bit of addition and subtraction, telling time, making change. Counting, of course. They would learn counting first. All the way up to one hundred.

When Sonia entered first grade this past fall, the school held an open house. Patrick and I went, along with the rest of the parents. I never saw the announcement that was sent to the fathers—or grandfathers, in the event one of the girls was a Heather with two mommies. Of course, there aren’t any two-mommy or two-daddy families anymore; the children of same-sex partnerships have all been moved to live with their closest male relative—an uncle, a grandfather, an older brother—until the biological parent remarries in the proper way. Funny, with all the talk before of conversion therapy and curing homosexuality, no one ever thought of the foolproof way of getting gays in line: take away their kids.

I suspect attendance at the open house that night was mandatory, although Patrick didn’t say so, only urged me to go check out the facilities, which were supposed to be state-of-the-art.

“State-of-the-art what?” I said, checking my counter before speaking.

An hour later, we found out.

There were still classrooms, complete with desks and projection screens. The bulletin boards were wallpapered with drawings: a family picnicking here, a man in a suit holding a briefcase there, a woman wearing a straw hat and planting a bed of purple flowers in another corner. Children on a school bus, girls playing with dolls, boys arranged in a baseball triangle. I didn’t see any books, but, of course, I hadn’t expected to.

We didn’t spend much time in the classrooms before teachers, each one wearing a small blue P pin on his collar, marched us along the corridors for the tour.