Sitting in math class, middle schooler Lisette’s discomfort at her inability to understand the material and her reflections on her oft missing mother are interrupted by the entrance of two police officers who tell her she is needed to make an I.D. She does not understand this disruption in her day. Lisette recalls her parents’ divorce, her mom’s frequent disappearance with “man friends” – a term Lisette does not question or dare to explore very far – and her father’s abuse that caused her fall and three subsequent eye surgeries. She also thinks of the high school boys with whom she flirted and drank half a beer, and the tissue paper with a lipstick mark she passes to her crush. Her mother has been gone for three days, and anger and resentment swirl in her brain. Now, she is being taken from her class to identify a battered corpse, a corpse that had been found with a driver’s license that bears her mother’s name. With the same confusion and emotional distancing she deploys towards her memories of her past, she steadfastly and confidently asserts that the body is not her mother’s. It simply couldn’t be. The clothes and body are bruised and destroyed, making them unrecognizable to the young girl when she layers them onto the memory of a living mother. Lisette denies it is her mother, and asks to return to school as if all is still normal.