HILLARY’S MY FAVORITE.

There was a period in our lives when I wanted very badly to believe my mom, Meredith, and I were the Three Musketeers.

All for one and one for all.

And there were certainly times when it felt that way. We could be incredibly close. We could laugh until we couldn’t breathe. There were enough good moments that, if I arranged them properly, I could make a pretty convincing case for the three of us.

But Meredith was my mother’s favorite.

This wasn’t some conclusion I arrived at years later after twenty thousand dollars’ worth of therapy. Everybody knew it. Family noticed it. My friends noticed it. I was treated differently.

But dammit, I wanted to believe we were the Three Musketeers.

So when my mom had a colonoscopy, Meredith and I went with her and sat in the waiting room while she had the procedure. This was before smartphones, back when the PalmPilot was all the rage, and my mother had one.

For reasons I cannot explain other than I was me, I looked at that PalmPilot and thought:

I bet I can break into that.

There was no information I needed. No family secret I was trying to uncover. I simply wanted to see if I could get in.

Meredith watched me the way she often did when I got an idea in my head, with a general sense of here she goes again.

It took me about fifteen minutes.

I’d like to pretend this required some extraordinary feat of technological brilliance, but my mother wasn’t particularly original with her passwords.

Still, I got in.

Even Meredith laughed.

And, having gained unauthorized access to my mother’s brain, I did the only reasonable thing.

I set a recurring daily reminder:

Tell Hillary she’s my favorite.

Every. Single. Day.

The first time it popped up, she laughed.

The next day, still kind of funny.

After that, the humor began to deteriorate rapidly.

Eventually she was completely annoyed.

Which is when the prank really became satisfying, because there was one small problem:

I never showed her how to delete it.

So every day, somewhere in Dallas, my mother’s PalmPilot would dutifully remind her:

Tell Hillary she’s my favorite.

And every day, I assume, she became slightly less inclined to do so.

At the time, it was just funny. Annoying my mother was one of my favorite pastimes.

I don’t remember thinking there was anything particularly meaningful about it. I knew Meredith was her favorite. I also knew I wanted desperately for that not to matter. Both things lived quite comfortably in my head because I had spent a lot of time learning how to make that possible.

I wanted us to be the Three Musketeers. I wanted all for one and one for all to somehow outrank all the evidence that said otherwise.

And apparently, when the evidence refused to cooperate, I was willing to take matters into my own hands.

I broke into her PalmPilot and changed it.

I programmed the answer I wanted into the machine.

Tell Hillary she’s my favorite.

She never did figure out how to delete it.

And maybe, for a little while, neither did I.