WHEN MERET WAS seven, Brian bought her a microscope for Christmas. I argued that it was an expensive gift for a child who really shouldn’t be playing with glass slides, but I was wrong. Meret spent hours hunched over it, switching among the five magnification settings, looking at prepared slides of dragonfly wings, cucumber ovaries, horsehair, and tulip pollen. She would meticulously use tweezers and swabs to make her own specimens, highlighting them with eosin or methylene blue. Her bedroom walls were filled with magnified drawings of what she saw: the lace of an overblown lilac leaf, the tangled spaghetti of bacteria, geometric evil eyes of onion cells. That was the beginning of her love affair with science, and to date, it hasn’t stopped.

Teachers love her, and why shouldn’t they? She is smart and curious and wise beyond her years. They look at her and they see what she has the potential to become. Other students, though, can’t seem to get past how she looks.

When most kids in elementary school began to outgrow their round bellies and chubby cheeks, Meret didn’t. It is not that she isn’t active or that she doesn’t eat healthily. It’s just how she is made, and if that isn’t everyone’s standard of perfect, then maybe they just have to revise their damn standard.

But.

I remember what it felt like to be fourteen. I remember looking in the mirror and not recognizing myself. I know that’s what Meret sees, when she forces herself to see her reflection—although I also notice the way she avoids that at all costs. What’s different is that my body was changing, and that’s what made me uncomfortable. For Meret, it’s the opposite. Her body stays the same—curved, softer, larger—and that’s what she is desperate to hide.

Last year, when she started wearing clothes that were bigger than mine, I told her that sizing wasn’t standard; that I could wear a four in some brands and an eight in others. She stared at me for a long moment. That’s exactly the kind of thing a skinny person would say, she told me, and she locked herself in her room for the rest of the day.

As her mother I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I cook only vegetables for dinner, she thinks I’m judging her. I try to completely avoid the topics of food, of exercise, of therapy, of weight. I know every time someone tells her she is the spitting image of me, she is thinking: yeah, buried under the extra pounds. I wish I knew how to get her to see that her name describes her: a homonym for a word that means worth.

Brian is equally at a loss. He was never overweight as a kid; he isn’t now. His relationship with Meret has one advantage over mine, though—she does not look at him and compare herself. Maybe for that reason, the bond they have has always been a little fiercer, a little more. Say what you will about Brian, but he loves being a father more than anything in the world. He would have had ten more kids, but that wasn’t in the cards for us, and eventually we stopped trying. Clearly, he would say to me each month, when I told him—again—that I wasn’t pregnant, we can’t improve on the original model.

This summer, Meret is at a STEM camp for teenage girls. We had to nearly force her to go, but since she will be moving into a new school next year as a ninth grader, this gives her the chance to make some connections with new kids before the academic year begins. It seems to be working. She keeps talking about a girl named Sarah, who like her, is a budding biologist. Today she texted me, asking if she could go to Sarah’s for dinner.

Which is why I’m surprised when she walks through the front door while I’m cooking for myself and Brian. “Hi,” I say. “What are you doing home?”

“Don’t I live here?” she asks, and flops down on the couch. She immediately takes a throw pillow and covers her midsection. I don’t even know if she realizes that she does that, every time she takes a seat. “What’s for dinner?”

“I thought you ate at Sarah’s,” I say, and wince, because I don’t want her to read between the lines and think that I’m criticizing her for being hungry.

“I did and I didn’t.” Meret picks at the tasseled edge of the throw pillow. “I mostly picked.”

I glance up, sympathetic. “Did they make pork?”

Meret hates pork. She has boycotted it ever since she learned that pigs are smarter than any other domestic animal. “No, fried chicken and Caesar salad.” Color rises in her cheeks. “It’s hard, you know. If I only eat salad, they’re thinking, Poor thing, she’s trying so hard. If I eat the chicken, they’re thinking, Oh, that’s why she’s huge.”

I wipe my hands on a dish towel and walk into the family room to sit beside her on the couch. “Baby,” I tell her, “no one is thinking that.”

“She asked me to come over Saturday to hang out.”

“That’s great!” There is too much cheer in those words.

Meret sinks lower into the couch.

