“I don’t really want to go to England.”

“But, no, you’re missing the point. That’s just what you have to say. You don’t have to mean it.”

“You know what my mom told me this morning? She says we’re moving to Texas. Or she asked me if that’s what I wanted, but it was, like, this is not really a question, this is just something you’re telling me.”

“Why does she want to go to Texas? London’s a lot cooler.”

“That’s where she’s from. She says she wants me to get to know my grandmother. I’m like, I’ve met her, she’s like this old lady with one hand—it’s all kind of swollen up, it’s like this zombie hand.” But as soon as I say it, I feel bad. “I mean she’s fine, she’s not crazy or anything like that. She doesn’t smell like pee or anything.”

Jake’s looking at me like I’m crazy. “What are you even talking about?” he says. “You know, everybody in school thinks you never talk, but you talk all the time. That’s what I try to tell them. I can’t get you to shut up.”

“I just talk to you,” I say. But I feel embarrassed, maybe because he seems embarrassed, too. We sit in silence for a while and Jake starts playing on his phone.

Then we go home. The whole thing lasts about forty-five minutes and afterward, for some reason, when he gets out on the seventh floor I don’t know if he wants me to come back with him—he kind of walks out when the doors open, and I say, “Okay,” and he says, “Okay, see you I guess,” and then the doors close and I go up three more floors to my apartment. It’s always that way with Jake. Sometimes I think he’s my best friend and sometimes I think he just hangs out with me when he’s bored because we live in the same building and I’m the only one around.

That night, before turning my light out, Mom comes and sits on my bed for a minute. “Dad said there’s this great school in London just for Americans,” I start to tell her. “He said he wants us to move out there. There’s somebody in his office whose whole job is to find us a house and . . . just kind of make sure we have everything we need.”

“I don’t want anyone to find us a house,” she says. “We have a house.”

“It’s not a house, it’s an apartment. Anyway, if we have a house, why do you want to go to Texas?”

“What do you want to do?” she asks me. I’m lying on my belly and she’s giving me a back rub.

“It doesn’t really matter what I want, does it?” I say.

“It matters.”

“Not really. I can tell you’ve already made up your mind.”

Mom takes a breath. “Ben, it’s my job to make the decisions, but I care about what you want, too.”