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safe tan for up to fifteen months.”
    The DermaBronze treatment made us rich, and it made my father briefly famous. He was deluged with offers to appear on vidcontent shows, and he grudgingly started accepting those offers.
    That’s where my future ex-stepmother came into the picture.
    Mickie Denman (her name at the time) graduated from the University of Florida with an M.S. in psychology. She opened her own office in Hobe Sound and counseled rich women about their mental health problems. She wrote an advice column for rich women based on her (slim) experience, but it was a big hit. The column got picked up by a content provider, and her name started to appear on vidscreens around central and south Florida.
    Soon her face started to appear, too, as she became an occasional guest for a medical show called
Living with…
Then she got her big break. She was asked to fill in for three days as the host of that show. The third of her three episodes was about the amazing new technique called DermaBronze. My father appeared with her that day, and the rest is history.
    My father never knew what hit him. Mickie says that she dazzled him with her charms. I guess that’s possible. I say he had just been working too hard for too long in his lonely room.
    Anyway, within a week they started slipping away together to the islands, leaving me with a series of professional sitters. Within ninety days (I counted that out on a calendar, too), they had gotten married, and my new stepmother was hosting nationwide content shows as “Mickie Meyers.”
    Shortly after that, we moved to The Highlands. As they explained it to me, we had no choice but to move to a newer house in a better neighborhood. Our old house had been built before the World Credit Crash, so all we had to safeguard our currency was a steel safe bolted to the floor. We now needed a modern currency vault built into an inside wall, and many layers of electronic surveillance, and a private security patrol, all because my dad was rich and my stepmother was famous.
    But I hated The Highlands. I had no friends there. All I did was hide in my room. In my solitude, I finally started to grieve for my mother and to miss her terribly. That’s when Victoria arrived in my life. Victoria was there to help me during that period; my father and Mickie were not. They could have been, but they were not.
    Since those days, Mickie has gone global as the new host of the
Living with…
series of broadcasts. The first one was based on me and my departed mother:
Living with Loss.
The second was
Living with Stepchildren.
I guess that was partly about me, too, but I wasn’t in it. Her third,
Living with Divorce,
is still unfolding. I play at least a small role in that one.
    Mickie’s parent corporation, SatPub, has its headquarters in New York City, so she spends most of her time there. On Friday, December 21, however, she was in The Highlands, in the Square, directing her crew’s actions on the ground and directing Albert’s drone helicopter in the air.
    Whoever had decorated the public places in The Highlands was taking orders directly from Mickie. The theme in the Square was “An Edwardian Christmas.” There were twelve two-meter trees arranged around the nine-meter Scotch pine. Each of the twelve trees was decorated with items from one of the Twelve Days of Christmas—partridges, pear trees, et cetera. In addition, in front of the Sun Currency Bank was a golf cart that had been converted to a sleigh, complete with reindeer and a Santa (although I don’t think there was anything particularly Edwardian about that).
    Everything was in its place and ready to go when my class arrived. Mrs. Veck tried to form us into a line, but Pauline Dugan made a fuss about standing in front of Sterling Johnston, shouting, “I’m not standing by any pervert!” and causing Kurt to momentarily turn off his camera. Mickie then took over, arranging us in a semicircle and cautioning Kurt to shoot Sterling’s top