table the night before while my mother stood at the sink washing dishes and reaching over my shoulder occasionally to correct my grammar without looking, just knowing by the sound of my pen when I was getting something wrong.
Every word was true.
By lunch the joke had achieved the specific velocity of things that spread through a school — self-replicating, acquiring new details, finding new audiences. Someone near the lockers asked whether my mother parked her fighter jet at Walmart. A group of boys laughed with the ease of people
who have found a reliable source of entertainment and intend to use it for as long as it produces.
I kept walking.
This is what I want to say about that day at lunch, the hour I spent in the cafeteria with my tray and my notebook and the accumulated weight of the morning: not reacting did not mean not feeling. My mother had taught me those were different things. She had taught me that control is not the same as absence, that what you choose not to show is
