To continue in this nagging vein, you know they won’t be sending people to Earth unless they have some special ability. (I can picture myself as a school counselor, shaking my finger at you, but it’s true.) Even if it’s not an academic specialty, it’s probably going to be something they measure through tests—and, unfortunately, the only way you’ll get better at test-taking is practice.

To get back to the point, don’t forget that when Mother was your age she was pregnant with me. I think she’s always resented losing a few precious years of childhood. (Though as you well know, this is an illusion people come up with when they get old and their memories start to go. Being a kid isn’t so much fun while you’re actually being one.)

I’ll plead your case with her, not because I think you’re right, but because you’re old enough to make the decision.

The work here is still interesting, though some of the people I have to deal with are walking hemorrhoids. Never a dull moment. Beeper woke me up at five-thirty this morning because a nine o’clock meeting had been moved to ten. Still trying to figure that one out.

Yesterday we had something new. A lawsuit. A middle-aged citizen who spends all of his free time building muscles so he won’t look so middle-aged (it doesn’t work) had an accident. He was working out on the parallel bars and one of them hadn’t been properly tightened. He did some sort of impressive flip that turned into a crash. He missed the mat and hit the floor face-first; it fractured his neck.

So we had to go down to the hospital with an arbitration team, the poor victim looking all pathetic with his plastic brace and kind of wall-eyed with pain drugs. Emily Martino didn’t help any—she’s the woman in charge of the gymnastic equipment, and technically responsible. She got all teary and wanted to give the guy everything. Well, hell. I work out on those bars, too, but I have the sense to always have someone spotting for me. If it had happened to me, I wouldn’t have gotten a broken neck. I would just have felt embarrassed at being stupid enough not to check out the goddamned equipment before I put my weight on it! But try to tell that to arbitrators. They’re always advocates for the individual, against “the system.” If this is a system, we’re all in trouble.

So they fined the department $250 and Emily $250, to go into an escrow account that Mr. Muscles can use whenever he has a yen for chocolate cake or weird sex. It’s actually five hundred bucks from the department, with Emily kicking over half of her hourly pay for the next 167 hours. We really can’t spare it.