I was up late last night working on an assignment that was due yesterday afternoon. By the time I packed it in it was midnight and my 13-year-old daughter Franny was still making noise in her bedroom, having been working on her own assignments (one paper on Animal Farm, one on the Gettysburg Address) until 11. She had been literally bouncing between floors, trying on fright wigs and singing “Seven Nation Army” when she should have been winding down. By the time I got the recycling to the curb and the coffee pot loaded for the morning there was quiet above. I settled in to watch the Jim Lehrer report that I had tried to Tivo — only to discover the news had been bumped by America’s Top Model. And no, his name is not Rumsfeld.

At one am I heard Franny’s voice — a very animated voice — and went up to find her leaning out her bedroom window, talking on her cell phone. “What the hell are you doing up at one in the morning?” I said. “It’s a school night.” This was followed by some dissembling (“I was checking my voice mail,” she said, branches growing from her nose as little birds flew about) and a stern reprimand from me. But when my wife got up at five to catch a flight to Chicago, she discovered our daughter was wide awake then as well.

“I couldn’t sleep!” she cried and I know there has been much drama in her circle of late. One of her friends is grappling with his sexual persuasion (even though they are all still what we would call pre-sexual) and another friend let his secret be known to the wrong party, which spawned cycles of retribution and phone calls and tears and drama. How to walk this minefield, o lord? I was certainly thinking about sex long before I was 13 and even kissed a girl or two that year. And I’m sure a few of the kids I knew then already knew they were gay, though no one called it that then, or dared to speak its name — it certainly wasn’t playground fodder. Of course there were no cell phones then, no top models. We’re not on the playground anymore.

I just sent her off to school with some lunch money and a promise to meet with me and her track coach after school. She was weeping on the stairs before she left, complaining about invisible love handles as she stood before the mirror. I told her that lack of sleep will cause you to hallucinate and she laughed as I recounted her beautiful attributes most girls (or guys) would die for: her raven hair, her beautiful smile, her luminous eyes. Before she split I heard her trying to pick out the notes to “Seven Nation Army” on my guitar upstairs (“I’m going to Wichita/Far from this opera forever more”). I should have told her that what she was looking at was a funhouse mirror, the kind that distorts your reflection to the world. The image of your real self changes as you grow.