Sometimes friends ask me for advice regarding different situations they happen to be encountering in their lives.

Not long ago, my friend Rita was embroiled in an interesting situation regarding when to keep something hush-hush, and when fingers should never do the talking. Her neighbor and friend Rita had called in a panic. "Jill. Could you ask John if he saw anything unusual at school today?"

With a little prompting, and what sounded like a valium being chased down by a triple foam latte on the other end of the phone, she told me she was able to determine that her high school son had acquired what amounted to a rather large bruise near his eye. I assured her that I she should ask her son about it, and he had claimed that he had fallen down a flight of bleachers in gym class.

"Some bleachers!" Jill exclaimed.

Because those red flags of motherhood have a tendency to pop up and wave themselves wildly, until there is answer for them, Jill assured Rita that she would ask John about it as soon as he stepped into the door.

Later, Jill struck up a jovial conversation with her son. "So, I heard Mark got a pretty good shiner! What happened?" (She has a way to finesse my way subtly into a situation. It's a gift.)

"Well," began John, avoiding eye contact, "I really don't want to say anything." The impending silence and sensation of Jil's motherly orbs burning shame into the side of his head were enough for him to break. Besides, she had the box of Crackerdoodles he was looking for in the pantry. Visibly uncomfortable, he shifted from foot to foot. "I'll tell you, but you can't tell a soul, because Mark made me promise."

She finally acquiesced to the terms of the agreement, swearing on a stack of Nintendo Power Magazines that her lips would forevermore be sealed.

Son then went on to explain, between handfuls of cheesy cracker snacks. "Mark was giving nipple twisters to another of the kids at school, and the kid hauled off and punched Mark in the face." Jill and John reacted as could be expected for the moment: they guffawed for a few minutes, both at how ridiculousness the situation was compared to the worry of a mom, and second, at the image of Mark giving another teenager a nipple twister.

Unfortunately, the joviality of the event broke into smithereens suddenly when Rita saw Jill the next morning as they were in the usual shuffle to send kids towards school. Before their eyes met, in a wild and last-minute attempt to dive behind the garbage cans to keep from view, Jill instead stumbled over her shoe, and fell unceremoniously into a compost bin. When she looked up, she saw her friend.

"Did John tell you anything about what happened to Mark?" she asked, plucking a piece of lettuce from Jill's hair.

This is when Jill painfully recalled the promise made to her son. There wasn't much she could palpably do in a situation like this. Part of her remembered that she is the parent, and that promises made could and should be broken when it has to do with someone's health and well-being. At the same time, these were the nipples of the young adult bipedal hominid, and some of the most pliable bits of flesh known to mankind. At the same time, she could see in Rita's tired eyes a desperate hope of knowledge she trusted that Jill had.

Looking for the happy medium of blabbing or letting a fellow mother down, she finally relented, "Well, I can't tell you what happened, but I can show you." She leaned forward towards her hopeful, waiting friend.

That afternoon, as Jill's son roamed into the kitchen for his afternoon snack, he stopped short. His eyes popped open, and as he drew near for a closer look at his mother's left temple, he plucked a piece of rhubarb from her ear. "MOM! That-you have a black eye! What hap--?"

Just as his voice box was about to complete the sentence, he saw the sharp glare which threatened his possession of car keys, and he abandoned the issue altogether.

Looking back, it was probably the self-examination of some things being better left unsaid in the wisdom of the young person who has had time to examine his life and who makes intelligent judgment decisions often based in restraint. Further examination from the casual observer might argue that it was more likely an outstretched mother's fingers flying out towards the boy's chest at just the right moment which silenced any commentary.

Or, on the other hand, it looked to be just another one of those unfortunate gym class incidents.

She pointed at me then, muttering, "Not a word."

"Bleachers?" I asked, anyway (I'd never been good at the whole not a word thing).

"With nipples," she nodded.