Another safari nightmare wakes me from my post-dinner, post-first-day-of-school nap. Unable to sleep and needing to cook something, anything, I creep down the hall past the wall of family photos from our trips to Disneyland, tiptoeing by Roz’s bedroom, where she’s bunkered down for her mandatory ten hours of sleep for crew.

Personally, I don’t understand comfort eating, being more of a comfort cooker myself. Bread bakers can talk all they want about the solace they find in the yeasty smell filling their home. I like baking, too, obviously, but soup is my specialty. I know, weird. For me, there’s satisfaction in seeing vats of my homemade soup poured into matching mason jars, all lined up in nice, neat, nourishing rows. On Sunday, the Seahawks are playing the LA Rams. I’d originally planned for Moroccan lamb stew, a kissing cousin to soup. (Rams, lambs, get it?) But lamb is expensive, and anyhow, baa baa black sheep and all. So instead, in honor of LA vegan, antifood, calorie-protesting types, I now plan to prep a test batch of weight-loss soup (aka cabbage). Tomorrow, I’ll guinea-pig it on my family for dinner.

The kitchen is too dark to read the recipes I’d printed out earlier. So I flick on the pendant lights over the island.

“Honey, turn off the lights,” Dad says, his voice low but urgent.

I jump as if I’ve been caught sneaking out of the house instead of into the pantry. “You scared me! When did you guys get home?”

While we may not attend church faithfully, my parents honor their quality time religiously, always shutting down work at seven every night with the caveat that they will only respond to true life-threatening emergencies (there must be blood). So tiny alarm bells jangle when I find both of them sitting at command central in the dark breakfast nook, kitty-corner to each other, and not just holding hands. It’s a couple minutes past eleven, and the kitchen table is covered edge-to-edge with papers, pens, and every device known to modern man so they can mainline the news as if this is normal. So much for Mom’s lectures on good sleep hygiene.

“You were sleeping,” Dad says, setting down his phone. “We didn’t want to wake you.”

“How are you feeling, honey?” Mom asks, her green eyes racing over my body and braking on my bare arms. “Hives! When did you get hives? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I put aloe vera on them just the way I researched, and they’re going away,” I assure her, annoyed when she leaps out of the breakfast nook anyway to inspect my skin herself. My self-sufficiency doesn’t stop Dad either. He barrels blindly past me, keeping his eyes on the overhead lights as if he doesn’t trust them. I sidestep out of his way. “What’re you doing?”

“Turning off the lights.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I haven’t had the time to change out the light bulbs yet.”

“If we change them out,” Mom says, frowning as she lowers her reading glasses to the tip of her nose to peer closer at my hives and notices my hand with the ragged remains of the blister. “Did you pop a blister?”

“Mom.”

“We need to sterilize it.”

“Mom. I dealt with it and followed the instructions on the Mayo Clinic site.”

Thankfully, Dad’s hmm, as he glares at the pendant lights, distracts Mom.

“Like I said, honey, Nat Geo’s energy blog says that it’s a myth that CFL bulbs”—Mom tells Dad, pointing at the light bulbs above us—“emit UVA rays.”

I may have researched my potential condition, but my parents have one-upped me with an action plan. Annoyed, I focus on collecting the ingredients for the test soup. I search the freezer for the flour only to find the missing canister against the backsplash along with the sugar, even though I’ve told everyone a million times to store the flour in the freezer where it’ll last longer. I slam the container harder than I intended (sort of) on the counter.

“Roz is sleeping,” Mom chides me mildly as she grabs a teacup from the table, but Dad is already sweeping over to her with the kettle. Her answering smile is so sunny, we should check her for UVA emission. “Oh, thank you, honey.”

“No problem, but, treasure, the NIH published a study that says photosensitive people”—Dad sits back down and nods over at me as if there was any doubt about who the photosensitive person in the kitchen is—“can get sunburned from those bulbs.”

I sigh. Heavily.

“Oh!” Mom cries, forgetting all thoughts about letting a sleeping Roz lie. She scurries away on her tiny, slippered feet, as she does whenever an idea overtakes her. What now? The call of her inspiration is as mysterious as it is indiscriminate—whether chaperoning a field trip to the Pacific Science Center or showering when my friends are here (all true, all witnessed with real live eyeballs, all mortifying).

A tiny prickle of foreboding needles me. I push down my concern and forage in the fridge for the carrots and onions I need to dice, which will be seriously risky given how dark the kitchen is, but if I mention this to my parents, they’ll imagine me chopping off my finger and there goes cooking. While some people might classify this as paranoid thinking, I know it to be a real possibility, which is why I haven’t been entirely forthcoming about my final list of colleges. If my parents think it’s dangerous for me to study at Northwestern, in Chicago (“Have you seen the murder rate?”), just wait until they hear about Abu Dhabi.

