My whole day deflated in a matter of seconds. “Mrs. Schectman was making a big deal about me not doing my homework and the Goldie Hawn story was the only thing I could think of,” I told them.

“Well, why didn’t you do your homework?” he asked me.

“Because, Dad!” I wailed, bursting into tears and stomping my left foot. “It was the season premiere of Charles in Charge! Are you out of your tree?”

“Chelsea, sweetie, you don’t have to make up such farfetched lies,” my mother said in her ultracalm tone. “Couldn’t you have come up with something a little more reasonable?”

“I know,” I told her, defeated, and walked over for a hug. My mother was always a softie, and once I got over to her I knew my father would cease being such an immediate physical threat. “But everyone started to believe it and all the older kids were asking me about it and I got carried away.”

“Well,” my father said dismissively, “you’re just going to have to go back to school tomorrow and tell everyone the truth.”

The problem with being the youngest of six children is that my father had me when he was forty-two years old, resulting in what I like to refer to as “severe generational gappage.” That, coupled with the fact that he was born without the embarrassment gene, left us little in common. It would have seemed completely appropriate to my father for me to hold a press conference in the school’s auditorium the next day, wearing a helmet with a maxipad stuck to my forehead while announcing into a microphone that I’d been a “bad, bad girl, and I’ve also been known to shit my pants.”

“Melvin,” my mother said, “that is going to be extremely humiliating.”

“Well, she certainly can’t go on pretending she’s going to be joining the army with some Hollywood hotshot.”

“The sequel isn’t going to be as much about the army as it will be about sea creatures,” I corrected him.

“Chelsea, what are you even talking about?”