“You know what my dad’s going to say?”

“What?” I ask.

“He always says the same thing. Is this what I pay all that money for?”

Latymer’s a private school—it costs $45,000 a year. Actually, Jake’s parents don’t pay all that; they can’t afford it, so he gets financial aid. But we don’t really talk about that. My dad makes a lot of money, but he doesn’t like to spend it—“throwing it around,” he calls it. So Jake has more stuff than I do, which is weird, because he acts like he has to feel sorry for me when really . . . but it doesn’t matter.

“I can’t believe our parents pay for us to go to school.”

Jake says, “I mean, just give me the money. We wouldn’t have to do any homework, we wouldn’t have to sit there all day.”

“What are you going to do with forty-five thousand dollars?” I ask.

“Think of all the pizza that could buy.”

“You can’t spend forty-five thousand dollars on pizza.”

“What do you think’s the most expensive pizza you could make?”

We can spend hours talking about this kind of stuff.

Jake says, “Caviar pizza.”

“That’s disgusting. The most expensive food you can get is truffles,” I say.

Sometimes I cook with my mom. She buys me cookbooks and baking books for Christmas and my birthday because I like to read the recipes, even if I’m never going to make them and even if I wouldn’t like them anyway.

“Truffles are chocolate,” he says.

“That’s a different kind. This is the kind that grows underground—they’re like mushrooms. You have to get specially trained pigs to dig for them.”

“You’re making this stuff up,” he says.

“It’s true. You can spend thousands of dollars on truffles. You can eat gold, too,” I say.

Jake stares at me. “You cannot eat gold.”

“You totally can. I had it in a restaurant once—pasta with gold leaf.”

“What’s it taste like?”

“I couldn’t really taste it; it just looked cool.”

So instead of going to school for a year, we could make a pizza with caviar, which is fish eggs, and truffles, which pigs have to dig for, and gold leaf on top.

“That is one disgusting-sounding pizza,” Jake says. “I think I’d rather go to school.”

He seems cheered up. “Let’s play basketball,” he says.

Jake’s dad put a backboard and hoop over the kitchen door, so we can play with a foam ball. Our games get pretty rough. Jake is bigger than me; he’s stronger, too. I know this for a fact, because he likes to make me arm wrestle against him, and afterward he always says stuff like That was pretty close, to be nice.

So we go into the kitchen and start horsing around. It always puts him in a good mood to beat me at some game. He pushes me out of the way and dunks on the hoop, which rattles against the kitchen door. “You’re not even trying,” he says. “You have to stand up for yourself.”