SCENE: A hallway, with two very large rabbit paintings hung in it. Our heroine has just opened the bedroom door to find KEVIN’s teenage son standing in the hall, looking perturbed. There is a distant baying of beagles under the bed.

KEVIN’S OLDEST: …

ME: Can we help you?

KEVIN’S OLDEST: What were those…noises?

ME: …

ME: …Y’know, if I were a teenage boy, there are some questions I just wouldn’t ask.

KEVIN’S OLDEST: Gotcha. (flees)

(Learning not to question strange squawks and yelps from other people’s bedrooms is a Valuable Life Skill. He didn’t need to know that we’d actually been doing bad kung-fu movie imitations and poking one another in the ribs, until the squawking set off the border collie’s herding instincts and he began trying to wrangle us both into more dog-acceptable positions.)