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    After several twists and pirouettes, the helicopter zooms directly toward Miranda’s own face, full speed ahead.
    There’s Miranda on the screen, laughing, gasping for breath, her wild blonde curls loose all over her shoulders, the big grin with the gap between her two front teeth, and her freckles. Her tiara glittering, shooting out spears of pink and blue light. And then the picture freezes — just Miranda’s tiara up there, enlarged, big as an iceberg and she ducks and the drone hits the display pillar behind her and boxes topple all over the floor.
    Everyone begins to clap.
    Miranda straightens her tiara and gives a little curtsy. She hands the remote back to the salesman, who is bent down, picking up the pieces of the smashed helicopter. The little engine cuts in and out, buzzing and choking and finally going quiet.
    That was so much fun, Miranda says as she strides out of the mall. And I managed to get a picture of the tiara up there on the screen, did you see that? Did you get your bathing suit?
    Miranda calls the tiara her thinking cap. She wears it everywhere. My mother has agreed to take part in a conceptual art project. She has to wear the tiara for at least a little while, every single day for a year and take photographs of herself in different locations. Six women from six different continents are taking part in the project, each woman wearing a tiara every day for a year and taking a daily photograph.
    Miranda read about the project in the back of a feminist magazine that they sell at the health food store and applied to be the subject from North America.
    Miranda was chosen, she says, because of her feminist ideals and because she is a single mother and for her talents as an artist, her ambition and creativity and her commitment to the environment and because, I have suggested, nobody else applied from North America.
    They don’t have anybody from Antarctica, though I also suggested they probably could have found a talented, ambitious, pro-environment feminist penguin if they’d looked hard enough.
    We’re hurrying to the down escalator — it’s almost six-thirty, time to pick Felix up from his karate class — and there are a bunch of people in front of us and Miranda is grilling me, sort of loudly, about the bathing suit. How much did it cost, and did I get one I liked with lots of support, and she hopes it doesn’t have underwire because she’s heard that causes breast cancer, and just when I wish she would stop saying the word breast so loudly in public, I catch a glimpse of a certain jean jacket with a Clash patch sewn on the back, riding the up escalator. My heart does a leap like the gazelles flying through the plains of Mongolia that I watched on YouTube last night when I was supposed to be doing math.
    I almost shout out to Tyrone — we have to talk about our unit for the Entrepreneurship project. The proposal is due at the end of September and it’s already September 19th. I’ve Facebook-messaged him and tried his phone, but he hasn’t answered me back and he hasn’t been in class all week.
    Then I notice a girl on the step right behind him. The girl is wearing brown suede moccasins and a vintage patchwork suede coat. She’s beautiful, with all this tumbling hair, dyed like a parrot, streaks of orange and magenta and pink, and is she or isn’t she with Tyrone O’Rourke?
    Meanwhile, Tyrone and I are like ships passing in the night. I crane my neck all the way around, and Miranda is going on now about how she’s been to plenty of topless beaches where all you needed in the way of a bathing suit was a little bikini bottom which is sensible, because then you get a tan on your breasts, but nude beaches are even better, because then you can tan your buttocks, and I’m trying to see if this beautiful girl is actually leaning against Tyrone, which it sort of looks like, and she’s chewing