I fact-check my father: “You came home from a business trip and started researching light bulbs?”

“Umm, yeah,” he says as if it is a perfectly logical thing to do on a weeknight. “Maddening. Here we thought we were being so eco-conscious, doing good for the environment, making the huge investment of replacing all the incandescent bulbs with these compact fluorescent ones. Meanwhile, they’ve been poisoning you.”

“Poisoning is a little strong, don’t you think?”

A flying saucer crash-lands next to me on the kitchen island, bowling over the flour I’ve set down. The canister clatters, spilling an avalanche of flour. I flinch. “Mom!”

She tucks her wavy red hair behind her ears, which are the tiniest bit pointy like she’s really part Irish fairy. Mom grins at me excitedly. “What do you think?”

Apprehension swells inside me. “What is that?”

“A hat.”

No, a hat is a cute accessory, known to punctuate sassy outfits worn by little old ladies at our church on Easter Sunday. This is a UFO, its massive wingspan doubling as a wind turbine. Just ask my hair. I brush the long strands off my face and edge away from the flour-speckled island. Who knows what else Mom will wing at me?

In any case, I should have known to be more specific with a crisis manager who releases facts, and just the sanctioned and preapproved facts. I ask, “What’s the hat for?”

Mom is careful not to make eye contact with me. Instead, she glances at Dad to sync their response, as they keep to the script: “The One Where We Turn Our Eldest into a Fashion Crisis.” They are a united front of imperturbable, unflappable, unreadable expressions.

“Protection,” Mom says finally. “We picked it up in Portland. Do you like it?”

“Protection from what?” I ask.

“Look,” says Dad, scooting out of the nook so he can stand next to Mom, his Mongolian warrior to her pixie princess. “We updated this house to be all about daylighting design, remember?”

How could I forget? Thanks to the inspiration of their clean-tech clients, the grand plan was to maximize natural light to minimize our drag on the electrical grid. So now we have eight skylights overhead, picture windows that envelop the breakfast nook, and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room, care of a remodel that we pretty much handled on our own. At six, my job was to pick up all the stray nails; unfortunately, I had overlooked one and learned my lesson later about being thorough.

“Glass doesn’t filter out the UVA rays, and the research says that sixty-two percent of UVA rays come through windows,” Mom says, frowning, as she consults her notepad in the nook. “All the experts agree on that much.”

“So? What? I have to wear this”—I grab the hat and shake it—“inside?”

No answer.

“Even at night just because the lights are on? Seriously?”

With a single clearing of his throat, Dad’s in Crisis-Manager-Knows-Best mode. “The doctor said to minimize your exposure to UVA rays until we know more after the tests this week.”

One hundred and eighty pounds of pure frustration stomps into the kitchen. No light—natural or artificial—is necessary to detect Roz’s irritation since her growl says it all: “Did you know that sleep is important for my body to recover?”

“Munchkin,” Dad says, rounding the kitchen island to hug Roz. In our family, Dad’s a giant at almost six feet tall, and he alone is able to call her by that nickname. “Did we wake you up, princess?”

“What do you think?” Roz’s pout turns into a sulk when she sees that the Cooking Fairy (c’est moi) is shirking her duty: no freshly made, crisp on the outside, late-night snack waffles? Just as she’s about to express her displeasure, Roz notices the hat in my hand. “What’s that?”

“Oh, just something Viola’s going to start wearing,” Mom says breezily. “For now.”

“I’m not,” I say.

“Good, because that”—Roz points at the offending and offensive hat—“is social suicide.”

“But I’d be wearing it,” I tell her, “not you.”

With a coaxing smile, Mom says, “How about this, honey? Wear the hat tonight with the lights on, and we’ll reassess tomorrow. Before school.”

Before school. Appearing on the first week of school in a sunbonnet is not the way I imagined my senior year to start. But what if my face becomes as red and blotchy as my arms? Worse, what if my cheeks blister?

“Fine,” I say, and allow my head to become the landing pad for this UFO of a hat, but not before I catch my parents’ satisfied looks as I run a dishrag over the flour on the kitchen counter. “Everyone out of the kitchen, please. I just need to prep if you want to eat dinner tomorrow night.”

“What’s that smell?” asks Roz, wrinkling her nose.

I take a whiff of the flour. Rancid. Light has that decaying effect. I would know.