I had begun to sweat and I pulled the sleeve of my cardigan up over my elbow. When it was my daughter’s turn to walk six times around the sun, I stood up.

The party was for all the kids with September birthdays and another mom read a book to all the kids. I was shaking by the time I got to our daughter’s first-grade room. I put the cupcake carrier into our old stroller and walked them to my daughter’s school. I put the cupcakes into a cupcake carrier. It was humid, mid-September, but I put on a cardigan to cover up the blood. I put on the short-sleeved shirt I think of as my mom shirt. I showered quickly, and poured half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my arm. It was only later, back at our apartment, that I saw how wide and deep and bloody the cut was.

I felt the warmth of blood, a few drips on my fingers. My elbow stung, burned, but I didn’t stop to look at it. Running, I tripped on something and I fell, hands and elbows first, on the hard dirt. Worse than angry: I had that feeling that I’ve felt so often the past four years-but also, my whole life-that what was happening was deeply wrong, and that was why it was happening, and that was just the way things were. I’d been watching Christine Blasey Ford speak-I’d moved from the couch to the floor-but I’d turned the TV off around the time that Lindsey Graham appeared to start crying. The day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings two years ago, I was applying thinly sliced yellow-dyed marshmallows in the shape of daisies onto cupcakes for my daughter’s sixth birthday party.

The US Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC.

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