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Mexico?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œRemember what Bruce told me? In the restaurant?”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œHe really hasn’t come back yet?” she asks.
    We’re having this conversation while staring at a suit of armor. I realize that my life feels like this.
Armor for Use in the Tilt.
    Life is a joust. Recently, I’ve been unhorsed. And yet I don’t feel a thing.
    â€œDoesn’t call. Doesn’t send letters.” I hold back on telling her I have his phone number.
    â€œIt was my fault,” she says.
    â€œI doubt that. I don’t think it was my fault.”
    â€œYou probably blocked it out. It was bad.”
    â€œWhat are you? Some sort of amateur psychologist?”
    â€œI’m ten. I’m not stupid,” she says.
    Here’s what I think. I think we’re really smart when we’re young. Ten-year-old Sarah is smarter than I am because I’m six years older. Twenty-three-year-old Sarah is dumber than me because I’m sixteen. Someone somewhere was way older and richer and dumber than all of us and paid forty-five million dollars for a bunch of dots. I think this kind of smart isn’t something they can measure with tests. I think it’s like being psychic or being holy. If I could be anyone for the rest of my life, I would be a little kid.

Breakfast
    When I get home from the art museum, Mom is awake and eating breakfast. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.
    â€œYou’re going to get expelled,” she says.
    â€œOkay,” I say. Expulsion is a buzz when she says it. My heart races and I taste adrenaline. I used to feel that way when I drew something cool. Excited for the next stroke of the pencil and simultaneously terrified that the next stroke could ruin what I’d already done.
    â€œDid something happen?” she asks. “At school?”
    â€œNothing ever really happens.”
    â€œYou can’t go to college if you don’t have a diploma.”
    â€œPicasso didn’t have a diploma.”
    â€œGood for him,” she says. “You can’t drop out of high school at sixteen.”
    She looks tired. She always looks tired. Being an ER vampire-shift nurse does this to a person. Some days she looks more than tired. That usually means something gruesome happened.
    â€œDid you have a hard night?”
    â€œAccident on the expressway,” she says. “It was ugly.”
    â€œDid anyone die?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” I say.
    â€œDon’t ever drive like an asshole, Sarah. Ninety percent of accidents are because someone was being an asshole.”
    â€œI promise I won’t drive like an asshole.”
    â€œGood.”
    We’re Center City people. We don’t even have a car.
    Mom goes to pour another cup of coffee. I stand there trying to remember the ten-year-old me who watched her do this four or five nights a week. Always over the weekend. I try to figure out why she chose weekends when it was the only time I was home all day.
    â€œDo you remember when I was ten?”
    She stirs in three sugars. “I remember some things.”
    â€œRemember Mexico?”
    She stops stirring her coffee and stares at the countertop and lets the question float above us for a second too long. “You got such a sunburn on the last day,” she says.
    â€œI forgot to put lotion on,” I say.
    She sits back down. “I always felt bad for that. I should have made sure you were covered up.”
    â€œIt healed,” I say, thinking of my thick skin.
    â€œStill.”
    â€œThat’s when we lost Bruce,” I say.
    â€œWe didn’t lose Bruce.”
    â€œI mean, that’s when he left. After that.”
    â€œWas it?” she asks. I want to call her out on playing stupid. How does a mother forget the last time she saw her own son? Maybe he’s an amputated ghost limb that still itches—but it’s not like a person