We had dinner with some friends who have an unnervingly smart six-year-old girl, a pretty little thing with with a husky voice and Bette Davis eyes. She is also, in the words of her school, “unacceptably aggressive.” “What were you thinking?” her mama asked in the course of a long, serious talk about not hitting, to which the first-grader replied, “I didn’t think! I reacted!”

So, after extracting a solemn promise from the child to keep her hands to herself at school, mama dropped her off and continued on to work. By the time she got there, a message from the school was waiting for her. Little Bette had spat on another student. At the subsequent meeting with the principal, the child burst into tears and declared it was all because her mother didn’t love her. Am I bad because I imagine the little girl saying this while gesturing with a cigarette in a long holder?