Mr. Tomski has watched him go, too. Eventually he turns to our class and says, “Let’s go back in.”

That afternoon, for the first time all year, I don’t eat my lunch by the basketball court. I sit with Mabley and Pete and a few other kids in the school cafeteria. Everybody has heard about Mr. Tomski’s argument with Sam—they’re all laughing about it. Mabley laughs, too.

When she gets up to bus her tray, I go with her. “It wasn’t funny,” I say.

“What wasn’t?” She takes her knife out and scrapes the leftover food into the trash, then puts her cutlery in the tub and slides her tray into the rack. I’ve just got a milk carton and sandwich bag to throw away.

“What happened with Mr. Tomski. I was there, and it wasn’t funny. He didn’t think it was funny either.”

“You’re right,” she says, after a moment. “I shouldn’t have laughed. Sometimes I laugh just because everybody else is. It’s stupid. But why didn’t you say something?”

“I am saying something.”

“I mean to the others, at lunch, if you didn’t like what they were saying.”

But the bell rings, and people are pushing past us—we have to get to class. “We can talk about it later, if you want to,” she says, drifting away, but I don’t really want to talk about it, because she’s right. When Sam looked at me on the football field, I looked away. When Pete makes fun of me, I don’t do anything. I just sit there and take it, and then complain about it afterward or avoid him. That’s how it used to be with Jake, too. That’s what my dad wanted me to see—you have to stand up for yourself, otherwise everyone pushes you around. But he isn’t here anymore to tell me.

Twenty-One

WHEN I GET HOME FROM SCHOOL, I ask Granma, “Can I call my dad?”

It’s six o’clock, and Mom has gone out. She dropped me off after basketball practice and drove away again. It’s “girls’ night.” Once a month she goes to the movies with some of the teachers, including Ms. Fontenot, our school principal. (Mom calls her Bernie, short for Bernadette. “A lot of people wouldn’t have given me a job, after fifteen years out of education,” Mom says. “But she’s divorced, too. She knows what it’s like.”) Anyway, it’s just Granma and me tonight, which is why I’m asking her.

“It’s pretty late, Ben,” she says.

“I finished my homework in practice today. At least, most of it.”

“No. I mean it’s later in London than it is here. Your father is probably asleep.”

“I thought he was always working. I thought that’s what the problem was.”

Granma’s making spaghetti—I can smell the hot water in the kitchen. “Is that what your mom says?” Sometimes she finds it easier to talk when she’s doing something else.

“Sometimes. But I mean, before, when we were still in New York—that’s what she used to complain about.”