So I was tattooing the girls. Gamma wanted a fire-breathing butterfly.

Yesterday, Gamma told us a story. She had a good day in school, she said. There is a boy in school. Every morning, Gamma said, when she’s kneeling down getting her books out of her bag, he whacks her on the head with his desk pad, or whatever one calls the big plastic padded thing you write on. Every morning. So yesterday morning, she knelt down as if she was going to remove books. When the boy approached to whack her, she grabbed the pad out of his hands and whacked him with it.

After that, she said, he treated her well and talked to her like a normal person. They discussed their teachers, she said, and who was better.