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the following afternoon.
    When I come to collect Zoë, I am greeted by a red-faced, puffy-lipped Tennyson Silver-Katz, her pugnacious little sister, and their mom, who reminds me—twice—that it’ll be payback time at Wednesday’s ballet lesson.
    Zoë makes me a present of the little bud vase she’s made out of clay and decorated in her art class at school. She insists I buy a flower for it right away, so we stop at a Korean deli on the way home, where she becomes frustrated that all the single blooms are long-stemmed red roses. She wants hot pink. A ger-bera daisy meets her stringent criterion, so I buy the pre-wrapped bunch of three and we return home, playing Lines and Squares, a game I taught her from one of A. A. Milne’s volumes of poetry for kids.
    At dinner, Zoë and I discuss our respective days. Mia and I grew up doing that. In the Marsh household, we all went around the table sharing with one another what we did that day.
    You see, “Fine,” was an unacceptable answer to “How was your day?” No monosyllabic responses for the Marshes, unfortunately for Mia. With a dad who’s a poet laureate, iambic pentameter was more like it.
    When Mia and I didn’t want our parents to know what we’d been up to, we became very adept at making things up. We invented a secret signal, which would indicate that we were about to tell a straight-faced whopper, but as we grew older, we discovered that blackmail was a very useful tool. When sibling rivalry was in its fullest swing, and we couldn’t even trust each other, we would just lie outright and neither of us would know whether it was true or not. Our parents, idealists that they were, insisted on an environment where the channels of communication were open and free; but honestly, would Mia really admit

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    Leslie Carroll
    that after receiving a particularly miserable math grade she’d taken a nip of Sake from the bottle she kept hidden in her high-school locker? Would I dare share that I’d cut gym for the third time in two weeks to make out in the deserted science shed on the roof with tall, dark and handsome Neil Forlani, the first boy in my class to shave? I knew that science shed like I knew my own name. Better than I ever knew science, that’s for sure.
    Of course there came a time when Mia and I began to wonder if our parents invented tales from time to time as well.
    Tonight, Zoë was going first. I used to encourage her to go first all the time, saying the youngest had to go first, (which is how we did it when I was growing up), but she decided that wasn’t fair (Why didn’t I ever think of that?), so now we take turns.
    “Mrs. Hairpin gave me a note for you,” she tells me, then jumps up from the table to hunt for it at the bottom of her yellow knapsack. “You’re gonna have to be class parent sometimes.
    You get assigned it. Everybody has to.” She thrusts the note into my hands.
    I open the envelope to read a form letter. It could have been worse. There could be a personal note written at the bottom like my mom used to get from Mrs. “Hairpin.” There was always some sort of second-grade infraction of which I was invariably guilty. Talking while on line for the cafeteria. Whispering in class. Passing notes during math. Giggling. Existing.
    I sigh, relieved. “So are you getting along any better with Mrs.
    Hennepin?” I resist using one of the students’ nicknames aloud, figuring I’d be setting a bad example. When I was in her class, the woman had been called “Mrs. Henny Penny,” “Mrs. Hairpin,”
    “Mrs. Hatpin,” “Mrs. Henne-face”—and kids who knew about turtles called her “Mrs. Terrapin”—though nothing too awful could really be done with her last name. At least we hadn’t thought of it yet. Not so for poor Mrs. Lipschitz in fourth grade.
    And Mr. Dong, who taught chemistry in the Upper School.

    PLAY DATES
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    “She still hates me.” Zoë shakes her head emphatically. “And yesterday she called me Claire by