“Do you want me to take your phone, so I can call?”

“Jake has a phone, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

She laughs at me a little, because I sound grumpy again. “We can talk about that later, too,” she says. She means, getting a phone.

I really can’t believe it—I can hardly wait for the elevator to take me back down to Jake’s apartment. “She said yes!” But he acts like it’s no big deal.

“Bye, Mom,” he calls out. “We’re going!” We stand in the hallway, waiting for the elevator again. The twenty-dollar bill is in my pocket, and my hand is holding it so tightly that it’s started to sweat.

New York suddenly looks different when we walk out through the apartment complex courtyard and under the arch. I’m not used to being out without a grown-up. I mean, you don’t even realize, when you’re out with your mom, that she’s making all these little decisions. About when to cross the street and which way to go. The buildings seem taller; the sidewalk is full of people; it’s like even the traffic is worse. I have to pay attention to everything, but Jake doesn’t seem to notice or care. For a second I think the doorman is going to stop us—like he’s a policeman or something, or a teacher and we’re running away. But we’re really just going around the corner to the end of the block, and then crossing the street, and then walking another block—under a bunch of scaffolding. Jake has this rule that you always have to hold your breath when you walk under scaffolding, but this one’s so long we start running all the way until we get to the Five-Star Diner.

It’s three in the afternoon and the place is pretty empty. We get a corner table, so we can watch the traffic going two ways—down Amsterdam Avenue and along 86th Street, too. Jake orders a glazed donut and a Coke, so that’s what I get, too.

“My dad wants me to move to London with him.” For some reason, when I say it, it feels like I’m bragging.

“What do you mean?”

“He says there’s this great school there, and we could have a whole house, just around the corner from the Beatles’ studio. Or something like that. It was weird. It was like he was trying to sell it to me.”

“Addie says that when his parents got divorced, he could get whatever he wanted from them. He just had to ask. Nintendo Wii. Tickets to a Rangers game. He even got a dog. They let his sister get her nose pierced. It was like—there were no rules, you just had to ask.”

So we start talking about what I should ask for. It’s kind of fun. Because Jake says, “It’s not just what you ask for, it’s how you ask for it. There’s a trick . . . you can’t just say, I want this. You have to say, Dad says that in England everybody has a dog, or something like that. . . .”