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and mother ten years ago at the kitchen counter, my mother spreading stone-ground mustard on wheat bread, my father singing with the bread knife to his lips, me in baggy green jeans shouting, “Make me a turkey sandwich, please!” and my father tapping me on the head, saying, “Poof! You’re a turkey sandwich!”
    I ran down the stairs, but by the time I walked into the kitchen, my father was out the door. I looked at the clean table and the orange bowl in the sink and my throat went dry. He was gone. Not even a crumb left on the floor. And when my father was gone, sometimes he didn’t come back for days. Sometimes he went on business trips to California. Sometimes he went to Europe. Sometimes he just went places and I didn’t know where, and I wouldn’t even know he was away on a trip until I woke up at eight in the morning fully rested.
    My father’s blazer was hanging on the back of one of the chairs. I grabbed the jacket and ran out the front door as fast as I could. “Dad!” I shouted, but his black car was already at the end of the street. I ran after the car, waved my hands, screaming his name, but he didn’t hear me, and I wondered afterward if I even shouted it at all.
    My mother stood in the frame of the wide-open door with a glass of orange juice waiting for me to return.
    “What?” I said, mortified.
    “Emily,” my mother said, frowning. “Why don’t you stop worrying about your father, okay?”
    I threw the jacket back on the kitchen chair, but it slid and fell to the tile. I had no idea what she meant, but she put her hand on my head and said, “Good girl.”
    “If Annie the Bird or Bear was an amoeba,” Richard said to a bunch of the Other Girls, “I bet she wouldn’t even reproduce with herself asexually, she’s that ugly.”
    “Richard!” Ms. Nailer yelled, finally hearing us, or finally recognizing us, turning away from the chalkboard to look at Richard, and then Annie, and then Richard again. Her white bra was visible through her shirt. She spilled her coffee on the desk, stepped backward, got chalk on her ass, and then laughed like it was an accomplishment that something finally touched her ass. She wasn’t a disciplinarian by nature. Ms. Nailer’s presence in the room offered no more protection than a fruit fly; she just buzzed from one shoulder to the next. Her interests were elsewhere, and she always reminded us that she was only a high school biology teacher as a last resort. She had been in the seventh year of her Ph.D. in body history when her funding ran out.
    “This is high school, kids,” Ms. Nailer said, wiping the coffee off her desk with her hand.
    I stood hopeful with my banana, waiting for Ms. Nailer to slap us across the faces if that was what it took to put an end to all this misery, to save us from the horrors of each other, from Richard. Richard was constantly taunting Annie the Bird or Bear, created a comic strip of her nose doing absurd things every day, like “ABOB’s Nose Goes to the Grocery Store” or “ABOB’s Nose Goes to the Doctor,” and passed them around the room. Everybody unfolded the paper, smiled, said nothing when he did this.
    Ms. Nailer put her hands on her hips and smiled too, as though our cruelty was playful, a game we used to get closer to her.
    “You can’t go around making statements like that until you properly understand what you are saying,” Ms. Nailer said. She was a skinny but doughy woman, like someone had ripped the muscles out of her body. “Richard, your comment implies that beauty is some objective thing, when really beauty is an evolving process of natural selection.”
    The class was silent.
    “What does ‘ugly’ even mean? Can anyone define ugliness? Or beauty, for that matter?” she asked.
    Ernest Bingley tried his hardest. “Beauty is the unconscious pleasure of looking at something artistic,” he said.
    “Let me teach you all a lesson,” she said. “And this is going to be the most important lesson of