“What did you work on today?”

Her face lights up. “We isolated the DNA of spinach.”

“Wow.” I blink. “Why?”

“Because we can. It looked like cobwebs.” She drops the pillow, talking with her hands. “Did you know we share eighty-five percent of our genes with zebra fish? And that less than two percent of our DNA actually has the instructions to make proteins? The rest is called ‘junk DNA,’ because it’s just a bunch of random sequences that doesn’t seem to be code for anything important.”

“That’s a lot of wasted space in a chromosome,” I point out.

“Yeah. Unless it is important and no one’s figured out the DNA Rosetta stone yet.”

I tug on one of her curls. “Maybe that’s going to be your big contribution to science.”

She shrugs. “You know what they say. If you need the right man for the job…get a woman.” Then, suddenly, she launches forward and hugs me. Adolescence is like summer weather in Boston—storms chased by sunshine, in the span of a minute. Occasional hail. And every now and then, a cloudless sky.

I wrap my arms around her, as if I could cocoon her again, and keep anything bad from happening. I remember what it felt like to have her settled under the umbrella of my rib cage, to have a double beat of a heart. I still do. It’s just harder to hear, sometimes.

Just then Brian comes in. After calling the Perimeter Institute and canceling his speech at the last minute, he went to his lab. He tosses his briefcase onto the kitchen counter and eats a slice of mozzarella off a platter of caprese salad I’ve made. “Ugh,” I say, “not before you wash your hands.”

“She’s right,” Meret says. “A single gram of human poop can contain a trillion germs.”

“So much for being hungry…” Brian leans down and hugs Meret, and then, after only a tiny hesitation does the same to me.

I breathe in. Neutrogena shampoo. Old Spice.

I exhale.

“Meret isolated DNA today,” I tell him.

He whistles. “How much is this camp costing?”

“It was vegetable DNA. But still.” Suddenly she leaps up. “Oh! But thank you for my birthday present! It’s perfect.”

He must have bought her something and left it in her room when I was visiting with Win. His gaze slides to mine as Meret hugs him. “I’m sorry it was late,” he says.

“That’s okay,” Meret tells him.

I feel, for just a moment, a pang of jealousy. Why does he get a free pass, every time; why am I always judged?

I know parents with more than one kid say they love the kids equally, but I don’t believe it. I think it is the same in the other direction. A kid will say they love both their parents the same amount, but when there’s a rough edge, sometimes that ragged border fits flush against one parent, and prickles against the other.

I just wish, sometimes, I could be the one she loves more.

But I never say this. I paste a smile on my face, and I ask Meret, “What did Dad get you?”

Before she can answer, Brian interrupts. “I almost forgot. I bought tickets for a thing Saturday at MIT. Guest lecturer in zoology who’s going to talk about the time she was bitten by a vampire bat and chased by a gorilla. Rumor has it she’s bringing a live octopus.”

“Sounds cool,” Meret says.

“But you were invited to Sarah’s.” I try to catch Brian’s eye, to silently urge him to not push; to realize that spending time with another teenage girl is a lot more important than meeting a cephalopod.

“I never said I was going.” Meret glares at me. “She wants to hang out at her pool.”

It is ninety degrees out, and humid. “That sounds perfect.” I look meaningfully at Brian. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I’m sure we can watch the lecture online.”

“I’m. Not. Going.”

“But, Meret—”

She swings around, her fists balled at her sides. “If I go to her pool, I have to take off my shirt. And I don’t want to take off my shirt.”

“She won’t make fun of you—”

“Right. She’ll pity me. And that’s worse.” Meret folds her arms across her chest like they are wings, like she can disappear behind them. “You don’t understand anything,” she says, and she runs upstairs.

I scrub my hands over my face. “Jesus.”

Brian follows me into the kitchen. “It was just an octopus.”

“You didn’t know.”

I take the chicken breast out of the oven, cut it into thirds, and separate it onto plates. Then I spoon rice on each, and a few slices of tomato and mozzarella. We both look up the stairs. “You want to call her down?” I ask.

Brian shakes his head. “Not for a million bucks.”

I cover the plate with foil. “I’ll bring it up in a little bit.”